THE MIRROR POOL

The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror, it grasps nothing, it receives but does not keep. ~ Chuang Tzu.

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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. ~

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Martin Rainbowmaker.