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Post by topology on May 8, 2014 11:32:34 GMT -5
I'm going to disagree about still mind = no thought. I am borderline ADD, an obsessive compulsive thinker. To me, there is no "stilling" of the mind. Instead I think what is meant by "still mind" is that one is in a mode of aware observation sans identification with anything. To me, a still mind or even quiet mind is more about the nature and attitude demonstrated in the content of the mind. Absent of any personal agenda, absent of an obsessed narrowed focus, alert, healthy, at the ready. In the background the mind can be active and chewing on a bone, but the whole system is more present, alert and aware. In essence, the minds activity is not interfering with how you relate to the rest of the experience you are having. I get what you're saying here. And I can relate. In some ways I see ATA-MT as an attempt to disidentify in the way you are describing. Attention is put elsewhere while thinking may continue (but loses momentum without attention to it). ZD often mentions that he goes through the day with nary a thought, though. 'Still mind' seems to imply that there is very little mind movement. And if thinking isn't mind movement, what is it? I think what you are talking about may be an enlightened perspective with respect to thinking, but I'm not sure it's still mind. And I'm not saying that "still mind" is necessarily a worthy goal -- but I have no authority myself to make such a claim. I've moved our discussion here to get a broader audience of people on this subject. Maybe ZD will weigh in as well. I think we're talking about thought on two different levels. There is the surface thoughts, which I experience as an auditory voice talking. These are more like an announcer giving a play by play. Suppose you're folding some TP to wipe your arse with and the fold goes hay-wire. The commentator can be heard uttering the thought "No, that's not going to work" or any of its variants. The other level of thought is non-vocalized and independent from the commentator. This deeper level of thought recognizes that the hay-wire fold occurred and moves to take corrective action. This wordless movement to respond, I would still call thought. There are two parts. (1) the recognition of the situation (mental activity) (2) movement to respond appropriately (also mental activity). The decision of how to respond stems from the personal conditioning of the body-mind. We have a limited capability to respond, so when we perceive the need to address multiple situations, we have to have a way of dissipating the innate desire to respond. The commentator actually plays a role in the release of the impulse to respond. If we are engaged in situation A and do not want to disengages to address situation B, the commentator boots up and processes the impulse towards B as a flurry of surface level thoughts. The impulse to respond is diffused instead of generating action. "I need to get eggs on my way home after work." I see the whole thing as a single wave of thought. We're the surfer sitting in the water as waves of impulse arise to pass (through) us. The surfer (some aspect of the mind) has to decide, do I ride this new wave and generate action or do I let the wave pass to catch a later wave? (or stay on the wave I'm already riding? [insert ideas about relativity and inertial frames of reference to reconcile the breach in the analogy]) The "choice" to not ride the wave into action means the wave passes in front of you visibly. That is what the commentator does, it allows the wave of impulse to pass through you without taking action and it generates perception of the wave passing (the commentary). Without the commentary to release the tension to take action, that tension will grow and interfere with the original action being taken. For ZD, I suspect that there are very few competing impulses to act. If they arise, there is not much emotional energy behind them that needs to be diffused, the decision between which impulse to act on is easy, and the inacted impulses are dissipated with relatively little noise from the commentator. I believe this model is a good description, allowing for variance of many factors to cover the range of experiences. Multiple competing impulses with high amounts of emotional energy overloading the system to create inaction due to conflicting action and the commentator noisily bitches and moans about all the waves that can't be ridden. vs. One impulse to act on at a time (perhaps with significant gaps between them), low energy invested in the impulse, and a mostly silent commentator. ---------------------- A treatment of Thought that is purely focused on the products of the commentator is not complete, and allows for a purely negative view of the existence of the commentator and its products. I think the commentator has a function in releasing tension. The whole system is susceptible to dysfunction, which results in noisy and pathological commentary (internal dialogue). We typically diagnose systemic problems based on the quality of the commentary. |
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Post by laughter on May 8, 2014 12:05:01 GMT -5
I get what you're saying here. And I can relate. In some ways I see ATA-MT as an attempt to disidentify in the way you are describing. Attention is put elsewhere while thinking may continue (but loses momentum without attention to it). ZD often mentions that he goes through the day with nary a thought, though. 