• Illusion of ‘I’

    September 19, 2015

    I have trouble deciding to work on self and I find that I often cannot remember to work.

    You are describing the functioning of the head brain. You assume that thinking, the little voice in your head, is you…who you are…and that it is the thinker that actually remembers and decides to do things because thinking appears to precede the doing. This is a false assumption.

    Almost everything we decide to do in our daily life begins in the body, with sensations and impulses to move and speak. Once these impulses are underway, the thinker comes along to take credit for deciding the actions that are already proceeding. It will take many years of observing self to see this clearly. Impartial attention can know this immediately but your early efforts to observe will likely use head brain attention, which is attention intermediated and interpreted by thought. Head brain attention is too slow and limited to enter real time; it lags behind the occurrences of ordinary reality, so much so that it can falsely think it is the one who decides.

    If you want to remember to work, you must be able to plant the impulse to do so in the body. For example, impartially observing the momentum of sleep in your machine for many years, certain gestures become clear indicators of mechanical sleep functioning. When observed, these gestures spontaneously provoke the immediate recognition of sleep and activate the impulse to invoke attention and presence. Related thinking may then arise. This process can be described as making ‘conscious habits’. By nature, habits are the foundation of sleeping behaviour but they can be made otherwise.

    If the thinking ‘I’ is an illusion, who am I?

    A good question. In the sleep state, no one is home. There are various rotating identities…haphazard assemblages of self-images, loops of self-talk, personal history and past conditioning…which take their turn on the stage. When an identity is operational, it provides a semblance of predictable behaviour and thinking until it is displaced by another. Observing self makes clear that there are no real decisions in the sleep state because there is no one there to make them. Everything is already programmed.

    The illusion of ‘I’ is one of the most difficult to break. Surely I can be taken seriously as someone who thinks and decides. Seeing through this illusion may initially be somewhat frightening but it opens the possibility of knowing another ‘I’, the ‘I’ of presence, which is conscious and unboundaried.

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  • Perception

    September 5, 2015

    Perception

    With physical eyes, I see into the physical world. With the mind’s eye, I see into the world of the mind, which has its own forms and textures as surely as the physical world. With the eye of the heart, I resonate with the play of feeling, formless yet as distinct as light and shadow on a summer’s day. All of these are the objects of perception.

    Is perception based in the brain and nervous system, the cumulative result of experience which has patterned a genetically constructed mechanism evolving over time? And is the ‘I’ of this experiencing merely the reflexive thinker, the afterthought of a psychological entity who reacts to incoming data based on conditioning and claims the reactions as itself?

    Or, are we perceiving beings, whose essence is in the knowing, before the processing of the brain and the afterthoughts of the thinker?

    The paramecium, a single cell creature, has no brain or nervous system. It senses food and when to flee. Is this chemical programming evolved over millions of years or a quality of knowing? In sensing, is it all a matter of structure performing its tasks mechanically or is there knowing behind the sensing, a reader of the data, a perceiver of experience, looking into life?

    Does it not seem that the universe is intelligent, that it is a knowing entity? Do you sometimes have the sense that the universe is looking back at you, in the eyes of another, a human, an animal, an insect? Is knowing a shared phenomenon?

    It seems to me that the world is a play of perception, of what I see and do not see. The seeing comes first, before what is seen. Sometimes I have the sense that the universe sees through my eyes.

    As Rumi says, “Looking is a trace of what you are looking for”.

    If you can look and simultaneously know (not think) you are looking, you have entered into an ‘a priori’ state of being.

    The problem is that perception is obscured by the psychology of the perceiver.

    Yes. The constructed self…that dearly held pastiche of identifications, undigested experience and conditioned reactions to stimuli…interferes with perception, expending its resources interpreting the little that is perceived and limiting the range of what can be perceived. The aim of observing is to see and unravel the constructed self. Meditation provides an opportunity to see the mechanisms of interference, the stage manager as one might call it, and experience moments of bare attention.

    What is the difference between perception and attention?

    When perception is voluntarized, it is attention. Attention is perception but also the qualities of holding, connecting and choosing, all of which are aspects of will. So, attention is perception and will together. Of course, there is also automatic attention but this is another matter for another night. Every impulse has will but not every impulse is conscious of itself and its source.

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