![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Mind As Sense Organ
When you listen to your favorite CD, do you become that CD? You might really enjoy it and personally identify with the emotions and sentiments it contains. But you are still distinct from it.
The same thing happens when you look at something: let’s say an apple. When you look at an apple, light is bouncing off the surface of the object into the lenses of your eyes, which the image is processed and sent to a part of your brain. You may have a clear or a dim image, but you remain distinct from it.
So if you are not what you see or hear externally, why would you believe that you *are* what you see and hear internally? That is, your thoughts and emotions. What makes them “you”, because they occur inside of your skin membrane barrier thingy? What about your internal organs? Those are much more concrete and objective than thoughts or emotions, but we almost never think of your gall bladder as “me”. So all of a sudden intangible perceptual states are meaningfully included in one’s self-image than the actual matter of which you are composed? Doesn’t that seem a little ass-backwards?
Speaking of, why is a person’s fecal matter looked at differently than their thoughts or feelings? Both of them pass through us as we process sensory input. Food is stripped of nutritious elements and waste is expelled and it occurs completely unconsciously. All you have to do is occasionally take a shit. Thoughts and emotion, likewise, arise from the intake of sensory data, it being stripped for “nutritious” elements and then expelled through the processes we normally glorify as “self-expression.” Why isn’t it self-expression when we take a crap?
Am I saying the mind is a toilet? Well, no. But almost. What I am saying is that, in order to be put in their proper place, what you think of as your “mind” and your “emotions” need to seen for what they are: sensory organs. Or rather, perceptual processing plants for data collected from our sensory organs. You do not equal the contents of your mind or your emotions. The things which now exist in your mental and emotional perceptions are caused by what you are feeding in as natural resources to the processing plants.
In other words, if you eat poison, you are going to shit poison.
The natural state of the human mind is clarity (as opposed to emptiness). The natural state of the human heart is joy and tranquility. Everything else is accidental and not optimal: spawned through misuse and misunderstanding of the intent/action harmony instrument known as the mind-body.
So stop taking in poison and you will stop shitting poison in the form of negative thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and emotions are not your “fault” - they are a natural consequence of human reactions to the choices we make and the experiences created by them. You don’t, therefore, need to spend any time whatsoever on beating yourself up for how you think and feel. Because these are only by-products of what you are consuming. Devote yourself to joy and beauty, and your thoughts and feelings will begin to reflect it. When your thoughts and feelings reflect it, they will initiate your perceptual system to select for it. So it becomes a positive feedback loop, amplifying, increasing, spreading: “my cup runneth over.”
Just because you are having good thoughts and feelings though does not mean you should get cocky and start thinking you are better than other people. All you are doing is making smart choices about what to expose yourself, what to consume and what to focus your time on. It is not any kind of secret. But its effects are explosive and utterly transforming when committed to as a lifestyle: take charge of what you take in. You are not what you see or hear and therefore you are not what you think or feel. What then, are you?
Follow-Up Exercise
- Sit in front of a mirror for five minutes in silence. Project your identification of self-to the mirror image of you.
- Sit across from another person and look at each other’s faces without saying anything for five minutes. Do the same thing you did with the mirror: imagine that your identity is fully synonymous with the image you are seeing. But in this case, the image is another person.
This exercise is hard to get it to “work” but if you can get “it” to happen for even a flash of a moment, your time is worth it. The effect is freaky!
August 31st, 2007 at 3:42 pm
-Meister Eckhart
I agree very much with this. It seems to me that the internal voice we speak to ourselves with is an end-product, only the result of the silent voice. As it passes into maturity, the words form more clearly, sometimes we repeat them to oursleves or rephrase them to be more satisfactory (to who?)
The written/spoken word is dead, or near-dead. It is the skeleton (or blossom) of the living word, which is silent and eternal. If the dead word ‘does’ anything at all, it is used as food just as you described. That is its proper role in its maturity.
I liked this post very much!
August 31st, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I like this post, if its understood that poison refers to false information and the healthy refers simply to true information. I wasn’t sure what you meant by “poison” so I can’t say. But I will say that if one is not careful with this, and focuses their mind on only positive feel good stuff, they actually end up eating a lot of poison. We should feel bad, its the impetus of change. Here is a good article I jsut saw linked to, images that changed the world:
http://www.bspcn.com/2007/08/26/images-that-changed-the-world/
You’ll notice that most of them aren’t feel good, but that’s why they changed the world.