'Still mind' seems to imply that there is very little mind movement. And if thinking isn't mind movement, what is it? I think what you are talking about may be an enlightened perspective with respect to thinking, but I'm not sure it's still mind. And I'm not saying that "still mind" is necessarily a worthy goal -- but I have no authority myself to make such a claim. I've moved our discussion here to get a broader audience of people on this subject. Maybe ZD will weigh in as well. I think we're talking about thought on two different levels. There is the surface thoughts, which I experience as an auditory voice talking. These are more like an announcer giving a play by play. Suppose you're folding some TP to wipe your arse with and the fold goes hay-wire. The commentator can be heard uttering the thought "No, that's not going to work" or any of its variants. The other level of thought is non-vocalized and independent from the commentator. This deeper level of thought recognizes that the hay-wire fold occurred and moves to take corrective action. This wordless movement to respond, I would still call thought. There are two parts. (1) the recognition of the situation (mental activity) (2) movement to respond appropriately (also mental activity). The decision of how to respond stems from the personal conditioning of the body-mind. We have a limited capability to respond, so when we perceive the need to address multiple situations, we have to have a way of dissipating the innate desire to respond. The commentator actually plays a role in the release of the impulse to respond. If we are engaged in situation A and do not want to disengages to address situation B, the commentator boots up and processes the impulse towards B as a flurry of surface level thoughts. The impulse to respond is diffused instead of generating action. "I need to get eggs on my way home after work." I see the whole thing as a single wave of thought. We're the surfer sitting in the water as waves of impulse arise to pass (through) us. The surfer (some aspect of the mind) has to decide, do I ride this new wave and generate action or do I let the wave pass to catch a later wave? (or stay on the wave I'm already riding? [insert ideas about relativity and inertial frames of reference to reconcile the breach in the analogy]) The "choice" to not ride the wave into action means the wave passes in front of you visibly. That is what the commentator does, it allows the wave of impulse to pass through you without taking action and it generates perception of the wave passing (the commentary). Without the commentary to release the tension to take action, that tension will grow and interfere with the original action being taken. For ZD, I suspect that there are very few competing impulses to act. If they arise, there is not much emotional energy behind them that needs to be diffused, the decision between which impulse to act on is easy, and the inacted impulses are dissipated with relatively little noise from the commentator. I believe this model is a good description, allowing for variance of many factors to cover the range of experiences. Multiple competing impulses with high amounts of emotional energy overloading the system to create inaction due to conflicting action and the commentator noisily pregnant doges and moans about all the waves that can't be ridden. vs. One impulse to act on at a time (perhaps with significant gaps between them), low energy invested in the impulse, and a mostly silent commentator. ---------------------- A treatment of Thought that is purely focused on the products of the commentator is not complete, and allows for a purely negative view of the existence of the commentator and its products. I think the commentator has a function in releasing tension. The whole system is susceptible to dysfunction, which results in noisy and pathological commentary (internal dialogue). We typically diagnose systemic problems based on the quality of the commentary. In my experience the commentator is a function of misidentification with appearance and I just can't take that thread of thought all that seriously these days. "Still mind" to me means a meditative state where attention is placed on attention. A sort of phase-lock of absence of thought tends to occur, and if I close my eyes I get a dissociated physical state along with that in which the perception of the passage of time is all whacked out. Sometimes, the lock fails and a recursive loop of thought will be noticed and in the noticing the absent state instantly returns. ZD and empty have described a state of "absolute samadhi" that includes the cessation of all sensory perception, but that's not something that I have any experience with. Dividing our internal landscape like this for the purposes of reflection can be interesting and informative to mind, but what E & company have consistently said about "split mind" is always worth a nod. What I'd say is that between the meditative practice and the tendency to watch thought on a moment-by-moment basis, that any recursion of thought involving reference to an identity rooted in appearances seems to me (ha! ha!) to be rare these days. |
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Post by laughter on May 8, 2014 12:48:49 GMT -5
that's what I'm thinking, what do you think? I'm going to disagree about still mind = no thought. I am borderline ADD, an obsessive compulsive thinker. To me, there is no "stilling" of the mind. Instead I think what is meant by "still mind" is that one is in a mode of aware observation sans identification with anything.To me, a still mind or even quiet mind is more about the nature and attitude demonstrated in the content of the mind. Absent of any personal agenda, absent of an obsessed narrowed focus, alert, healthy, at the ready. In the background the mind can be active and chewing on a bone, but the whole system is more present, alert and aware. In essence, the minds activity is not interfering with how you relate to the rest of the experience you are having. My experience of this is that in the absence of identification there is less thought. Seems the explanation would be that the structure that formed (we could say, for the sake of argument, in the brain), was both the subject of and the source of alot of thought that can be ultimately seen as repetitive, negative and useless. |
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 13:38:03 GMT -5
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Post by runstill on May 8, 2014 15:38:03 GMT -5
Pathological, logical, and psychological thinking is all one movement or energy, that movement/energy can be notice pushing the content in front of it, that movement/energy can disappear and you with it ..... what's left is what is real...... |
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Post by zendancer on May 8, 2014 16:34:28 GMT -5
From my POV, and I think from Ramana's POV, a still mind is a silent mind. The body functions intelligently without a personal narrative. Seeing and responding to whatever is happening is a seamless process that does not require mental verbalization.
