Movies like this, though, make you long for what I call quantitative experience: have you scuba dived? Jumped out of an airplane? Eaten at a fine restaurant in Paris? Ridden with a drunk helicopter pilot?
I have had many experiences in my life, some of them a bit wild. But what I long for more than anything is perfect enjoyment of a simple day in which nothing unusual happens. I long to enhance my sensitivity to the point where I need go nowhere or do anything exotic the rest of my life, and live very contentedly, happily.
It is an odd juxtaposition, but can we call the Sean Penn mindset the Hemingway mindset? What I follow I might call the Tarthang Tulku mindset, that of constant expansion.
There is a frequency to the Hemingway mindset. It occillates. It goes up and down. And keep in mind that despite all his adventures, all his “living”, all his risk taking, Papa Hemingway in the end killed himself.
The Tarthang Tulku process is to build up the capacity for experience, for connectedness, for love, without calling it love. It is a steady increase in ambient energy–expressed in peaceful and alert joy–that becomes constant.
That is what I want. I have had enough glimpses to know this with certainty.