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I want to riff a little more on what I mean by 'aliveness' and try to hint at some of the felt sense of what it's like, at least for me the absence of aliveness is a kind of 'distance' between me and the vividness of real world increasing aliveness closes that gap towards zero https://t.co/FLyefzQEBh
I talk a lot about awareness, particularly the fact that it can be expanded or collapsed But awareness is just one side of what might be a 2x2, where the other axis is 'aliveness' What I want to teach encompasses both 'expanded awareness' and 'enhanced aliveness' together
this is often framed as 'being in your head', or 'mind wandering', but that seems to underplay what's going on in my experience, what the vast majority of us do, and I used to do before AT, is create a lower resolution simulation of the world and then 'be present' in that
that 'projected simulation' vs 'real world' (such as we can access the real world, let's not go there right now) represents the distance I'm talking about the more in your own simulation you are, the further you are from the real world, and the less aliveness you have access to
full aliveness is the moment when simulation drops away entirely and you suddenly find yourself confronted with the indescribably real experience of *actually being in the world* this is a 'psychophysical process': both body and mind, which are one thing, are fully engaged
let me bring in some metaphors to point at the thing aliveness is like the difference between noticing that there is a wave and surfing along the crest of the waves at high speed in both instances you may be 'present', but in only one are you an active participant in what is
aliveness is like when the transmission in your car is working properly when the two plates either side of the clutch mechanism are in perfect contact and spinning perfectly with each other non-aliveness is when your transmission doesn't get the full energy of the engine https://t.co/ovSwUKJaIl
I remember using a version of this metaphor with an early student, while I will still training to be an Alexander Technique teacher I described something called 'the world cog', which spins as it will, and showed my student how to align his 'cog' with the 'the world cog'
this, of course, is a particularly mechanistic way of describing the Dao, but it's the same idea the world is flowing, doing its thing as it does, and you are fully aligned with it, engaged with it not just watching it, not just noticing it, but fully 'going with' it
THAT is aliveness so expanding your awareness brings the whole of the world into your experience, rather than cutting bits of it off... enhancing your aliveness means choosing to be a fully engaged participant in all that is and in a sense, realising that you *are* all that
as with 'mindfulness', being fully alive in this sense, being an active participant in present moment, is not something you do once and then cling to that will send you back off into your simulation instead, the move is to keep choosing to reconnect to the world, over and over
aliveness https://t.co/lSVaLc3HQB