…the pervasive patterns of the thinking mind…â€
Knowledge is available, even to a self, but in a distributed way, not all at once. In any given moment the senses and thinking mind have a narrow range and capacity to know. Does this mean that ‘self’ knowledge by nature is reduced to a concrete form – a thought – that can thus be acted on, or known? Does our way of knowing rely on the concretization of a thought as a image, sound, or language? Are the five senses and thought the only form of knowing, the only way of knowing, available to us?
My experience is no, they are not. There are ways of sensing and knowing that are non-conceptual and not the outer senses, that are very different, much more expansive and subtle, than our usual conscious self, our usual self-oriented knowing. But the more completely I become these expanded knowings, at some point there is a ‘coming back’ process that demands a translation into concrete types of formulations to a self, to interact with ordinary reality structures. There is value in the pure experience of expanded knowing(s) in and of itself, and there is the integration of this with ordinary reality and the self’s world. How can such knowing be more active in the self’s world? Or how can that knowing become more central and hold the self more lightly? The pervasive patterns of the thinking mind seem to take center stage by some kind of default; however, the more higher levels of knowing are engaged, the more easily they are accessed, which brings more levels of time to bear on the self’s present. But the patterns of the thinking mind are always there, either in the background or the foreground. Is this a problem?
Does the quality of conscious experience only belong to a self? Is the sense of conscious awake-ness only due to the ‘self’ structure? When the self goes to sleep, self conscious awareness disappears, but knowledge does not disappear. What creates what we experience as conscious awake-ness? What is more fundamental than the awake/asleep of the self?