Recently I've become more aware of the Field and how to reach it, and I'd like to share some of my insights.

While there's only one field, it can be said that it has degrees or levels of realization, and our path is to go as deep as possible into it until all of our ego is dissolved into the context.

At the beginning of the path, the ego is like a tightly wound ball of yarn. It is impossible to see the space that occupies that ball of yarn to normal perception. To become conscious of the infinite space, what you do is expand it out as large as possible, so that it becomes like a large net with lots of holes inside. At that time, while consciousness is still aware of form, it can also be aware of the formless space.

Analogously, what you do with the mind is to stretch it out as wide as possible, until it feels like it is already the infinite field, and then it will be easier to realize you are the field and to surrender the ego.

The main practice of achieving this is to continually contemplate or focus on a higher context or insight and to surrender the lower content as well as lower contexts (which is also just content to a higher context). To do this, you actively use your mind to "think", "stretch", "focus", or "allow attention to flow" on a higher context. It doesn't have to be a lot higher, just anything that is higher than the context(s) you are currently holding, so that you illuminate the "space" underneath the content of the mind. In practice, it actually feels a little like you are stretching the boundaries of the mind. You force your mind to "think of" or "hold onto" a higher context, until that becomes your natural way of being and all the content that drags you lower and back into form is surrendered.

It is said in various books and traditions that thinking is an obstacle to the path. Not so! At least, not in the beginning. You contemplate higher contexts and insights as much as possible, and it helps remove thoughts and concepts of lower content, so effectively you use thinking to root out thinking. Thinking higher thoughts clears out lower thoughts.

I've found that there are two ways to do this. One way is to see the context underneath the content, or to dissolve content into its underlying context. This is the nothingness path. You focus on the qualityless non-experience of formlessness and eschew form and phenomena. The second way is to focus on all of your content at once, so that content and context "blend" together and the context starts to "stand out". This is the allness path. In the end, they both equal each other.

One insight that helps with this is to realize that nothingness is the same as allness. To continue the analogy, unraveling a small piece would be to surrender a part of the mind and to see into the formless "hole" that is created, whereas stretching out the ball would be to include more "space" (as well as form/objects which is not different from space) into experience so that the mind feels expansive and formless and infinite. To be All, is to be One form, which is equivalent to no form, and to be nothing, is to be no form -- so they equal each other in the end.

There are various stages of the field to go through, and I'll list the ones that I've found to be helpful.

-- normal linear ego
-- beginning of nonlocality/formlessness
-- time, space, distance, motion, causality start to disappear
-- awareness of formlessness becomes increasingly predominant
-- form and formlessness merge
-- Oneness beyond form and formlessness
-- No-self beyond Oneness (not two, not one)
-- Bliss / ananda
-- Atman
-- Brahman

For me personally, the insights or pointers that have helped me the most:
-- using mind or awareness to "penetrate" Reality without using experience or perception or cognition or self..."movement without movement"
-- focus attention on nonlocal, nonfocused, formless state of awareness
-- try surrendering or letting go attention so that it naturally flows to a higher context, or alternatively, focus attention on everything until focus becomes nonfocused and like those 3-D magic eye pictures, the context reveals itself
-- experience doesn't need to change in order to realize a higher state...the content of consciousness doesn't need to change in order to realize the context...experience can stay the same
-- personally, I use the flow of energy or pressure in the 3rd eye / energy system to gauge how well my practices are working...the harder the flow/pressure, the more blocks there are, and the deeper context you are in (more content as blocks)
-- contemplate the nonexperience of formlessness as unexperiencable and unknowable...what is Reality like if you are not using experience, perception, or self to interpret it?
-- the field is self-aware, mind is not aware. What you are seeking is like a self-contained Reality outside of experience and "I". The field is aware of the field. Take the point of view of the field, not from the mind or content. See the field from the field's POV.
-- focus on reality "outside" of experience, let go of all the ego's relationships to reality and to experience and to self...find a way to focus on the "outside" without using experience...the outside focusing on itself (at the beginning it may seem like the mind is focusing on the outside)

Hope this is helpful to people out there. I'll try to add onto this if any new insights come :)

Also, another suggestion that has worked for me, is to focus on the content sometimes when it works for you. Sometimes the higher context is being held by part of your mind, and by focusing on the content you are effectively surrendering it, using the power of the context behind it.

