Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog

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Whatever you do, don’t look at life and the world beyond the systems, patterns, and ways in which you were taught.  If you look outside of the systems, patterns, and ways — which were poured into you, forming your consciousness — you may be a danger to all that is false, fragmentary, and distorted.  Keep looking at things just as you were programmed to.  Don’t question anything.  Be sure to accept (and cling to) everything that they poured into you.  

Continue to observe things from behind a self-made psychological wall supporting separation and isolation.  Continue to mindlessly escape into endless forms of entertainment, travel, drugs, and amusement.  Continue to have opinions based on how you were raised and taught.  Worship the dollar.  Grow out of that youthful, magical wonderment concerning life and turn into a fusty adult who sees little of life’s newness and magical beauty.  Get dreadfully bored while seeing and thinking the same old patterns. Think only of yourself and have no feelings for others.  Continue to worship the dollar.  Never stop endlessly chattering with mental symbols, patterns, and words. Look at everything through a maladjusted psychological screen (or curtain) of separation and division.  Be very afraid of sweet and refreshing mental silence.  Seldom look at (or visit) nature.  Do not fundamentally change on the inside, but make your body look very unusual and different on the outside.  Continue to worship the dollar. Go through existence being narrow-minded, selfish, and opinionated.  Blindly cling to a lot of manmade patterns that were concocted in the distant past, and never look at reality without old, dusty, iron-clad beliefs.  Keep your lawn looking perfect, but remain disorderly and a mess inwardly.  

Thinking, being of abstraction, is sequential in nature; therefore, it is of time; it is time. It is psychological time that creates and manifests as fear. In time, one may be despised by others; in time (i.e., in the future), one may be laughed at; in time, one may become senile; in time, one may get psychologically hurt by another. So, often, thought and its shadow (i.e., concomitant fear) manifest in (and “as”) time. And remaining in (and “as”) conditioned, sequential abstraction… is a form of suffering. Such suffering is not blissful living.

Thought is often a very necessary tool. However, all too often, we go on thinking (when thought is not necessary). This remaining in (and “as”) thought/thinking, is remaining in what is merely conditioned, merely sequential, merely symbolic, and what is merely time-bound. To psychologically die, at times, to the repetition of abstract thinking, is to go beyond fear, secondhandedness, fragmentation, symbolism, and separation. It may be that the separation between the thinker and the thought is, in itself, another conditioned, sequential misstep… another learned fabrication that isn’t true. It may be that thought creates (and is) the thinker, not the other way around. And we are afraid to have thinking stop (because we are afraid of being nothing). But this “nothing,” that we are afraid of, is a projection of thought/thinking that is erroneous and illusory. To often go beyond the limitation of abstract, fragmentary, and sequential thinking — and all thought is fragmentary, sequential, and time-bound — may be (if it is actually done) rather blissful and beyond distortion, fear, and suffering.

I’ve included the following quote by Einstein in previous posts, and i’m including it here again.

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.” — Albert Einstein

The human brain goes through a huge amount of associative mental connections. Most people associate the “I,” the “me,” the “self” with power to control, with domination over “other” thoughts, and with freedom to act independently. However, the “I” — just like the other concepts of central authority — is just a protrusion of thought/thinking. In all actuality, there is no true central “controller” situated in the brain. Unfortunately, far too many people treat this thing as if it has a separate, substantive existence (apart from others). It may be that many millions deceive themselves each and every day. Transcending this limited, primitive, crude form of thinking opens the way toward deep compassion and holistic understanding. Our age-old associative ties to a central, independent “controller” (apart from the world) may be very erroneous.

Most of us are almost constantly churning — mentally — with various images, words, and patterns within our minds. (The words are often verbal in essence and usually occur as simulations of what one’s own physical voice sounds like.) Even when we listen to others, or observe others, what we perceive largely consists of patterns recognized (i.e., re-cognized) by mental patterns which already exist in (and “as”) the mind. We often take these patterns — these protrusions of thought/thinking — to be equivalent to pure reality. However, they are primarily just virtual representations that are fragmentary, symbolic, and of the past, since they are constituted of repetitive mental protrusions that reflect what was poured — piecemeal — into us by others. Even the “I” that each one seems to zealously harbor and worship consists of a protrusion of thought/thinking (that deceives the mind and often invites fragmentary, separative behavior).

A silent mind transcends this limitation by going beyond what is secondhand, virtual, and symbolic. Such a mind is not merely trapped in (and “as”) the representational. Such a mind is dynamic, alive, pristine, and beyond sequential, robotic imitation. Then, true care and compassion may manifest. Compassion does not emanate from what is fundamentally not alive.