I actually think this post describes a utopian world, where what we all output reflects what we all input, ie its the truth. In reality, the process becomes a lot more “constipated” than that because people become liars, which is to say that they craft their words to have a desired impact on the people around them. When words are used as a method of manipulation rather than a to convey reality as the teller experiences it, they become poisonous and divorced from reality, regardless of the intent of the teller. Or at least that is how I would define “poison” in this sense.
September 1st, 2007 at 3:22 am
So you are implying that all thoughts arrive from external stimuli?
September 1st, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I don’t agree with this at all. This seems like its getting at the difference between Buddhism and Gnosticism. And I’m a Gostic and not a Buddhist. I have a self and its a divine self.
I can have a false sense of self, but that is not to say that my idea of having a self is a delusion. The delusion is a false sense of self. I have a true self and I get “occluded” in my perception of my true self.
So what is the purpose of this exercise of sitting in front of a mirror and projecting your image onto the reflection and then doing the same thing with a projection of another person? To demonstrate that both are a total illusion?
You aren’t the person in the mirror and you aren’t the person in front of you?
Well, you aren’t the person in the mirror, because it backwards, but there is complete one on one correspondence. I think our true self is composed of energy. This energy signature creates a body. What I mean is the energy signature leaves a clear and unique imprint on the body. This is a dynamic plastic thing to a degree, you can chang your character and it will show up on your body. The energy you take on will change your countenance and as you age your emotional energy will leave an imprint on your face.
But I think to say that this interface is plastic and dynamic as opposed to static and immutible is not to say that it doesn’t exist or that its a mere illusion.
I think there is some core of energy that is uniquely “you.”
September 1st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Here are three articles that get to the crux of this:
The problem with Buddhism in this regard, in how this idea of oneness and no self ruins peoples lives and lets them be preyed upon by cult leaders:
http://www.mimbres.com/holp/holpath/kramer/oneness.htm
Jeremy Puma on the difference between Buddhism and Gnosticism in regards to the ego and the self:
http://www.palmtreegarden.org/fp/2007/08/27/the-ego-self-hypgnosis/
The idea of the ego in Kaballa and the ideas of Jung and how it differs with Eastern Religions:
http://www.donmeh-west.com/evolvego.shtml
One other thing I want to throw in here-India is a civilization of a bunch of violent Aryan “blonde beasts” that took over the original highly cultured and literate inhabitants of India and brought them under domination and created religious doctrines to keep them in their place.
This last paragraph may seem incongruous with the rest of my post, but its not.
Psychopaths are skilled at “negating” people. So to me its no wonder that a psychopathic race of people (which aryans have that tendency) to create a religion centered around people negating themselves.
Turning yourself into a blank slate is not enlightenment. Because you didn’t start out as a blank slate. You came from the divine and have a divine purpose for being here.
So to me this self mastery stuff is about interfacing correctly with your body in order to fulfil that purpose.
September 1st, 2007 at 1:43 pm
How can one distinguish this from what it is not?
September 1st, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Totally agree with you Ted. There is the self, and the Self. Anyone who has spent some time meditating will eventually learn to distinguish between the two, and may well even get to “feel” that ‘core energy’ you speak of.
As for the energy signature that gets imprinted on the body. I agree with that also; in fact I wrote about that very subject here:
[URL=”http://www.thethoughts.co.uk/thoughts/meditating-and-moving-around-the-mask/”]Social-personal ‘Energy’ Mask[/URL]
September 1st, 2007 at 2:12 pm
That’s what gnosis is.
September 1st, 2007 at 4:06 pm
The purpose is that it is an experiment. It is a challenge to personal perceptual exploration. See what happens. You’re not going to turn into a mindless cult freak unless you decide to do that.
I don’t remember saying or implying that. I don’t see what the big deal is about “the Self”. The point is living for other people instead of being a selfish douchebag and suffering because of it endlessly. It has nothing to do with “negating” yourself. If that is a fear, then it ought to be faced. Your life is in your hands, you are responsible for your actions and your decisions. Further, you are responsible for your own internal states and emotional responses to your perceptions.
September 1st, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Well Tim,
We talked about this before. This exercise of looking at another person and projecting your self image onto them is somthing you came up with several months ago and looks like its not part of your newer ideas of “self mastery”
Maybe you think its just a nitpicky little thing, but to me the concept of self is a big deal.
If the goal is to serve others as you say, and at the same time, you believe “self” is an empty concept, then who are these “others”, then?
Would not ech of these others have a corresponding “self”? The simantics of this gets all convoluted. I should take some effort to sort out all these concepts.