FWIW, I do not regularly go through the day in total mental silence, but the body can, sometimes just for fun, totally stop thinking and yet continue to perform intelligently. Self-referential thinking sometimes occurs, but not in the same way as it did prior to seeing through the illusion of "the little guy in the head pulling levers"-ha ha.
Gary Weber claims that his personal narrative and sense of selfhood ended completely on a particular day while he was doing a yoga exercise. His mind simply went silent. Something similar, though perhaps not as extreme, happened in the case of this body. We both pursued various meditative practices for a long time, and the same sort of thing seems to have happened to both of us. It's no big deal, but that sort of thing seems to be more common for people who do lots of ATA or other similar attention-shifting activities.
Weber speculates that meditative practices (ATA, inquiry, yoga, repetitive physical practices such as tai chi done with awareness, etc, change the way the brain functions via neuroplasticity, and I suspect that he is correct. By repeatedly shifting attention away from self-referential thinking, the neural pathway associated with the sense of selfhood either collapses or is in some way significantly or permanently bypassed.
The body/mind is intelligent, and it can reason without verbalized thoughts, so when Top is referring to problem-solving, this kind of processing apparently can go on without the usual reflexive internal dialogue. Weber writes about going to business meetings with a totally silent mind, and without any planning, yet he interacted with people intelligently and offered solutions to problems that he thought were better than anything he could have thought up from his prior self-referential perspective.
Leonard Jacobsen has written somewhere, "People cannot imagine how little I think. I think when it is necessary, and when it isn't necessary, I don't think." IOW, a still mind is much stiller than most people imagine.
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 17:07:04 GMT -5
From my POV, and I think from Ramana's POV, a still mind is a silent mind. The body functions intelligently without a personal narrative. Seeing and responding to whatever is happening is a seamless process that does not require mental verbalization. FWIW, I do not regularly go through the day in total mental silence, but the body can, sometimes just for fun, totally stop thinking and yet continue to perform intelligently. Self-referential thinking sometimes occurs, but not in the same way as it did prior to seeing through the illusion of "the little guy in the head pulling levers"-ha ha. Gary Weber claims that his personal narrative and sense of selfhood ended completely on a particular day while he was doing a yoga exercise. His mind simply went silent. Something similar, though perhaps not as extreme, happened in the case of this body. We both pursued various meditative practices for a long time, and the same sort of thing seems to have happened to both of us. It's no big deal, but that sort of thing seems to be more common for people who do lots of ATA or other similar attention-shifting activities. Weber speculates that meditative practices (ATA, inquiry, yoga, repetitive physical practices such as tai chi done with awareness, etc, change the way the brain functions via neuroplasticity, and I suspect that he is correct. By repeatedly shifting attention away from self-referential thinking, the neural pathway associated with the sense of selfhood either collapses or is in some way significantly or permanently bypassed. The body/mind is intelligent, and it can reason without verbalized thoughts, so when Top is referring to problem-solving, this kind of processing apparently can go on without the usual reflexive internal dialogue. Weber writes about going to business meetings with a totally silent mind, and without any planning, yet he interacted with people intelligently and offered solutions to problems that he thought were better than anything he could have thought up from his prior self-referential perspective. Leonard Jacobsen has written somewhere, "People cannot imagine how little I think. I think when it is necessary, and when it isn't necessary, I don't think." IOW, a still mind is much stiller than most people imagine. Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. |
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 17:39:18 GMT -5
From my POV, and I think from Ramana's POV, a still mind is a silent mind. The body functions intelligently without a personal narrative. Seeing and responding to whatever is happening is a seamless process that does not require mental verbalization. FWIW, I do not regularly go through the day in total mental silence, but the body can, sometimes just for fun, totally stop thinking and yet continue to perform intelligently. Self-referential thinking sometimes occurs, but not in the same way as it did prior to seeing through the illusion of "the little guy in the head pulling levers"-ha ha. Gary Weber claims that his personal narrative and sense of selfhood ended completely on a particular day while he was doing a yoga exercise. His mind simply went silent. Something similar, though perhaps not as extreme, happened in the case