July
18, 2001.
(The following is not an attempt
to force a concocted theory to fit facts, but is a report on things that
occur in you, and which are available for your own inspection & profit.)
______________________
You consist of two things: your
disposition, (how you are feeling),
and your thoughts, (what is
constituting your consciousness);
disposition drives the car;
thoughts are along for the ride,
(and to comment thereon).
Consciousness is like a movie
screen,
and thoughts, individual frames
on a film loop,
not a finished movie with a
beginning & end,
but an endlessly running loop.
Each thought (frame-in-the-loop),
exists but for a fraction of a second,
and may be related to the one
that went before it,
or it may dramatically jump
to an entirely new scene.
Each man’s neural film loop contains
many individual thought-frames,
but there will be several Major
Themes around which
related groups of thoughts gather.
You may have a Major Theme of
you as: Rock Star;
Famous Athlete: Supreme Programmer,
any of which began life as a
single thought-frame.
The first time you saw a photograph
of Musician X backstage
after a blow-out gig;
drink in one hand; guitar in
the other,
and drowning in a sexy sea of
groupies,
The Thought that established
this Major Theme in you
instantly popped into your consciousness:
“That’s me!” it said:
“That’s what I want to be.”
Such a Major Theme-thought quickly
picks up peripheral,
supporting thoughts that naturally
& automatically flow from the
major one, so that whenever
the Major Theme of you as, Rock Star
comes on the screen of your
consciousness,
it is surrounded by a host of
momentarily existing related thoughts.
Scrutiny will show that your
constantly running thoughts (daydreams)
return again & again to
several Major Themes held in your head,
with one being of dominant interest,
yet the film loop of thought
never stops, and thus your consciousness
is continually focused on first
one thing for a moment,
then another for second, then
before you know it -- off to a third.
This is an ordinary man’s sane
state of mind;
indeed, any great variance there from will result in behavior deemed
a public danger.
If, instead of being a Rock
Star, a man has a thought of himself
standing backstage with Musician
X, as his closest friend;
arm around his shoulder, sharing
the good times,
but without the normal peripheral
thoughts;
the man is single mindedly fixated
on this thought,
and begins trying to actually
experience it at any cost:
he becomes a stalker of Musician
X;
his consciousness in this matter
is completely filled with just the single picture of him with his hero,
with none of the normal surrounding thoughts that would present the possible
consequences of him actively pursuing his fixation.
This is the reality behind the
so-called, criminal, anti-social mind;
a man, let us say, with the
thought: “I want money,”
and who will unhesitatingly
engage in forbidden acts of robbery, having no thoughts related to the
potential aftermath of his actions.
The French have a term for it,
idée fixe, and throughout all societies
it is a condition much &
rightly feared;
it is not proper that a human
should have any one thought that is
so powerful in his life that
it stands alone & fixed
with no others to temper it.
Men will say approvingly that
it takes, single-minded-devotion
to succeed in any endeavor,
but an ordinary man’s central
picture/thought of himself
as a success in his Major Theme
is always surrounded-by,
influenced-by, tempered-by many
smaller
thought-frames in the film loop
so that the ultimate goal does
not become a dangerous fanaticism.
Man’s routine consciousness consists
of an endless running film loop
consisting of individual frames,
which are individual thoughts,
but it runs so fast and seamlessly,
(just like an actual movie),
that you accept the activity
in your head as being a fixed,
consistent representation of
who you are, and what you want,
(remember this is thought, not
your disposition,
which does what it is programmed
to do regardless of the former).
This state of mental affairs
is what man runs the world with,
and that’s that --
for ordinary men;
now; to the few.
Those for whom this Daily News
is writ
are distinctly dissatisfied
with this state that is natural to man,
and since they only have the
state itself to speak for them,
they have great difficulty in
expressing the exact nature of
their dissatisfaction
-- all they know is that they are dissatisfied.
Such men have attempted to describe
it allegorically by saying they feel like they are, living-in-a-dream,
from which they want to awaken;
or that they are being, held-captive-in-an-unlit-cave,
from which they
wish to escape,
all being the brain’s verbal
representations of
something physically occurring
in their brain,
and from today’s expedient perspective
it is this:
wanting to awaken, achieve enlightenment,
is a man’s too common awareness
of the endless film loop,
and his desire that it either
stop -- or else settle on one frame.
Pursuing the first possibility
is: meditating, zazen,
trying to still the mind:
going for the second is attempting
to become: A Sufi, A Yogi,
A Cabalist, a --
something –
a something say, like a Sufi,
which is nothing but a thought,
and for that one thought to
permanently replace the
incessantly changing film loop
of thoughts.
You can try either, but you will
fail to see & engage the situation
from the most direct position.
If you are one of the few, to-this-thing-born,
you can ask yourself: “Would
I settle for being able to stop thought?
And, alternatively: would I
settle for just having one permanent, awakened, enlightened thought that
would replace all the others?”
and your answer would be, yes,
and yet that is not where this
leads.
The, impossible-to-accurately-define-beforehand
goal of the few
turns out not to be a stopping
of thought,
nor a replacement of all your
little, passing thoughts with
one great permanent one,
but is the screen of your consciousness
being able to
shrug off the frames.
If consciousness were a box,
normally filled-with, and consisting-of
-- thoughts,
then the condition at the end
of the rainbow is that the sides of the box
which constitute your consciousness
are still, (as ‘twill always be),
made up of thoughts,
but now the front & rear
sides of the box are open,
and you can see clear through
it.
Thoughts are still its sides,
but your box of consciousness
is now empty & open.
(The opening mention of the potential
practical benefits herein
depends on your, reverse-engineering.
…..and always, it is thus.)
J
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