Just One Look Forum Archives

My name is Peter Duggan, I am sixty eight years old, and I come from Perth, Western Australia.

I first came upon the looking when I was on the net perusing torrent sites looking for audio tapes on Alan Watts talks. There I found some old podcasts of John's.

John seemed to have an unusual approach to spiritual ideas, which attracted me strongly, and from then on I just wanted to listen to more of his pod casts. I immediately started the looking, and Ihave been doing this ever since. That was in September 09.

I had very little difficulty with the looking as it seemed to come to me quite easily. However, the difficulties came when I heard others say that they found it hard to do. This gave me doubts as to whether I was actually doing it right or not, which interfered a bit with the looking.

Eventually I realized that my doubts seemed to be unwarranted. So I started incorporating the looking into my meditation practice; I now chant for twenty minutes, then use the next forty minutes asking myself things like 'Am I here?' 'How can I be so sure of this?' 'What is this certainty of me?' and other questions; also during the course of the day I periodically look at me.

I have suffered from post traumatic stress disorder ever since I served in Nam, which I was told was incurable, and most of my life I have let small things panic me, I also I have suffered a great deal from uncontrolled anger, and resentment, as well as heaps of internal dread that seems to come upon me for no reason at all.

Since I have been doing the looking. However. all these things seem to be fading and I am becoming easier to live with. As those close to me will testify to. My forty year old habit of heavy binge drinking has come to a halt, without me even trying to stop it, and my habit of smoking Cannabis all day long has also stopped with only the minimum of effort on my part. Even my exaggerated fear of heights which I have always had has seemed to tone down a bit these days.

I now find myself extremely happy, and life feels wonderfully sweet these days. That awful sense of dread that was so debilitating before, does't seem to bother me any more, and even moments of justified anxiety, seem to fade out very quickly these days. Life is still the same as it was before, but it just seems so much more enjoyable, and this makes me very optimistic when I look towards the future.

To all those folk reading this, I say for goodness sake give this looking a try; it can't hurt you, it can only help you. It certainly helped me.