of this body. We both pursued various meditative practices for a long time, and the same sort of thing seems to have happened to both of us. It's no big deal, but that sort of thing seems to be more common for people who do lots of ATA or other similar attention-shifting activities. Weber speculates that meditative practices (ATA, inquiry, yoga, repetitive physical practices such as tai chi done with awareness, etc, change the way the brain functions via neuroplasticity, and I suspect that he is correct. By repeatedly shifting attention away from self-referential thinking, the neural pathway associated with the sense of selfhood either collapses or is in some way significantly or permanently bypassed. The body/mind is intelligent, and it can reason without verbalized thoughts, so when Top is referring to problem-solving, this kind of processing apparently can go on without the usual reflexive internal dialogue. Weber writes about going to business meetings with a totally silent mind, and without any planning, yet he interacted with people intelligently and offered solutions to problems that he thought were better than anything he could have thought up from his prior self-referential perspective. Leonard Jacobsen has written somewhere, "People cannot imagine how little I think. I think when it is necessary, and when it isn't necessary, I don't think." IOW, a still mind is much stiller than most people imagine. Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. You're trying to walk backwards through a gateless gate. |
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 17:50:16 GMT -5
I get what you're saying here. And I can relate. In some ways I see ATA-MT as an attempt to disidentify in the way you are describing. Attention is put elsewhere while thinking may continue (but loses momentum without attention to it). ZD often mentions that he goes through the day with nary a thought, though. 'Still mind' seems to imply that there is very little mind movement. And if thinking isn't mind movement, what is it? I think what you are talking about may be an enlightened perspective with respect to thinking, but I'm not sure it's still mind. And I'm not saying that "still mind" is necessarily a worthy goal -- but I have no authority myself to make such a claim. I've moved our discussion here to get a broader audience of people on this subject. Maybe ZD will weigh in as well. I think we're talking about thought on two different levels. There is the surface thoughts, which I experience as an auditory voice talking. These are more like an announcer giving a play by play. Suppose you're folding some TP to wipe your arse with and the fold goes hay-wire. The commentator can be heard uttering the thought "No, that's not going to work" or any of its variants. The other level of thought is non-vocalized and independent from the commentator. This deeper level of thought recognizes that the hay-wire fold occurred and moves to take corrective action. This wordless movement to respond, I would still call thought. There are two parts. (1) the recognition of the situation (mental activity) (2) movement to respond appropriately (also mental activity). The decision of how to respond stems from the personal conditioning of the body-mind. We have a limited capability to respond, so when we perceive the need to address multiple situations, we have to have a way of dissipating the innate desire to respond. The commentator actually plays a role in the release of the impulse to respond. If we are engaged in situation A and do not want to disengages to address situation B, the commentator boots up and processes the impulse towards B as a flurry of surface level thoughts. The impulse to respond is diffused instead of generating action. "I need to get eggs on my way home after work." I see the whole thing as a single wave of thought. We're the surfer sitting in the water as waves of impulse arise to pass (through) us. The surfer (some aspect of the mind) has to decide, do I ride this new wave and generate action or do I let the wave pass to catch a later wave? (or stay on the wave I'm already riding? [insert ideas about relativity and inertial frames of reference to reconcile the breach in the analogy]) The "choice" to not ride the wave into action means the wave passes in front of you visibly. That is what the commentator does, it allows the wave of impulse to pass through you without taking action and it generates perception of the wave passing (the commentary). Without the commentary to release the tension to take action, that tension will grow and interfere with the original action being taken. For ZD, I suspect that there are very few competing impulses to act. If they arise, there is not much emotional energy behind them that needs to be diffused, the decision between which impulse to act on is easy, and the inacted impulses are dissipated with relatively little noise from the commentator. I believe this model is a good description, allowing for variance of many factors to cover the range of experiences. Multiple competing impulses with high amounts of emotional energy overloading the system to create inaction due to conflicting action and the commentator noisily pregnant doges and moans about all the waves that can't be ridden. vs. One impulse