The
perfect man uses his mind as a mirror, it grasps nothing, it receives
but does not keep. ~ Chuang Tzu.
~
~ ~ ~
The
idea of enlightenment is like the branch trying to become one with
the tree. ~
On
reflection, do you notice that when there’s a thought, a verbal
thought, it’s like a voice within? Except it’s not a voice. A
voice is sound vibrations. With a thought there’s no sound at all.
Nobody else hears any sound, and when you give full attention and
just listen, neither do you, so you can’t call it a voice. It’s
just the ghost of a voice pretending to be you.
So
if it’s not your true voice what is it? It’s just
conceptualizing grammatically. Totally redundant and needless. Like
looking into a mirror to see if you’re present. Framing what is
already self-aware into a pattern of language identified with as
yours, and seeming to define who you think you are.
Rene
Descartes was a self-confessed example of this when he declared, “I
think therefore i am”, which further compounded this hallucination.
Strictly speaking, it would have been slightly more appropriate if
he had witnessed and honestly confessed that, ‘evidently thinking
thinks it’s a thinker.’
Internal
verbal thinking is a kind of parasite, a compulsive self-perpetuating
cycle. If thinking thinks it can’t stop thinking, then it’s
assumed to be who you are. If that’s the assumption then it won’t
stop, or you’d cease to be who you think you are, or so it is
thought. There being no alternative one can think of.
So
it’s no surprise if the idea of enlightenment holds a certain
fascination as a way of having a quiet mind, or even being a better
‘i’, but an ‘i’ can’t be enlightened. ‘I’ refers to
this bit here, exclusive of everything else.
The
idea of separateness can never achieve wholeness because separateness
is a fiction, and doesn’t do anything by itself. ‘I’ stands
for isolate in more ways than one.
It’s
like the branch trying to become one with the tree, the petal trying
to become one with the flower. Impossible because it already is.
The human trying to become one with nature or the cosmos, absurd.
What a waste of natural cosmic energy.
The
perfect man uses his mind as a mirror, it grasps nothing, it receives
but does not keep. If that’s so then where’s the perfect man?
There’s just reflection.
Yet
mind has a tendency to reflect on there being a something that
reflects, but that’s just language, which implies in its structure
that any ‘doing’ necessitates a ‘doer.’ Whereas if you were
to call it a happening, then it doesn’t have to imply that there’s
a something that it’s happening to within the wholeness in quite
the same way.
It
depends on what is meant by the word ‘who.’ In this case a
collection of memories, ideas, descriptions, and stories. Whereas
what you presently are is that which can see all that as being just a
limiting repeatable attempt at definition. There is no defining
that, it’s not a thing.
“If
mind is used to work on the mind, how then can you avoid an immense
confusion”. Who said that, and what is meant by ‘who’ anyway?
Talking of mirrors, if nothing can be done to avoid a hall of
mirrors, and nobody there to do it, then there’s nothing that needs
doing, never mind thinking about. Yet if you’ve never thought
about it none of this will mean anything.
There
was no verbal thinking involved in painting ‘The Mirror Pool’,
Why would there be? Just direct perception, silent reflection. In
fact most of what happens by itself is seemingly done simply with
awareness.
Words
are literally just ‘the divide and rule virus’, and you are an
afterthought mistaken for a basic premise. Inner talk starts with
being trained to read. Try looking at a word or a sentence and not
hearing it internally.
What
just happens neither requires or even uses such a linguistic phantom,
and to say it’s just what’s happening tells us nothing. Just
apparent movement and change rearranging itself. Refining in feeling
from the simplest to the subtlest and finest nuance, integrating in
the image of a mirror pool.
So
never mind the words lest the words be mistaken for the mind, which
remains forever unknowable. No mind in things and no things in mind,
both of which are only concepts. What’s true is beauty when
there’s nothing else in the way. But who am i to talk? Just
reflecting. ~
~~~~
~~~~ ~~~~
Martin
Rainbowmaker.