Friday, October 2, 2015

the mind and consciousness


Investigating the mind, I ask myself “What is it that I really know first-hand about what I call ‘the mind’?” Everything that forms part of the appearance in the Self known commonly as ‘the world’ is identified by the mind with name and form. That means that the continuous stream of apparitions in my field of awareness is divided up and put into separate ‘boxes’, so to speak. Here is a keyboard, here is a laptop screen, here is the word ‘mind’ and here is another, distinct word ‘thought’. Are they really distinct? Is there mind without thought? Look to the thought ‘I’, we are told, and investigate its reality. I ascertain that every moment of my waking consciousness is connected to the sense of ‘I’. Never is there a conscious moment without the element of the ‘I’. I type. I form the next word to put into the document. I breathe. I hear the rooster. I perceive the thought-image of the rooster. I bring up that image from my past impressions that are stored in my brain. Is there any space in my waking awareness, my entire field of perception that is not absolutely linked to my sense of being an “I”, a center of perception, and individuated unit of consciousness? No. In every facet of my perception of the world there is ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’.

The mind is then a quality of consciousness that delineates, separates, defines and creates contours within the one homogeneous field of the Self or Big Mind and then misinterprets the signals coming through the sense organs using this selective filter. The mind is a filter that misinterprets the sensory input, which is an undifferentiated stream of electro-magnetically charged particles free of special characteristics. All is composed of continually fluctuating patterns of sound-vibration in its essence. These fluid patterns are frozen into single “movie-frames” and then this mind-filter creates the focus which creates separate images where there actually are none.

The mind then takes these separate images (which all have their root in the sense of the first ‘form’ – the ‘I’ thought-form) and uses them like building blocks to create a seemingly stable world of name and form which we then take to be the “objective reality” outside of ‘us’ that we interact with as the subject. Only our own form, the ‘I’, is the subject, all else are ‘objects’ outside of and separate from us. This is the mind-created world, conjured up by this filter, whose lens is the ‘I’ thought-form.
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