The morning
time between being asleep and fully awake is a time of wonderful insights.
These insights can come anytime, however. They are more a Grace and Blessing,
than being arrived at by an effortful striving.
One such:
These days one
comes to interact and interface with the world through the cell phone for
extended periods of time. It is as if one gets one’s bearings from and because
of the cell phone. One makes a sense of the world through the social media
apps, the internet sites, the news apps or sites by browsing these on the cell
phone. Even when not interacting on the net through the phone, one is often
found doing something (out of force of habit) in the phone so that the
attention is inside the phone- scattered there- rather than it engaging with
the world around, the issues around. One is simply absent, for want of
attention, to the world around, though that world- people, situations, Nature- all
of this- is present.
Is it not
likely that the mind too is acting like this cell phone, a filter, which is
restrictive like the applications of the cell phone, allowing only a limited,
tunnel vision of what it wants one to see, or, by the force of habit -again- doesn’t
let you see except through its own filtering mechanisms? What could it be that
the mind is filtering out? Just as we are only peripherally aware when using
the cell phone, that there is a reality outside the phone that we are subtracting
from our interactions – thus reducing the possibility of a richer lived
experience- just like that, aren’t we, when using only the mind, subtracting a
reality, and, thus, its offer of a richer lived and felt experience? It is even
difficult to conceive with the mind what that could be- for indeed that is how
it is described in all Wisdom traditions- that reality that cannot be perceived
by the mind!
There is
certainly a confirmed state of existence where there are no thoughts, and yet
where, at the same time, one is very much there, alive. Since there are no
thoughts there to process that state, there are also no words possible to describe
that state, only similes can be employed, and that too with no satisfaction
that the simile will do its job well. The experience cannot be ever
satisfactorily distilled into words for the experience to be repeated in the
reader. That is why it is necessary for each one to experience it -the thoughtless
state- oneself. How?
There are
indeed many hows! Know-hows.
Meditation,
Music, Inquiry, Being with Nature, Prayer, Service, and, Direct Knowledge (
transmitted or bestowed upon), even Playing ( sports), and, Love.
Yes?
