This Extraordinary Moment

Astin, John

• Publisher: Non-Duality
• Year: 1010
• eBook ISBN: 9781684031825
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"The realization that there is no explanation for existence or awareness of existence is ultimate liberation. John Astin's book offers an opportunity for this liberation, if you are ready." —Deepak Chopra "This book has the power to transform lives." —Shauna Shapiro, author of The Art and Science of Mindfulness

Anyone who attempts to describe what is ultimately indescribable faces the same challenge—how does one use words to explain something that transcends language? Many writers fall into the trap of using more words to do the job that most words aren't even particularly suited for, the ideas growing ever more allusive and abstract as the verbiage piles up. But in trying to unmoor the essence of lived experience from the concepts and stories we use to construct it, author and spiritual teacher John Astin takes a different approach—using fewer words instead of more, and grounding them with exercises designed to evoke the actual experience of what he's describing.

Evoking the true nature of experience in words is a tricky proposition: perceptual reality has no beginning and no end, making it impossible to delineate, and what arises internally as thoughts and feelings are equally limitless, indeterminate, and unresolvable. While we have countless ways to categorize, conceptualize, and label things, the truth of whatever is being felt, seen, tasted, touched, or heard is infinitely more complex and multidimensional than our conceptual or linguistic structures would have us believe. By becoming more intimate with experience itself—rather than trying to narrate, avoid, or escape it—we can begin to discover that our experiences cannot possibly limit us in the ways we've imagined, owing to their radically open-ended and ultimately indefinable nature.

This Extraordinary Moment? invites you on a journey of boundless inquiry, which becomes a liberating free-fall into the mysteries that lie just beyond our understanding of lived reality—which words can never quite describe. Built entirely around personal experience and exploration, this book provides activities, dialogues, exercises, and meditations to help you unlearn the basic misapprehensions about the nature of moment-to-moment experience, and shows you how to gain distance from the stories you tell about what you're experiencing, so as to better focus on what's actually happening in the present moment.

With ultrashort chapters grounded in experiential practices, and without the use of the usual spiritual jargon, this fast-moving, highly readable book makes the esoteric accessible to all—from anyone interested in stress management, well-being, or positive psychology to the devoted spiritual seeker.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Suggestions for How to Approach This Book
• Two Approaches to Happiness
• The Impressionistic Nature of Experience
• The Misinterpretation of Experience
• Cognitive Fusion
• The Map Is Not the Territory
• What Is Experience Made Of?
• The Partiality of All Explanations
• It’s Not What You Think It Is
• Dialogue: The Uses and Limitations of Language
• Reality, the Greatest Drug of All
• The Confirmation Bias
• Distinguishing Thought from Experience
• Categories
• Dialogue: Discovering the Common Denominator
• Interpretive Frameworks
• Experience Deviates from Our Interpretations
• The Vast and Indescribable Nature of Experience
• Dialogue: Are You Saying That Suffering Isn’t Real?
• Relaxing All Effort
• Don’t Do Anything About This
• Refer to Nothing
• The Continuous Discontinuity
• Mindfulness Is Unavoidable
• Sitting on a Chair Isn’t Merely Sitting on a Chair
• Let Yourself Be Astounded
• Dialogue: The Room
• Let the Winds Blow
• Boundaries
• Reality: Virtual, Actual…or Both?
• Everything Is Present
• The Phenomenal Nature of Phenomena
• The Mystery of Intention
• Not Privileging Thought
• What’s True About This?
• This Is It
• Resting as the View
• The Ease of Being Here
• The Miracle of Perceiving
• Expressions of Energy
• We Have Not Been Here Before
• Everything Slips Away
• The Knowing of This Moment Is the Feeling of It
• Being Here Now
• Presence
• Drifting Toward Reality
• The Problem of Oversimplification
• Signal and Noise
• What Is Awareness?
• Dialogue: The Miracle of Everything
• Wide Open
• No Hierarchy
• Time
• The Freedom of Uncertainty
• Dialogue: The World Is Made of Verbs
• The Bottomless Well of Infinity
• The Borderless Field of Being
• No Distractions
• The Olympic Athlete Model of Spirituality
• Dialogue: The Many Flavors of Here
• Everything’s a One-­Off
• Awareness Is Experience
• The Fullness of Experience
• The Surface Is the Deep
• Overdramatizing the Path
• Identity and the Body of Experience
• What Are We?
• The Impossibility of Measurement
• Many Flavors, One Taste
• Experience Doesn’t Matter
• The Magic Show
• Everything Is What You Want
• The Indescribability of Everything
• It’s Exactly What You Think It Is…and So Much More
• Epilogue: This Life That Is Also Death
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• References