16 Comments
User's avatar
Gaby's avatar

I loved this. I started highlighting sentences that really struck me to place in the comment section but at the end the end of the day I think a simple "thank you" is easier. :-) A very enjoyable and fun read.

Jeff's avatar

This is perfectly stated. Thank you!

Marcia Wade's avatar

I loved this. And wanted to learn more about the workshops. But the link didn't work. Is there another way?

Rowena Hutchison's avatar

Wonderful. So clear. Thank you Rob.

ren's avatar

"This is wonderful. So true. Thank you for expressing it."

Joel Gruber, PhD.'s avatar

This is brilliant, Rob. So well said!

Greg Brown's avatar

Wow Rob, this was excellent.

For The First Time's avatar

Just wonderful…I just wish there wasn’t that forgetting - just as it should be! 🙏

Matt Cardin's avatar

This. Is. Brilliant. 🙏

Patrick Dorsey's avatar

Brilliant layed out Rob, lovely validations w/ so many great takeaways, loved this ❤️

Celene's avatar

Now playing in a theater called “me” 😉 Very nice and very clear. 🙏

David Sykes's avatar

Love it! Thanks for writing this Rob, and thank you, Joan, for sharing. One possible concern is of someone, not me, interpreting this solipsistically. My 2 cents.

Rob Matthews's avatar

Thanks for naming that. This piece leans a lot on Peter Brown’s work, and when I first came across it I also wondered if it sounded like solipsism.

Peter starts from a simple fact: all we ever have is experience. Whatever appears, including “me”, “you” and “the world”, shows up in this one unresolvable field of experience. The sense of a subject is itself an appearance in that field, not something standing apart from it. Solipsism is a philosophy, a theory about what reality is. Peter’s yoga is not a theory but a direct look at what is present, so in that sense it is empirical rather than speculative.

Solipsism keeps a private “me” at the centre and downgrades everything else to contents of that mind. In reality there is only the single field in which both “me” and “others” appear, with no owner to be found. From that angle solipsism never really gets off the ground.

User's avatar
Comment deleted
Dec 10
Comment deleted
Rob Matthews's avatar

Thanks for your astute question.

Nothing in the piece is meant to sneak a chooser back in. There is no inner agent who decides to flip life from “serious” to “enjoyable”. There is only this one field of experience, doing everything.

The wish to recognise this, the sense of moving closer, the resistance, the boredom, the “flip” itself, are all just further appearances in the same field.

No one stands outside the appearance to change how it plays. Sometimes appearance takes itself to be the character. Sometimes it shows itself as the whole scene, character included. Either way, it is only this, doing what it does.

All the best.

Peter's avatar

That's helpful. And there seems to be a relief, that you handle that big free will thing so relaxed. Its all consistent. For this moment. 🙏