But there are some wierd effects of not believing in the concept of the self. You start out wanting to help people, i.e. by being “selfless” and then you realize you should not help them because then you are edifying their concept of self. better to ignore them and let them work of their negative karma. That happens in Buddhist countries.
September 1st, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Ultimately, “self mastery” is meaningless with no core concept of a self. How do you get around that Tim? Who is the master and what is being mastered?
What is unqualified “intention”? Whose intention?
September 1st, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Marcus,
I couldn’t get that link. But it sounds interesting. The idea I have is that the “world” is a structure built around peoples false sense of self and that the “Kingdom of God” is built around people’s true sense of self.
September 1st, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Let me try that link again…
September 1st, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Weird, the links simply refuse to show up.
Tell you what - click on my name - ( or go to www.thethoughts.co.uk ) then on my site look under the “Recently Written” menu on the far right for the post called “Meditating and moving around the Mask”
Yep, the world “system” / matrix / whatever you want to call it is built up of peoples expectations and perceptions. The practicality of realizing this, is that it allows you to work on self-development. You move further away from what you “think” life is about into what life “really” is about. And then you are in a much better place to live for others - because bit by bit you destroy your own Ego and all the BS it carries with it.
—
Tim, I like your idea here - because to some extent it helps you move your “point of awareness” around. You get to see yourself from a different perspective. I have done something similar under meditation, your “awareness” sees yourself from outside so to speak. And yes it solidifies your understanding of who / what you are.
Although I am not sure what you mean about not seeing ‘what the big deal is about “the Self”.‘ is? If we can’t come to discover our personal core - then what else is there to do? We can’t truly help others until we can work from a foundation of true self (and thus human) understanding.
Or perhaps that is what you are getting at?
September 1st, 2007 at 5:19 pm
My understanding would be better phrased as the opposite, though: gnosis is the knowledge that anything which can be indicated as ’self’ is more fundamentally and truly ‘non-self’.
So how do we even know if we are talking about the same things? The image of the self possesses no fundamental constancy at all as far as I can tell, not even the property of existing, which can come and go.
I would think the goal would be disillusionment with false beliefs, and part of that is eradication of habits which support those beliefs.
Right. Nothing ‘I’ do (as we casually put it) or am can be accurately, logically ground to any indicateable thing, not even in my own head, I think.
September 1st, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Well P,
what can you be with that mindset other than a slave?
September 1st, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I mean I guess you can see yourself as a good kind of slave. But with a concept that you have absolutely on self or ego, you would just float around in space, with no internal locus of control until some person or cause took a hold of you and put you to use.
September 1st, 2007 at 7:22 pm
That says it all right there. This idea of no self is a deception. You think. You think therfore you are.
I think a false sense of self is constructed by other people. Existentialists would say that everything has no inherent meaning and you should create your own meaning. I desagree with that too. I think meaning is tied to your true self, which is tied to a higher will.
September 1st, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I guess I look at it like this: Its good to bring some of these metaphores up to date. So we are vessels. Great. Vessels are boring. Who gives a shit about flowerpots? Drinking glasses etc? Its a very basic analogy. But I think its so commonplace it loses its impact. Plus being a vessel is kind of undignified. Like being a chamber pot. What, you just passively lay there and lot God piss in you?
God doesn’t just want to piss in us. He wants to be us. We are a bit more complex than a clay pot. if you were God would you want to be some liquid sitting in a clay pot? Booooooooring. We are clay pots that have several very sophisticated features. We are like space vehicles. O.k.? We are these powerful space vehicles. So then God gets in there and accomplishes things through us. Before that time, we are kind of on auto-pilot. We are on auto-pilot and fuctioning as golf carts or garbage trucks or some stupid thing.
Because our auto-pilot is the false ego and its plugged into the world system. But if there is nothing outside of the false ego, then we are nothing. Nothing is not a vehicle. Nothing is a void. Nothing is nothing. God is a void, an intelligent void. A vehicle for a void is not another void. Then you would have to voids, sitting there in their mutual voidhood. We definately have spark. I would tend to think there is more than one Ghost in the machine. One is God and one is us. The machine is our body, our minds etc.
I don’t have the structure totally worked out, but one thing I know is you need an ego, otherwise you are not worth God’s trouble.
September 1st, 2007 at 7:59 pm
maybe some people are totally empty machines being run by a demon or somthing. Maybe some people have an aut-pilot but no God, I don’t know.
If that’s the case though that sucks.
