- Contemplation
Contemplation is a deep and focused questioning, and an essential tool for increasing consciousness. It is creating the possibility that something can be known outside of what is known or knowable.
Book of Not Knowing
Why contemplate?
Contemplation is a powerful tool that allows you to make breakthroughs, have insights, and learn. Once you have these insights you will be able to have more capacity and freedom in life. You can use what you learn in any way you choose which will dramatically increase your quality of life. Without honesty, contemplation is impossible.
For our first week, let’s contemplate honesty.
Honesty is telling the truth, not only to others but to ourselves as well. Here, this distinction goes beyond the conventional use of the word to a profound and real experience of an activity that is as “rock-bottom” honest as we can manage. Our normal tendency is not one of such powerful honesty. We manipulate our own thinking and feelings, and our experience is so influenced by our beliefs, fears, and desires that we cannot trust it without challenge. We must maintain a diligent probing into the truth of anything that arises — from our ideas on how something works to the nature of relationship or reality. This is not honesty as a moral issue, and it’s not looking for some fantasy called “Truth.” We’re seeking only to align ourselves with what is already true. Yet, we don’t begin to participate in this until we are honest with ourselves and others.
Remember, understanding this work through experience is a different matter than merely hearing about it. Since an authentic experience occurs as real and true, we don’t need to memorize the information any more than we need to memorize what we’re doing right now. When we come to this work through honest experience, we find we have no need to fit it all together intellectually, or to make a decision whether we believe it. It is either so for us or it is not.
Contemplate during the week:
During the week observe honesty. How honest are you with others and with yourself? Try not to judge this, just observe how honesty functions. What is honesty?
Watch this short video of Peter Talking about Contemplation: