Dear John,

It's been a few months now since I heard of you first. Since then I heard, saw and read probably nearly everything available on your homepage and on the web. I happended to trust you and your work completely right from the beginning and I started immediately with the "work of looking at me".

I'd like to give you a short feedback now, what works best for me:

Looking back in time.

Your suggestion to "look back in time" to see whether it's possible to recall how it felt to be "me" as a child is a tremendously helpful "tool" for me. I can't find moments when I was very little, it starts with about the age of 14. But from there, I can go through my whole life up to now, kind of "meet how it felt like to be me" in a deliberate number of places, times and circumstances and - although I could remember what happened then or how everything felt or looked like — I'm not going to the memory, I'm going to the feeling of being "me" which is always exactly the same. Exactly. Amazing. In moments of fear and in moments of happiness, in moments of pain and in moments of phyical well being — always the same, exactly the same — as you say.

This helps me a lot. I then don't stay with the actual event in the past, but it brings me like a doorway immediately "into the looking"

Who is seeing this?

The second thing that helps me a lot in "bringing me into the looking at myself" is the question: "Who is seeing this?". In your November Retreat you didn't seem to give this approach "much credit". But for me it works very well. When I look at something, very often the question pops up: "Who is seeing this?" and what comes then is not a mental asking. What seems to happen is that after the question "Who is seeing this?" there goes a quick "attention check" to my physical eyes and then the attention goes "into the physical head" and there appears a kind of "comment": how could these flesh eyes, how could these brain cells see this? "Who sees this?" And then the whole "attention energy" is like thrown back at myself and goes in the direction of what I understand as "looking at me".

Nobody would say that a camera sees the pictures it takes. There is a wonderful system of lenses and highly sensitive information-receivers. So the picture is taken. But there has to be someone looking at it. Similar with me: there are these wonderful eyes of mine and this brain and whatever else involved in this marvellous happening of physical seeing. But who "looks at the pictures?" This brings me into the looking, not in the thinking or speculating or mind-gaming about it, but really into the looking.

I hope, with these two approaches, I'm looking in "the right direction".

There's one question that keeps sticking with me: With the "looking back" I can very clearly see, that I haven't changed at all. That, as you say, nothing has helped me and nothing has hurt me. That is in a way an enormous relief and it takes away a lot of fear from life. The experiencing of this "unchanging sense of being me" through my life is very clear to me. But it is always kind of connected to this body that changed over time from a boy to a fifty years old man. The question that keeps arising in this context: What happens when this body dies or is severely injured (for example brain damage)? Will this individual consciousness, will this feeling "me" go and die with the body or will it survive, will it merge into a kind of not knowing as in deep sleep or is this sense of being present not bound to this individual mind-body?

For me this "fear of extinction" is a major aspect of my fear of life, something that prevents me very strongly to stop "keeping life at arm's length" — as you put it so much to the point.

To conclude: many many thanks for your work to you and Carla. I'm extremely grateful for all you do.

In case you relate to this E-Mail in one of your World Wide Meetings: As I can never be "life" at the meetings, I would be very grateful if it could come as a podcast afterwards so I could hear it.

All the best to you and greetings from Switzerland in winter.

T.

January 25, 2010
Luzern, Switzerland

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