to act on at a time (perhaps with significant gaps between them), low energy invested in the impulse, and a mostly silent commentator. ---------------------- A treatment of Thought that is purely focused on the products of the commentator is not complete, and allows for a purely negative view of the existence of the commentator and its products. I think the commentator has a function in releasing tension. The whole system is susceptible to dysfunction, which results in noisy and pathological commentary (internal dialogue). We typically diagnose systemic problems based on the quality of the commentary. I like that you have become aware of that bolded bit....when I talk about and recommend 'not knowing' what I am really recommending is 'still mind' with no objective to learn or gain anything from 'still mind'....basically, saying to 'not know' is short hand for saying be still without seeking anything from it. Many times when I have spoken about 'not knowing', and about what that looks like...not knowing means that you don't try to figure stuff out and engage in that whole mental narrative, but it also means that you don't verbally identify define and name stuff, but at its most subtle level, it means that you do not move into a very subtle kind of non-verbal recognition of anything....or said a different way, there is a kind of very subtle mental movement associated with 'familiarity'...once you have moved into a kind of familiarity or re-cognition, a cascade of knowing and doing follows...so when doing 'not knowing' as a kind of practice, be very alert to this simple kind of very subtle familiarity or re-cognition that arises, and just don't do it, be still instead ;-) If you can let this gap open, a gap in the constant stream of re-cognition or subtle familiarity, then it is MUCH easier to move consciously, or be still, instead of the mind just going on its merry way propelled by habitual velocity. It is all mind movement as you say though, just more or less subtle variations. |
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 17:52:11 GMT -5
Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. You're trying to walk backwards through a gateless gate. Pointing out conventional thinking in someone is walking backwards through a gate-less gate? How so? |
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2014 19:37:41 GMT -5
'Thoughts about thought' helps us gain some impression about our lives whilst we are not~working for the $,
just in case another person perceives us as more intelligent than themselves and ask for our rendition about life,
as they haven't yet made up their mind which they intend to believe.
Creating a philosophy is ok by me.
What I want to point out here for those that choose to think (like myself)
is that there is a slim gap between thoughts as well as the topics of thought
which alludes to the still mind.
Given time, and experimentation this gap widens somewhat
giving the impression that the mind no longer exist
but all mental records remain in the ethers about this globe
for researchers and time travellors who have an interest in how mankinds evolution.
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Post by tzujanli on May 9, 2014 5:31:33 GMT -5
From my POV, and I think from Ramana's POV, a still mind is a silent mind. The body functions intelligently without a personal narrative. Seeing and responding to whatever is happening is a seamless process that does not require mental verbalization. FWIW, I do not regularly go through the day in total mental silence, but the body can, sometimes just for fun, totally stop thinking and yet continue to perform intelligently. Self-referential thinking sometimes occurs, but not in the same way as it did prior to seeing through the illusion of "the little guy in the head pulling levers"-ha ha. Gary Weber claims that his personal narrative and sense of selfhood ended completely on a particular day while he was doing a yoga exercise. His mind simply went silent. Something similar, though perhaps not as extreme, happened in the case of this body. We both pursued various meditative practices for a long time, and the same sort of thing seems to have happened to both of us. It's no big deal, but that sort of thing seems to be more common for people who do lots of ATA or other similar attention-shifting activities. Weber speculates that meditative practices (ATA, inquiry, yoga, repetitive physical practices such as tai chi done with awareness, etc, change the way the brain functions via neuroplasticity, and I suspect that he is correct. By repeatedly shifting attention away from self-referential thinking, the neural pathway associated with the sense of selfhood either collapses or is in some way significantly or permanently bypassed. The body/mind is intelligent, and it can reason without verbalized thoughts, so when Top is referring to problem-solving, this kind of processing apparently can go on without the usual reflexive internal dialogue. Weber writes about going to business meetings with a totally silent mind, and without any planning, yet he interacted with people intelligently and offered solutions to problems that he thought were better than anything he could have thought up from his prior self-referential perspective. Leonard Jacobsen has written somewhere, "People cannot imagine how little I think. I think when it is necessary, and when it isn't necessary, I don't think." IOW, a still mind is much stiller than most people imagine. Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. People can and some people do choose if and when to actively conjure thoughts, much of misunderstanding about such matters is related to the experiencer assuming that others have the same mindscapes that the experiencer has.. Without a thinker there is no thought, in the same way that without a vehicle there is no driver.. if the 'thinker/thought' seems like a problem, ask yourself why, there is no avoiding the actuality of that relationship, and.. the intention to separate the thinker from the thought is like trying to separate the wet from water, it creates an irreconcilable illusion/conflict as can be observed in this thread.. allow it to be what it is, and the conflict vanishes.. There is a significant amount of thinking about thoughts here at ST, a lot of false certainty.. i understand Leonard Jacobsen's description, it is consistent with my experience.. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 9, 2014 7:47:29 GMT -5
Most of thought consists of recordings, looped tapes that just keep repeating. Of course there is enough variation to make one think there is a real self behind the thought, most people believe that THEY ARE this thinking self that spits out words. For most of what we do in life there is an existing tape-of-words which the unconscious mechanism can pull down and apply to the situation at hand. When there isn't a situation, the mind just wanders in la-la land, daydreams, jumping from one tape-loop to another. .............I'd say the first step is just to not-believe that thoughts are self. Some day you realize that awareness is self (in a manner of speaking, to the extent there is a self...).......
I read quote the other day...forget who by. It said, Intelligence shows up when you don't know what to do. There is an excellent Dogen quote I'll try to find also.....to study the self is to forget the self..... IOW, you come to find that the self you think you are (the thinking self that spouts out words) isn't who you are.......
sdp
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Post by topology on May 9, 2014 8:36:59 GMT -5
Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. , much of misunderstanding about such matters is related to the experiencer assuming that others have the same mindscapes that the experiencer has.. Without a thinker there is no thought, in the same way that without a vehicle there is no driver.. if the 'thinker/thought' seems like a problem, ask yourself why, there is no avoiding the actuality of that relationship, and.. the intention to separate the thinker from the thought is like trying to separate the wet from water, it creates an irreconcilable illusion/conflict as can be observed in this thread.. allow it to be what it is, and the conflict vanishes.. There is a significant amount of thinking about thoughts here at ST, a lot of false certainty.. i understand Leonard Jacobsen's description, it is consistent with my experience.. With the proper structure in the analogy, we can see that the thinker's existence depends on the existence of thought. Trees grow, but there is no grower of trees. Water flows but there is no flow-er of water. Wind blows, but there is no blower of the wind. The heart pumps, but there is no pumper of the heart. Discrete doers are a product of our mind trying to reason and cope with the perceived world. The mind thinks, but there is no thinker behind the mind. |
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Post by zendancer on May 9, 2014 10:25:06 GMT -5
Top wrote, "Trees grow, but there is no grower of trees. Water flows but there is no flow-er of water. Wind blows, but there is no blower of the wind. The heart pumps, but there is no pumper of the heart. Discrete doers are a product of our mind trying to reason and cope with the perceived world. The mind thinks, but there is no thinker behind the mind."
I would say that the grower of trees, the flow-er of water, the blower of wind, the pumper of blood, and the thinker of thoughts is the aware, unified, and intelligent cosmos. Call it "God" or "what is" or "the ground of all being." THAT is the only real do-er, but when it manifests as human beings, it usually imagines that it is a separate entity interacting with an external world. It fails to see that it is BOTH the entire cosmos AS WELL AS a particular human being through which the cosmos is momentarily manifesting.
It is pretty easy to do thought experiments that reveal that all boundaries are abstract, artificial, and illusory, but such experiments have no power to make us feel the unity, or boundarylessness, of "what is." There has to be significant freedom from the mind before it is possible to feel that we are flowing like water through the river of life. No inside, no outside, no cognition, no impulse, no intention, no motive, no purpose, and no knowingness need arise in the emptiness of whatever is happening. Seeing, being, and acting are one flowingness in the same way that trees grow, water flows, and the heart pumps blood.
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