Assignment: Reflect (or ‘meditate on’) the “pervasive patterns of the thinking mind.†Is this reflection itself a pattern of thinking? How can you tell the difference?
A while back I posted my practice notes on the exercise, “Let sense experience unfold, but then dissociate from it“, in which I was observing self-activities, even attempting to catch the self in the act. It occurs to me it closely relates to the assignment for this week. The question of ‘reflecting‘ seems to point to the very act of thinking, and ‘considering‘ memories.
Then there’s the question, “How can you tell the difference?” The difference between what, thinking and not thinking? It seems to me considering objects of the mind and the process of naming, categorizing and judging them could represent acts of thinking, but the arising of appearance might be different. Arising is one phenomena, but as what seems to be a conducting process. Perhaps observing arising without conducting it, leads to knowing the intimacy of the capacity to know.
Here is a link to my post from 2009.
“Let sense experience unfold, but then dissociate from it“
Hi Brother Bruce,
Thank you for your gentle, thoughtful response. Yes, I used the wrong term, I conflated in my mind while writing the above, the ‘capacity to know’, with zero-time, and should have said the following in the last sentence:
Found this quote that seems to apply:
Hi Karin,
I can definitely appreciate your thoughts here, it CAN be difficult, and I think it’s the gentle, most subtle observations that can often open me breathlessly to dawning insight.
David
Hi David, hi Bruce. Your discussion and observations of the questions, that arise along with our assignment for week 6, are helpful. It seems to be impossible to notice the difference between reflection and pattern of thinking without being caught up again in another content. But isn´t it already helpful too (and another way of opening) to be aware of these difficulties? Karin
David, I really appreciate your sensitive observations and discriminations here. Do you recall our conversations back on the Krishnamurti forum many years ago? I recall our initial explorations and discussions there of beginning to differentiate the content and process of thinking. To be involved with the content seems to be the normal way of ‘thinking’ — to be what we mean by ‘thinking’ — whereas discerning the process of thinking requires something else, a relinquishing of involvement in content, a kind of silent not-doing awareness. But it is hard to really fully separate awareness from thinking, since, to the degree that awareness ‘notices’ any distinctions, this seems to be subtle thinking again. It’s almost like there’s a pre-thought in which nothing happens but patterning becomes clear, but as soon as we ‘know it,’ we are ‘thinking’ again. The relation here is like a Moebius strip, perhaps… Or maybe we can say that thinking is like that pesky two-sided tape that gets stuck to the fingers — sticking ‘here’ as soon as we remove it from ‘there’!