[Special Note:   Happy New Year everyone!  Though we need to go way beyond “happy” into deep perception, compassion, and environmental awareness (that matters).]

The passion of awareness — real awareness, not all of that phony stuff — perceives beyond the known.  The known consists of preconceptions, traditions, and limited patterns of the past.  Profound awareness goes beyond all those things.  It goes beyond the mundane and commonplace.  It is not enmeshed in repetitive, rather mechanized habits that dull the mind and expand sorrow.  (Most people are caught in sorrow and perpetually try to run from it.  Interestingly, they always run from sorrow in a particular direction, and that direction is always limited; then, sorrow remains.)  Awareness is a motiveless inquiry without superficial direction or desire.  Any inquiry with direction is calculated and limited.

Many people have preconceptions about the way things are; with (and “as”) those preconceptions, they look.  What they see, then, will inevitably be limited, predetermined, and partial.  To perceive without conclusions is real humility, real innocence in action (beyond mere reaction).  The constant labeling of things, mentally, is a repetition of memory and the known (which is the past recurring).  All thoughts are symbols that are both fragmentary and limited.  Limitation can never see the whole… but so many cling to their limited preconceptions and fragmentary patterns of thought/thinking… just as they were taught to.  Many remain circumscribed within the limits that were given to them as their foundation.

Recently one saw a science program about artificial intelligence.  In the near future, there will nanorobots (nanobots) — at sizes smaller than the cellular level size — that will enter the brain and connect with the neural pathways.  People then will be composed of minds that are part computer… part machine.  Ray Kurzweil, who works for Google, and other computer experts/entrepreneurs claim it can begin happening very soon; the year 2029 has been pinpointed as a date for when it can really (more fully) take place.  All kinds of beneficial things are allegedly supposed to happen because of this.  However, one questions whether is it taking us to a better place.  Human minds are heavily conditioned and mechanical enough; implanting the brain with machines will only make them more robot-like… more prone toward programming by the powers that be.  Some scientific reports maintain that 50% of the earth’s wildlife has been killed off by humans in the last 40 years.  Immersing ourselves in virtual worlds, which is what computer implants will likely do to us to a significant extent, will not help wake us up to what is alive and precious in the real world.   Additionally, people wishing harm to others will — more easily — access ways to make deadly viruses and nocuous substances.   We need to intelligently put a leash on technology; however, that is unlikely to happen unless more of us wake up; the leash, so far, is on us.  

Awareness, real awareness, is action… not merely secondary reaction.  Very many of us habitually react all day long (like robotic, mechanized, programmed instruments); and they want to implant more mechanicalness, more man-made concoctions into our (already programmed) brains!  

It is only the uncontaminated, pristine, innocent mind that can be entered by the whole, the timeless.  That which is limited, fragmented, sequential, partial, and prejudicial, is not open or unbounded enough to be visited by that miraculous, impersonal intelligence.  

Bee Flight (1) Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2017

Bee Flight (2) Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2017