I am finding the recognition that “thoughts have no substance” helpful in freeing me from the reactivity I experience around thoughts and their contents. It has been useful to consider “thoughts” as a space in which content appears. This helps establish the image of thoughts as bubbles. Just recognizing thoughts as bubbles of space, (regardless of the content) immediately reduces the appearance of “substance” and thus the “gravity” of the experience to draw attention and perpetuate the contents next moment.
Hayward
Hello Michael
Thanks for the contact. It is increasing difficult for me to identify a fundamental beyond the appearance
(somehow the first part of this got posted inadvertently before I was finished) Can we just reverse the roles of “Not knowing” and “Appearance” and arrive at a more healthy proposition? Accepting not-knowing as a mystery (rather than a limit) could bring out the explorer in us? Seeing “appearance” as fundamental could reduce our tendency to attribute an underlying substance to it. — (PS: I wonder if the lack of faces and background information about one another in the posts and confence calls–a “not-knowing”–tends to drive us toward an exploration ot the “fundamental”).–Michael
Hi Hayward,
Your reflection on thoughts and bubbles, content and substance, draws me in. This may be a big jump away from your quietly introspective contemplation, but I’ve been ponderrng a sentence at the top of page 37: “We know the consequentce well (of treating space as a container), not knowing emerges as fundamental, and appearance becomes a mystery. I think you are working with reversing the usual precedence we give to the the content of our thoughts over the space that allows them, and I wonder if the quote above can’t also be reversed. Can we just reverse the positions above and arrive at a more healthy proposition: