Excerpt from the teaching "Effortful selectivity and effortless non selectivity", Zoom teachings with James Low on March 1st, 2025.
English: https://youtu.be/zakRXkX84AA
English (withou silence cuts): youtu.be/jx8_jV6eoqk
German: youtu.be/ZpX2GE85g-U
Russian: youtu.be/sFO_SuRSxg0
Spanish: youtu.be/6SjnZ0Qwi4E
Portuguese: youtu.be/xVJ8ou6L_6g
Romanian: youtu.be/kI1qkcK4B6Q
Turkish: youtu.be/M4RHyVz-ARY
"The key thing is to find ourselves on the inside. The door is open. The welcome is here. Come in. So, what is the limitation on my participation? There are many aspects to this. One is, um, I know what I like. That’s not the way I like it.
Oh, over the years, I have known quite a few women who have gone to the hairdresser and who then come home and look in the mirror and they are very unhappy. Oh, they took off too much, or they didn’t take off enough. So then they go to another hairdresser to try to correct what is wrong because they want to have the right appearance. But their appearance doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the people who see their appearance.
Unless you’re going to look in a mirror all day long, you hardly ever see yourself. Other people see you. So, in that sense, you could say your appearance belongs to them. They are the audience for your appearance. But I’m concerned about how you will see my appearance, but I don’t know what criteria you will use to evaluate my appearance. If I don’t like my haircut and you say it’s fine, then maybe I will hate you because I know it’s very bad. I don’t want to look like this.
The key thing here is I have become an object for myself, and my sense of myself as an object does not determine how other people will see me. I don’t know how I should be for you. So, if I am concerned about my appearance, if I’m seeing myself as a performative being, then I’m having to make decisions about how I should behave."
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Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvsHwxFLD-s