Photo courtesy of: ‘bubbles’ by taftar – Pixabay
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Over the past few days, I’ve found that thought has shown up quite differently, sometimes diffuse, dreamy, and unfocused; sometimes clear and crisp; sometimes vivid and charged with feeling. Last night, as I attempted to meditate before bed and was feeling tired, I had a hard time finding the “edges” of thought and could not trace its movement clearly. It seemed almost indistinguishable from other elements of my experience, and I found that after a few moments of watching it, I would be pulled in to a trance-like, magnetically attractive state — a state that was full and strangely closed or ‘occupied,’ seeming to foreclose any possibility of movement. I didn’t notice this while in the state, but only once I was out of it and could see how my attention had been captured by it. What’s interesting is that I can feel this same gravity, this same semi-trance-like quality, underlying or accompanying some of my thinking throughout the day.
At other times, especially during the day when I’m practicing on my regular walks, I have been more alert and have been able to notice several layers of thought. On the grossest level, there is internal dialogue, the reflexive self-talk which seems to be present much of the time (“nervous habit” indeed!). On subtler levels, there are faint images and impulses, inchoate conceptual/feeling tones, and “narrowing” or focusing intentions and orientations. It is easy to notice internal dialogue as an “object” within experience, a conceptual “thing” or “movement” arising in the midst of non-conceptual things (whatever else I happen to be seeing and feeling at the time). But when you begin to pay attention to subtler layers of thought, to thought as orienting intention, as the “insurer” of familiarity operating in the background, etc, it becomes harder to distinguish thought from the “whole.” Then, as Jack suggests when talking about thoughts as carriers of the field communique, it seems more like we are in thought.
As I was exploring these layers this afternoon, I inquired into what thought establishes, and questioned that establishment. As I held this question, I found “familiarity” begin to unwind a bit. It became clear how the sights I was seeing plugged immediately into recordings, expectations, and for the moment the influence of expectation no longer held. I found the environment suddenly uncanny, disturbing and attractive at once. It was a grey, drizzly day outside. The dark branches of the trees looked new, startling, a little menacing. They were an unknown presencing — still recognizable to me, of course, but somehow not the “same.”
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Later this evening, I went out for a walk again, and found simply that challenging “establishment” and familiarity, there was a shift from being amidst “objects seen” to a very fine sense of unfurling seeing, curling around on itself. An ongoing knowing that did not foreclose itself, that did not reach to anything already established. At one point, a thought arose that some things just couldn’t be challenged — they were too obvious. The thought that came to mind is “I am here.” When I didn’t accept it as given, I felt like something gave way beneath me; there was the sudden sense of a gulf and a stab of anxiety. I felt a similar sense of dynamic, bubbling knowing emerge as the bubble of identity momentarily popped, but a familiar bubble-self soon re-emerged. I looked around at the gorgeous shadows of trees against a purple, misty light that seemed to suffuse the lawn. I heard chimes on a neighbors porch and felt them lapping through my limbs like waves of mercury, subtle, almost painful in the pleasure they evoked. The scent of meat cooking was round, palpable. All my senses were alive. Everything was knowledge, and newly unknown.
Bruce