mixed message

[stardustpilgrim]

Sept 8, 2016 9:30:49 GMT -5 @agraves said:

Spiritual teacher is stable. A life lived through perceptions
needs a stable presence. This stable presence is you
and is not you. The memory of the stable is competing
with the land of duality. All teachings once taught are
able, from that point on, to increase. Though a spiritual
thought also increases, we must keep in my mind that
without new ways of thinking, the worldly thoughts
will also continue to increase. Clearly the mind can't
serve two such masters at the same time. Jumping back
and forth between a worldly goal and a selfless goal
can get extremely frustrating. We are routinely sending
mixed messages to our thinking mechanisms.

The stable part of all living things is already a part of
our minds. I believe all spiritual work (all teaching work)
is memory work. A person does not remember stablity
by relying on the past. I believe he remembers his
spiritual teachers through regular associations.

Nice post, I will tweak it a little. I think it was Plato who said all (new) knowledge is remembering (not going into the why of that). But the use of the word memory, in this context, would be more related to Plato's use than our ordinary use of the word. The ordinary use of the word merely means a recollection of a past occurrence, a sort of recording, a replay. Used in this sense, memory does not help lead to new thinking.

But you are speaking in Plato's sense of the word memory. And yes, there is a struggle between the two senses of the word. "This stable presence is you and is not you". The not-you sense is what many call the false (sense of) self ("A person does not remember stability by relying on the past"). The is-you is the true self (essence). In my tradition this state of ~presense~ is called self-remembering. This would be related to Plato's sense of the word. And without making a direct crossover (because there is not a direct crossover, for many reasons) self-remembering could be called Self-remembering.