So many people consider mind movement to be only what I call Gross Mind Movement, or the word based thoughts that arise that define a phenomena and then references those phenomena to an imagined self.
But there are also the 'fine', or subtle movements of mind, like simple obesrving, and subtle familiarity/re-cognition.
So for the sake of conversation, we can identify 'Gross' mind movements, and 'Subtle' mind movements.Gross mind movements are things like internal verbal cognitions, naming, and defining, also self referential thoughts that link internal verbal cognition of phenomena to an imagined self, and finally emotions, that are the result of self referential thoughts.
Subtle mind movements are the simple sensory perceptions that we cognize without any movement into the Gross mind movements, and example of this kind of subtle mind movement is ATA-MT....which is really not minus ALL thought, because sensory perception itself is a kind of subtle thought or movement, rather, ATA-MT is really Atending the actual minus Gross Thought Movement....only deep or absolute Samadhi is trully ATA-MT because only absolute samadhi is without subtle movement as well as being absent gross mind movement.
However, Subtle Mind Movement (SMM) without Gross Mind Movement can appear to be mental stillness in the same way that a car moving at 10 miles per hour can appear to be still if you pass it in another car doing 80 miles per hour.
Subtle Mind Movements (SMM) still remain as long as there is cognition of a sensory environment...the sensory environment is itself a Subtle Mind Movement. Sensory perception often gives rise to another kind of SMM which includes a subtle movement into a kind of non-mentally-verbal familiarity/re-cognition, which can be 'paired back' with alertness and conciousness to simple, non-re-cognizing sensory perception without subtle familiarity, and without turning it into the more complex mind movement of an internal dialogue defining phenomena, and without moving in turn into the more complex mind movement of self referential thoughts that are referencing an imagined self juxtaposed against the now verbally define sensory phenomena.
SMM compounds in complexity into GMM...but only if one is not being concious of the process, and only if there is some desire causing the movement toward more complexity.
In my own experience,
desire seems to be the key in the initiation of Gross Mind Movements arising out of Subtle Mind Movements.
Awhile back, I realized that it was utterly impossible to truelly know anything as absolute truth or reality...the realization removed my desire for truth and knowing, and in the absence of that desire causing a movement of mind, most of my mind movement simply vanished....its frankly astounding how much of our, or at least my mind movement, was centered around the desire for knowledge and knowing...almost everything I did or thought was centered around an inate desire to 'know' or come to know. In the absence of that desire, the vast majority of mind movement just went away, stopped arising out of the stillness.
To backtrack a little bit, this morning, this thread intitiated a question: Why does GMM arise from the natural mental stillness that seems to pervade my general being these days?
So I did a little investigation, because, if the mind is still, why does it 'start' again? Then I had to look at for what reason there is mind movement arising from the stillness, what kind of mind movements are they and why do they arise?
A short investigation revealed that the only reason mind movement arises out of the stillness, is because of a desire, and the resulting intentions that was 'set' regarding the fulfillment of those desires before the mind became still.
Desire, which moves into intention or impulse, seems to initiate specific mind movements out of the stillness that support the fulfillment of the associated desires.
In a different iteration of this moment, which we can call an earlier phase of my life for easy conversation, my biggest and prevailing desire was to 'know' something from every experience.
When my desire to 'know' evaporated, the mind movements relative to this desire stopped arising, and for me, this turned out to be the cause of almost all my mind movement....I suspect it is also so with most but not all 'normal' people.
These days, my mind is mostly still of all GMM, except with regard to some remaining desires and intentions that don't seem to require much GMM to endeveor to fulfil.
I have a desire to have a stable financially secure home and living environment for my wife, and some security with regard to food and shelter, and to secure this in such a way that I can have lots of time spent being still, and still have my wife feel as though she has adequate companionship for her desires.
This desire, and a few others, turns into an intention to do certain tasks relating to these desires...these intentions give rise to mind movement arising out of the stillness when mind movement is needed to fullfil the existing desires.
The less desires there are, the less intentions there are, the less 'mental movement' there is.
So you can be still in two different ways, one requires effort, the other requires a letting go...through alert conciousness you can arrest mental movement for a time, but as long as there is desire, movement will return, because it is VERY difficult (but not impossible) to maintain constant alert vigilence that arrests mind movement.
The other option, is to let go of desires, without desires and the intention of action that arise from the desires, stillness is there waiting as the natural state....without desire, no effort is needed prevent mental movement from arising,
because desire is the cause of Gross Mind Movement.All GMM is the result of desire compounding into intention and/or impulse.
