Photo courtesy of: ‘Red at the Edge’ by cmesker – Pixabay
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Regarding keeping the mind at the focal point of arising… I’ve seen how as a subject I am often carried away with the linearity of the stream of appearances; shifting attention to the past and future, like the needle on a gage, back and forth. But the instructions tell us to focus awareness where “reality is conducted into being“. So I’ve found that to get the needle to hover over the now, it’s helpful to initially focus on the tactile feeling of my body, such as the breath, and to feel what the body is touching, how my skin feels hot or cold, or to focus on any sensual input. For as soon as I do that, my attention needle is more easily focused on and in the NOW where appearance unfolds, where presence allows focus to expand and open, and where the activity of structuring can be seen through. Of course, I still get carried off, but at least I’ve learned where to restart focus each time when being mindful.
Regarding how new knowledge is conducted… One time, I stood at the second floor window looking down through tree branches and new leaves to the grass beyond. The mind had settled into a spell of quiet winds and sounds of rustling leaves. It was kind of floating on a sea of green, as sun dappled every tint and shade. Suddenly, before mind could catch it, there was a lightening flash of red — nearly spontaneous and faster than eye could focus or muscle contract, but witnessed none the less. And then, like a rising flood-tide filling in the hollows and contours of the land, the mind (of which I had no control) moved lightening-fast, inexorably on to make sense and clarify the meaning of what had already passed. I was building and marveling at what had just happened. I realized I was constructing in memory what I could place there, like a leaf captured between pages, as if a leaf could capture a forest, or a description really summarize a moment.
A moment like that might ordinarily slip away into the unnoticed background, but I tried to be mindful of what was happening, and as each micro-second passed I watched the filling-in behind the point of perception. I looked to see if I could feel a difference in the texture of what I was experiencing. I felt I could not hold the original perception of what happened – when all was open, just prior to the instinctual, unuttered question – “what the…?” Because the discrimination and categorization activity was relentlessly continuing that would result in understanding that the ‘red flash’ had a name and classification in my experience. I could not retard this progress. This was occurring off somewhere distant as if beyond my control. As I continued to observe I was also feeling each new instant and taking note of the mental ‘filling-in’ of each succeeding moment with more and more focus and narrowing precision, until most of the spaciousness within which the initial event included, was gone.
Further review and inquiry into this process revealed, that the sudden and lightening-fast movement of ‘red’ is what triggered a need to know in my fairly open field of consciousness to begin the process of clarification and knowing. The desire to know seemed a spontaneous reflex. The need set up the future projection to know, which propelled a search through memory, and a sifting through categories and classes of patterns for matching or near matching patterns, and rejecting non-matching patterns. This process breaks down forms and reestablishes the representational self as ‘I’ separate from the environment I was part of, a ‘me’ at the window, a subject separate from the representational objects of perception who asks, what was that red flash? Then, the mind process continued to refine the perception into a clarified mental representation that could be described and recorded in memory: self, its location, in relation to trees, leaves, green, sounds, movement, the feeling of the self about this sudden movement, and the blood-red cardinal – all that… from the initial instant, of open participation in a sunlit sea of green, and an inquisitive impression of an unnamed red dash.
David
