In the skin boundary exercise we explore the most obvious me/not-me boundary, the skin.
But this isn’t the only boundary we can experience. Let’s explore heat.
- Close your eyes
- Notice any warmth in your body
- Notice the clothes you are wearing
- Notice the air around you
- Reflect how your bodily warmth is warming up your clothes, thus keeping you warm
- If this warmth is caused by “me”, is there a clear point at which this warming influence on our surroundings ends?
- Can we clearly identify where this warmth ends and the rest of our environment’s temperature is unimpacted by us?
- Or is it that there is a temperature gradient, a gradual cooling as we move attention away from our body?
- What might it mean if there’s no clear temperature boundary marking the edge of our warmth? Influence boundary (including prior conversations with me)
She had already an easy sense of boundarilessness
Moved on to space/time:
are you here or there? Now go to kitchen. Really imagine yourself in the kitchen. Are you there, or here? Did you "take here with me"?
She said: we don’t move, really.
Now time:
wiggle your finger now, tomorrow, yesterday. If you wiggled it tomorrow, would you be wiggling it tomorrow, or now?
Now jump to fear of death. Is death going to happen in the future, or now? Are we fearing our actual death, or an imaginary version of it happening in the future?