What is being measured · 19 of 24

The character

Notice how much of you is built on the body you are driving.

Your avatar has no free will

My Big TOE uses avatar in the video-game sense: the computed character you play inside a virtual reality, which here is your physical body. It has particular abilities and limitations, and it has to obey the ruleset.

The observation that does actual work is about identification. Most people, the material says, identify with their avatar almost completely — and build their fears, their ego and their beliefs around it. Read that list again. It is the same three things this course spent the last stage on, now given a common foundation.

The instruction is not detachment. Immersion is by design and it is useful; without it none of this would teach anybody anything. The expensive mistake is not caring about the character, it is founding your identity on it — because everything the character can lose then becomes something to be afraid of.

There is a sharper line in the free will entry: your apparent physical body is nothing but data in a simulation, and has no free will of its own. The choosing happens somewhere else. Whatever is doing the choosing is the thing this whole practice is addressed to.

So today, for twenty minutes, be the one holding the controller rather than the one on screen.

Before you start

  • Lighten up. Do not be intense or serious about this.
  • Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed. A chair is fine. He does not specify anything beyond that.
  • Close your eyes.
  • Pick a time when you are not already churning. First thing on waking or last thing before sleep tend to work; straight after a big meal, or while you are angry about something, tend not to.
How long

Campbell’s own instruction is twenty minutes, twice a day. The shorter lengths early on are ours, not his — starting at twenty is how most people stop after a week.

The two buttons during a sit

Campbell’s mantra is not a fixed thing you repeat for twenty minutes. Its size is a dial, and you move it during the sit against how much thinking is going on. His instruction is symmetrical: if intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form; as thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity.

Busier
Your mind keeps wandering off. Give it more to hold, so there is less room for anything else. At the busiest: fill your mind with the longer chant: ah-lum-bar-dee-dum · ah-lum-baa-dee-dum. no need to make an actual sound. let it be busy.
Simpler
Nothing much is intruding any more. Let it thin out — there is no point crowding a mind that has already gone quiet.

Keep going down and you reach the end of it: If the sound slips away and no thoughts come in behind it, let it go. Drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness. That is the whole aim — the mantra is scaffolding, and you take scaffolding down when the building stands up. Arrow keys work too, if you have a keyboard to hand.

Keep this tab open. The screen stays awake and dims itself, so the phone can lie face down. On iPhone, locking the screen or switching apps stops the sound — a browser limitation rather than a setting.