Dream: needs to work itself through

I see what is left to be worked through, represented as a black rectangle with some substance and thickness.

This was a dream image that stayed with me after I woke up.

It has a sense of something that needed to be exhausted through practice and effort. And also that they exhausting itself is the point of it.

A synchronicity was Joel mentioning this towards the end of this talk this morning.

For a while, our practices has a real effect and we feel we are getting somewhere. Things happen. We notice progress. It is all going pretty well.

And that whole time, we are caught up in the idea of being someone getting somewhere. In Big Mind terminology, we are identified with seeking mind, always seeking something on the other side of the hill.

So at some point, we need to exhaust our efforts and practice. We need to engage fully with it, try it out, until it is shown to not work. And the belief in being someone getting somewhere wears off, either gradually, in periods, or maybe suddenly.

Which leaves us right here now.

In Big Mind terminology, we find ourselves in nonseeking mind because the seeking mind is exhausted. It has tried everything, and even that which seemed to work for a while, getting us somewhere, is shown to not really work. Nothing works anymore, so there is just the letting go of it left.

Note: It seems that this can happen in several different ways, probably also depending on the practices we use. But what may be common for them all is a release out of seeking mind, because nothing works anymore, or at least does not work in a way that feels honest anymore. We see that what we get from it is just another way of reorganizing content of experience, which only has temporary effects, and is exhausting in the long run.