Hello Ethereal,

Respectfully, do you practice this by yourself or do you work with a group or a teacher?

colleen

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This is very interesting, I believe this helped. So if you have anymore new insights please add them, I'm sure it will help even more, if not now maybe down the road.

I somewhat understand with what you are saying that the higher thinking is sometimes nesecary to hold us in place for the actual non-thinking or awareness,...if that makes any sense.

Colleen,

Some of the information (like the stages of enlightenment and the field) I've learned from teachers and partially corroborated within my own experience, the others (contemplation techniques and insights) I've learned on my own through experimentation and seeing what works. I do these practices on my own, since I am not sure if it works for other people. I've just found it to work for me, and I wanted to share it here in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.

Alc,

Not exactly sure what you mean by your statement, but perhaps this might be helpful:

Ramana maharshi once said something to the effect of, "the mind needs to grasp onto the higher states". I take this to mean that "thinking" or contemplation or what Adyashanti calls "effortless effort", is required in order to reach higher states. Buddha once said that each stage of enlightenment is a "place of effort". So some kind of "doing" or "thinking" or contemplation is required, it's not just that there's nothing to do and no one to do it, so you don't do anything.

By the way, all the contemplation techniques that I've mentioned, and all the ones that you may figure out for yourself, work at specific stages of your path and not at others. So do whatever it is that is working for you right now, and don't worry if a technique stopped working or if you can't get it to work.

Some more insights and techniques that I've learned:

Mind tensing technique:
This is similar to the whole-body tensing technique that some of you may know, where you try to tense all your muscles in your body all at once for 5-10 seconds or so, and then after relaxing you find that you're in a deeper state of relaxation than before. What you do is, try to further tense or contract your mind completely, or around "areas" of tension/contraction or around the "center"/self/ego/I-sense, and then relax and follow the feeling of release deeper into surrender. The mind kind of gravitates towards surrender naturally, so if you give it a stimulus to grasp onto, like the feeling of release, the mind follows that feeling/direction inward and goes deeper within.

Surrendering the surrenderer / center:
The mind naturally grasps onto one part of mind, which is the self or center. When trying to surrender, what is usually happening is the mind grasps like crazy at one end of the mind, and tries to push away / let go at the other end. But you can't let go completely while you're still holding on to one end of the mind (the center). So what you can do is, completely let go of the periphery of the mind, which is your experience, or everything that the mind is grasping onto besides the center/self, and then surrender the center as well, so that you let go of both ends of the mind. It will feel like you are surrendering the surrenderer. When surrendering the center, your mind doesn't move in a particular mental "direction", so it is not a grasping or pushing away or manipulation of mental objects/experience. It is almost as if you're doing nothing with the mind, a "directionless" movement you could say. It is not a forceful letting go or surrender (which is actually the mind pushing away), but more of just a recognition that you are already surrendered, you are already free. There are many stages of it I think, as the surrender gets deeper and deeper. One of the stages which I am more familiar with, is surrendering the center of mental perception and movement based on the location in the middle of your head. If you observe closely, you'll see that all of your mind's movements are based off of this imaginary center in the middle of your head; it acts like a reference point, like the origin of a coordinate system. All the pushing away and grasping of experience occurs in reference to this center. After surrendering it, it's like you can't feel your mind move anymore, not in any particular direction.


These days I've been just doing surrender in general, surrendering the experiencer/self. If you let go completely, of experiencer and experience, then what is left is (seemingly) nothing. If you can intuit where this nothing-"space" is, and let go into that... :) It's rather difficult however, and I have a lot of trouble with it, it comes and goes in stages. What has worked for me is just simply to try letting go deeper.

This was very insightful. I appreciate you putting this out here, its very helpful.

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I agree with this. What I meant to say that the "thinking" becomes etheric in nature rather than intellectual or mental, its like a whole new paradigm in "thinking" which cannot be quite grasped by the intellect alone. Where the etheric rises above the normal intellect, rather that the intellect or emotional trying to make it be. Hence the term "effortless effort" which is a contraction in itself but makes perfect sense when it it understood through essense rather than form.I don't know if I have explained it right but its very hard to explain in a mental way, you seem to do a better job of it.

Anyways, anymore insights you have I'm sure will help.