Very many of us regard humans as something separate from animals. We are, in actuality, a strange kind of animal.
(Please watch the attached short video.) 😉
Short Video entitled “Animals Acting Like Humans”…
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Monthly Archives of: July 2023
Awareness without lackluster thought/thinking…
There can be a holistic awareness without significant thought/thinking taking place, (in which the intelligent mind often sees without thinking and cognition interfering). There can be, for example, simple awareness of creatures upon flowers and of leaves lightly dancing in the breeze. However, thought/thinking is then not merely labeling, analyzing, comparing, or projecting what science has taught concerning these things. Then the mind may be of a sweet emptiness that is beyond the second-hand constructs of man. That emptiness (of mind) may be a blissful, effortless negation of inherited mental fabrications. Such mental nullification may be the highest positive, for neither is it handed down, replayed as monotonous imitation, conjured up via effort, nor dully rehashed. And it can deeply exist (too) beyond the ordinary, habitual recognition of things. It is always refreshingly new and beyond dead blueprint-like (mental) structuring. (Too many of us take words to be the equivalent of reality; they are not.) And, coincidentally, real love is always explosive, pristine, and not copied or imitated. The ordinary “once-lers” of the world are, unfortunately, not of it.
Lo Zu and Nothingness… (yet another Lo Zu tale)
The elderly, gray-haired Lo Zu was sitting — as he often tended to do — on a large boulder in nature… his wooden meandering cane leaning against him. Some youth saw him from a distance and they curiously journeyed over to where he was sitting. Then they asked him what he was doing. Lo Zu replied… “Doing nothing… being nowhere and existing as nothingness.” One of the youth queried, “What do you mean by ‘existing as nothingness?'”
After a long, meditative pause, Lo Zu replied, “When the ego is transcended, the mind is often mysteriously beyond its contents; then there is a beautiful nothingness that is blissfully beyond ordinary experience, sensation, space, and time; that emptiness is beyond the ‘known.’ But most people are afraid of being beyond the known. They are afraid of having their cup empty. Each one desperately wants their cup to be filled (with something). Their cups are full of stale theories, secondhand ideas, flat beliefs, antiquated traditions, divisive religions, corrosive fears, greedy desires, banal suppositions, learned superstitions, limited so-called organized systems, dead images, and shallow words from so-called leaders. But it may be that their fullness is the real poverty; it may be that real richness is in transcending the psychological self (that is an illusory troublemaker). Profound love is beyond the dilation of self.”
You can Experience Things but You can’t Experience Wholeness
from the song “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes:
Lost in their eyes as you hurry by
Counting the broken ties they decide
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Experiencing things, for most people, involves recognition and thought/thinking. Experiencing things, for most people most of the time, deals with experiences that seem to be separate from the “experiencer.” But the “experiencer” is really not something apart from the experience (though he or she seems to be separate). Without the experience, there is no “experiencer.” Most tend to look with full-blown separation and distance.
When people look at the stars, they are observing something that happened millions of years ago (which, of course, is due to the fact that it took the stars’ light millions of years to get to the Earth). So, essentially, they are looking at the past. And even when one sees things that are physically very close, one is still observing the past. Experiencing is, for survival purposes, often very useful; it often is a necessity for survival. However, merely depending on experiencing — and existing as experiencing — may not be very prudent. Merely remaining in that limited realm may be remaining in (and “as”) the past. Many cling to the apron strings of experience… and they are afraid to venture beyond that limited and separative realm. It is wise to often be experiencing things and it is wise to be beyond experiencing things. Immense wholeness is beyond experiencing (and all of the traditional separation, discrimination, psychological distance, isolation, and circumscription that goes with it).
Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog 