It has come up in discussions that words have different connotations.  Does that hinder understanding?  Well, let’s just share what we mean.  We don’t have to all adopt the same definition, but just say what we are communicating with that or other words.  These I have gathered from what works in my life.  I can also report that just writing something from yourself to yourself, is worthwhile.  2,300 words

This, like all my posts, comes from my new definition of relationship.  Often, we think that we must endeavor to figure out the other guy.  What are his motives and what are his likely moves.  In another definition we might use relationship as our mirror.  (That is a hint from others.) What are my reactions to this contact, and why do I act and feel like I do?  Figuring out myself is infinitely more rewarding that gathering knowledge about the other.

I have no “expertise” to offer and I shun that concept, no matter where it has been laid.  But I have been discovering lately, which reflects in my outlooks, and writing about it is my tool for consolidating that understanding.  Whether it is of value for your particular life process is for you to determine.  If you do see something, I would appreciate comments or questions.  I will also question you, where I am not clear. We have been told a lot of things, which have become our expectations.  We ought to sort through them to find where they might lead, and where they might be valid. (I’ll number these concepts, so you don’t take this as a “unified body”.  Each number is open for contemplation and comment.)

We tend to be talking about many human processes, like awareness, perception, mind, thought, sensation, feeling, insight, intuition, discovery, or if thinking is the only creative tool that is taking us, (somewhere). But we are not grounded in what each other means by using these terms.  Constantly explaining ourselves might make our comments too long or too repetitive.  So, I offer this provisional way that I look at these things. In no particular order.  Please add your modifications in the comments and we will know where each is coming from.

1.  For example, a “perfected awareness” might take in the whole of our surroundings all at the same time.  (Short-hand, you have an expectation that you’re supposed listen the bird’s tweet while you are washing the dishes.)  You might, and you might not.   Maybe you should just be watching the soap being applied to that greasy frying pan?  Let’s say that you are playing tennis, and you remember your guru told you to listen to the bird’s tweet.  What could be more absurd than that?  This part of perfected-awareness can be thrown out.

2.  Let’s ask if awareness can be multi-tasking?  Maybe so, and maybe not.  It is most often manipulated by attention, which means desire.  In that case it is a mono-focus, and if it is coopted by one question, all the other questions are impoverished. Let’s throw that one out too, and let it happen as it happens.

3.  Let’s go on to say that perception is triggered by a sensation, (you see or hear something).  Can we just be fully aware of that sensation before thought pops in?  (I think YES, we can.)  But the way we are used to living, (it serves some purpose), is that immediately there is also triggered a thought arising out of memory to recognize that sensation and to judge it.  Is it dangerous, pleasurable or painful, do I like it, or do I dislike it?  All those conclusions are used to take our awareness away from that sensation and put it onto the judgements. First priority is to record it back into our memory as one more similar occurrence, and then to project into the future, “what we could do to modify that sensation”.  NOW WE ARE LOST.

4.  Let’s take up thought.  Do we have to assume the origin of it?  Is it bio-chemical, mechanical, or a gift from the higher realm of our idealized SELF?  It is already here, (for whatever reason), so let’s just talk about how it operates.  Does it take a trigger to get it going?  (That is the sensation, which also could be a trigger from another thought from memory.)  Thought can visualize an image, (word, sight, sound, etc.)  A single image at a time can be apprehended by awareness alone.  But to be thought, you must be juggling (comparing, categorizing and organizing) multiple past and present images.  Where are multiple images located?  Only in the storage bin of yesterday’s memories.  So, then perception becomes a sensation, crossed with a recognizing thought.  Thus, we look at all of our experiences through various images, never directly.  The images contain our conditioning about our world.  We see only through that conditioning.

5.  We add to images, maybe reluctantly, but for the most part images are semi-fixed, until they become too much out of date.  Therefore, our perception of the universe is semi-fixed, or moves rather slowly, as we so determine.  How do images become “out of date”?  It must be that in reality; our world is always in flux.  Our wife may seem to be the “same-old-girl”, but that is because we only see our created image of her.  Maybe she accepts it, and falls into line to play her part.  But if we looked-her-in-the-eye directly, with no image, anything could happen.  (HOW SCARY).

6.  So, all of our images give a false sense of continuity to our life, and continuity is perceived as security.  We count on our made-up images to tell us the continuing story of “who we are”.  With direct “awareness” in the present tense, there are no images, so we don’t have any continuity.  (It is adventurous).  Thus FEAR, is the basic need for thought in the human life.  It is also good, because thought propels us into the past and the future, to get away from that scary present.  (I don’t say thought is impossible in the present), but it has a totally different quality, a flexible openness, no judgements, and without containing any inherited or adopted conditioning.

When thought subsides, even for a moment, there are zero conclusions from the past, since thought is the container for those conclusions.  That might be a moment of pure awareness.  That awareness is in complete sync with the movement of the universe.  It sees TRUTH.  Forced awareness, through meditative techniques, or spiritual practices are always for the egoic (separate-self’s) desire to attain spiritual mastery.  It is just more acquisition for security.

7.  Everything perceived is perceived both with the body and with the mind.  Sensation (feeling), and thought (about the sensation).  Feeling comes as a level of contraction in the musculature, (and perhaps elsewhere).  If the sensation agrees with our memorized conclusions, the contraction lessens from our default muscle tone.  (Then it’s a feeling from God.) If it is not accepted by our beliefs, the contraction tightens, (that one is mortal limitations).  An indifferent sensation keeps our same default muscle tone, and we say that we do not recognize any feeling.  (But it is always there.)

8.  Since a feeling is in the body, it is always in the present tense.  That makes it somewhat trustworthy.  But really, it is completely modified by the memory’s acceptance or rejection.  So now feelings become all about conditioning.  Thought is the story that you tell yourself about every circumstance.  Everyone can demonstrate, without schooling or practice, just by changing the story (even lightly), about any circumstance, and the feeling immediately changes.  For this I say thought and feeling are inexorably linked.  They are the same phenomenon.  Even if you are in a car that suddenly loses traction and is careening into the ditch, there’s no time for thought.  But that thought is already there, that cars don’t drive well in a ditch.  For all practical purposes, thought and feeling are the same.

9.  Now from several places, people maintain that feeling equals intuition, and it comes from a divine origin or the unseen.  You can become more sensitized to it, (but can you interpret it correctly)?

10.   Insight comes at a breakpoint in thought, or between two thoughts.  Something becomes instantly clear (through awareness, which is not switched off).  [Like when Archimedes got into a bathtub, and figured out if the royal crown was pure gold by realizing its density. EUREKA], Intuition might be a cross between insight and manipulated a bit with thought.  Inspiration comes from wishing to imitate someone else’s life.

11.   Discovery refers to what’s presently unknown.  It is a widening of the contexts of memory and conditioning.  There is no way to perceive the unknown, until you have made this expansion.  Nothing unknown can generate from memory.

So, discovery is the product of awareness.  Discovery, for you, can come through discussion, but not necessarily from someone else’s knowing.  It is when confronting the two lines of thought, something might appear “in between them”.  That is what we are doing here.

12.   Let’s say something about the structure and the use of the mind, (it is not just thoughts), it’s the only instrument for living at man’s disposal. Otherwise, he cannot be truly human and realize all his potentialities. Here the word ‘mind’ covers both superficial, the conscious and the deep, the unconscious, the former manifesting itself as our daily consciousness, the latter as the impulses, urges, tendencies and motivations. The Conscious is that portion of the mind which is kept in the focus of attention. Under the attention which is motivated, and therefore limited, there is also the power of awareness. Awareness is most often steered by attention, which is motivated by desire.  Awareness is the very substratum of experience: it is what makes experience happen.

13.   Society: to become and remain truly human, society must be in a state of permanent revolution, of continuous re-evaluation, experimentation and re-organization. It should become and remain a social laboratory where new forms of social life, new patterns of relationship between man and man, plus man and society, are evolved and tested with the touch-stone of happiness and creativity. A truly human society will be integrated economically and politically.  As of now, culture follows largely the economics of production and distribution.

14.   Let Beliefs be called Definitions.  That way it is your responsibility to make them up and change them at will.

Western man comes out of 1,000 years of Europe’s development, and it was all Christianity, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox.  The main Christian tenant is BELIEVE in what you can’t know; just trust what we tell you.  That morphs into faith, adoration, worship, and of course defending that faith with sword and firearm.  Hence, the western man is trained for 1,000 years to be a follower.  What does a follower want?  I must have a leader, who is my expert, (guru) and what is my ideology?

15.  A Hunch is a guess or supposition about what can’t be known or proven. I can’t assume a hunch is a message from the beyond.

16.   Ecstasy and Bliss are the great “come-on”, and an expectation.  (A paradisiacal place, typically where souls are believed to live after mortal death.)   Let’s just say ecstasy is high intensity thought and feeling and bold immediacy of action/response.  Not that big of a deal.

17.   Spiritual “truths”, spiritual paths, and all Guru-Speak must form expectations in the listener.  There are volumes of these expectations, and (even if they could be true in a certain sense, or for those that speak them); it is not now at your level of operation and experiencing.  All expectations rob your personal process of motive power and destroy it  So, they are all a toxic to you.  You are demanding a shortcut.

18.  Experts suggest that a Habit is a pre-wired pattern, (probably in the brain), that has been ingrained by many decades of repetition.  I suggest, (and it has happened often with me), that habit is held in place with an unconscious verbal justification.  Once you find that justification and determine it is NO LONGER valid, the habit evaporates immediately.

19.  Let’s look at Stillness of Mind.  The first and most obvious cases are in sleep, grogginess, and extreme introversion.  Another case of mind-stop is in Shock. WOW! I am “speechless”.  Also, AWE stops the mind. Looking at something so immense, the milky-way on a clear dark night.  The Grand Canyon, or a view for 40 miles in all directions from a mountaintop.  A river in full flood stage, the racing water like the mass of dozens of heavily loaded freight trains rushing down the canyon.  Hurricanes and cyclones have immense power.

We try to still the mind with practices, and something finally happens.  But because the practice is from a motive and a desire, there is always the thought in the background, checking if that motive is being satisfied.  (Am I making any progress, is my expectation being fulfilled, am I doing it right, or “hard enough”?)  Hence you never arrive to the human potential.

Another stillness of mind happens for no reason, and with no desire.  If I have been able to look directly at how and where my thoughts take me, (without any justification or reasoning of their validity), maybe I will find them uninteresting, and they could drop away (for periods) by themselves.  What is left is just still awareness, without any reason or motive.  There is no element to pollute it.  A great seeing can happen on those occasions.

20.  Let’s reserve some words for special purposes.  Let TRUTH refer only to “what-is”, with no judgement.  Use conditional-belief or current-definition to describe your current level of conclusions.

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There are other important topics, like the ‘unseen world’, Consciousness, and the nature of the individual.  But these are too vast to add to this simple (already long) definition list.  They will have to be looked at in a separate posting.  I hope you can see where I am coming from out of each one of these items.   Anyway, those are the tenants through which I have been discovering more-so every day.

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