Post by stardustpilgrim on Jan 28, 2012 12:04:33 GMT -5
The following might be clear to most of us, however, I just wanted to share........
Babies are born as almost pure essence, pure real self (just set aside the baggage of karma for a second, other than karma being where and when you were born). You could say that this being the case, babies live through their awareness and through their attention, IOW, they don't live through thought. It's very cool to just watch babies........Awareness is intelligence.
Now, everything a baby takes in through the five senses gets recorded in the neural structure of the brain. Around the age of two, more or less, babies begin to learn to talk. This is necessary in order to function in life. Before learning language, babies cried when they were wet, had a stinky diaper, were hungry, cold or hot. Moms (and Dads) had to figure out what the crying meant.
When Jr. learns language, he can tell Mom what's wrong, what he wants. OK, take a piece of white typing paper, that represents your pure essence. Babies learn something every second of every waking moment. For every second, draw a line across your white paper, that represents a neural connection. As a baby keeps learning, there are more and more neural connections, and connections between connections between connections. By about the age of six, that white piece of paper, isn't white any longer, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and hundreds of millions of neural connections. There are actually more connectioins between neurons than there are particles in the whole of the universe, that's all the particles in 100,000 billion galaxies that have 100,000 billions stars each.
What does that paper represent? The whiteness is still there, covered over by all the ink that is the neural structure. The ink is the neural structure of ego/personality, our cultural self. Our essence is virtually covered over by personality. Personality functions through symbolic thought. Our essence, our real self is buried under all those recordings. These tape-loops get played over and over again, and we take ourselves to be the recordings, instead of the life buried below, the white piece of paper.
The spiritual journey is about uncovering and recovering the white piece of paper. The primary means to do this is again living through our awareness and attention. After ego forms over essence our awareness and attention become slaves of personality, actually prisoners of personality. We live in a prison.
What do we collect when we encounter life as a baby? We don't just record the facts about how the physical universe works. We experience and record all the warped thoughts, emotions and actions of everyone we encounter. IOW, our personality becomes what we are around. This cannot be helped, we "inherit" everybody else's crap. And at about age six, we no longer really live in "reality", we live through our own neural structure. Our personality colors and interprets everything that now comes in. We see life as we are, not how life really is.
Now, our neural structure is not some imaginary thing, it's very real. Most people never even come to the idea that personality is not their true identity, let alone conceive of getting beyond it. Trying to find the white sheet of paper is like a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull ........ but it's there, alive......within......
Enlightenment is finding the white sheet of paper, and living through....it........
stardustpilgrim
Babies are born as almost pure essence, pure real self (just set aside the baggage of karma for a second, other than karma being where and when you were born). You could say that this being the case, babies live through their awareness and through their attention, IOW, they don't live through thought. It's very cool to just watch babies........Awareness is intelligence.
Now, everything a baby takes in through the five senses gets recorded in the neural structure of the brain. Around the age of two, more or less, babies begin to learn to talk. This is necessary in order to function in life. Before learning language, babies cried when they were wet, had a stinky diaper, were hungry, cold or hot. Moms (and Dads) had to figure out what the crying meant.
When Jr. learns language, he can tell Mom what's wrong, what he wants. OK, take a piece of white typing paper, that represents your pure essence. Babies learn something every second of every waking moment. For every second, draw a line across your white paper, that represents a neural connection. As a baby keeps learning, there are more and more neural connections, and connections between connections between connections. By about the age of six, that white piece of paper, isn't white any longer, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and hundreds of millions of neural connections. There are actually more connectioins between neurons than there are particles in the whole of the universe, that's all the particles in 100,000 billion galaxies that have 100,000 billions stars each.
What does that paper represent? The whiteness is still there, covered over by all the ink that is the neural structure. The ink is the neural structure of ego/personality, our cultural self. Our essence is virtually covered over by personality. Personality functions through symbolic thought. Our essence, our real self is buried under all those recordings. These tape-loops get played over and over again, and we take ourselves to be the recordings, instead of the life buried below, the white piece of paper.
The spiritual journey is about uncovering and recovering the white piece of paper. The primary means to do this is again living through our awareness and attention. After ego forms over essence our awareness and attention become slaves of personality, actually prisoners of personality. We live in a prison.
What do we collect when we encounter life as a baby? We don't just record the facts about how the physical universe works. We experience and record all the warped thoughts, emotions and actions of everyone we encounter. IOW, our personality becomes what we are around. This cannot be helped, we "inherit" everybody else's crap. And at about age six, we no longer really live in "reality", we live through our own neural structure. Our personality colors and interprets everything that now comes in. We see life as we are, not how life really is.
Now, our neural structure is not some imaginary thing, it's very real. Most people never even come to the idea that personality is not their true identity, let alone conceive of getting beyond it. Trying to find the white sheet of paper is like a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull ........ but it's there, alive......within......
Enlightenment is finding the white sheet of paper, and living through....it........
stardustpilgrim