September 1st, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Ok here is a really good quote from Martin Buber I got from this website “Donmeh West” http://www.donmeh-west.com/incarn6.shtml that I quoted earlier: “We have heard that everyone should search his own heart, choose his particular way, bring about the unity of his being, begin with himself; and now we are told [by Judaism] that man should forget himself. But if we examine this injunction more closely, we find that it is not only consistent with the others, but fits into the whole as a necessary link, as a necessary stage, in its particular place. One need only ask one question: ‘What for?’ What am I to choose my particular way for? What am I to unify my being for?
“The reply is: Not for my own sake. This is why the previous injunction was: to begin with oneself. To begin with oneself, but not to end with oneself; to start from oneself, but not to aim at oneself; to comprehend oneself, but not to be preoccupied with oneself . . .
“Judaism regards each man’s soul as a serving member of God’s creation which, by man’s work, is to become the Kingdom of God; thus, no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation. True, each is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake — neither for the sake of its temporal happiness nor for that of its eternal bliss — but for the sake of the work which it is destined to perform upon the world.” (Hasidism and Modern Man, pages 162-166)
So that’s How I see it. You start out working on yourself. But that is not the end goal. The end goal is to carry out your part of the divine plan for the sake of humanity as a whole. But I mean, how the Hell can you do that if you dispense with the whole concept of self from the outset?
September 1st, 2007 at 8:42 pm
“When Yahweh had said all this to Job, he turned to Eliphas of Teman. ‘I burn with anger against you and your two friends,’ he said, ‘for not speaking truthfully about me as my servant Job has done. So now find seven bullocks and seven rams, and take them back with you to my servant Job and offer a sacrifice for yourselves, while Job, my servant offers prayers for you. I will listen to him with favor and excuse your folly.” (Job 42:7)
Thus, Job (the ego) out of remaining strong and constant in the face of violent attacks from Yahweh (the Self), and not disintegrating as his friends advised him to do, is raised to the status of near-partnership with God — becomes his priest, so to speak, through whom divine dispensation finds its opening onto others. He has become, as we have been describing it, an archetypal “vessel for the continuing incarnation of God.”
That’s another quote. I’ve said enough I think. But basically I will say, if you want to have a relationship with God, try to hold yourself together. Reatian your personal integrity, Don’t just try to merge with God and become dissolute. That’s not the point.
September 1st, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Excellent.
But, this is where the serving comes in. It’s not slavery, not disolving but what else could Job do? Would he go through what he went through and tell these guys “Hey, where were you when I needed you? I’m not going to pray for you. Go figure it out for yourself like I did.”. He’s a servant of God and his fellow man because of his strength.
If my friend asks for $20.00 I give it to her because she’s my friend. If God asks me to give I do (or try to) not because I feel threatened but because were friends. If I don’t feel like helping people (not $$ to crack heads but crack heads need prayers too) I know I need to examine my relationship with God, I’m too much in the world.
September 2nd, 2007 at 10:55 am
Julia,
Serving God is different I guess. Sorry for not being clear. I think of a slave as serving against ones will. If you were to totally disolve your ego, you would be like an empty vessel that anyone that happened by could use for whatever purpose.
But my point is being a servant for God requires a strong ego. Its a give and take relationship. You don’t just go limp.
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:33 am
> The things which now exist in your mental and emotional perceptions are caused by what you are feeding in as natural resources to the processing plants.
Hrmmmmmrmmmrrmmmmrmmmm. Hm.
That little word ’caused’ gives me pause. For starters, that particular causality clearly works both ways: the things you’re feeding in are determined by your mental and emotional perceptions. But more than that, if the mind is a big sausage machine then it’s become very lazy. Direct causal link between stimulus and response is what machines do.
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Ted, I don’t mean to be a dick and I don’t mean to not give you an answer to your questions, but you’re just running yourself round in circles around the central goal with all of this.
I admit that I am perfectly unable to communicate the point I am trying to make here. The best I guess I can do (hopefully) is create in you the space to ask questions which will empty themselves out if you really follow through with them.
If I might offer simply the benefit of my own experience (which is all any of this should be taken as): you are pushing too hard. The “answer” is so simple that it could be described as “dumb”, which is why so few people ever find it, or finding it, end up accepting it.
Life is perfecting each moment. Any notion of the self can only exist there. Maybe all self really is is awareness of the moment. Maybe self-mastery is mastery of the moment. Maybe mastery of the moment is acceptance of what that moment brings to you and celebration of it. I struggle to share what I have found in my own life, but it has transformed me in such a way that I cannot help but try. I would be a failure as a human being, I would be without justice or compassion if I did not at least make the attempt, knowing full well I will fail again and again.