Wednesday, August 17, 2005
9.~~~~~~~~~
Is it possible to be aware of the mind, when it is only the mind that can be aware? There is nothing new in this question, and yet it continues to move towards the horizon.
I’m fascinated by the way my individual mind moves--it is my moving and playing, that I can observe as my body is still. And then I watch how I/it shifts focus to “the mind”, mine to ours, from individual to species. This mind is the mind, yet it still exists in the sight of this particular mind in one time and place. I can stand between the two and know myself as the link between subject and object, as in, this human is every human. So one of my primal fascinations, which is, why am I fascinated by this or that?, shifts to: why is the mind fascinated, what is fascination. If I follow the pathway of one thought to another it is the mind which is doing this; I am the pathway of the mind.
This is not Buddhist meditation, which requires that one be fully aware of thoughts but hold no interest in them; meditation is pointedly disinterested, cuts at the root of interest as a form of desire. Fascination, which here fascinates me, is rather like a light guiding me down the path of the mind. It is desire, and my desire is to know it not extinguish it. I didn’t say, know about desire, but know it, as the Delphic oracle didn’t suggest to us to know about ourselves but to know ourselves. I take that to mean, face to face and suddenly, or finally, speechless. And I could speak forever about desire, but to know it is to know myself as desire, and to face it speechlessly. That has nothing of renunciation or opposition in it, but nonetheless a kind of extinction and silence. It is extinguished not as something that we overpower but by its own strength and fullness. ¶ 6:43 AM
Is it possible to be aware of the mind, when it is only the mind that can be aware? There is nothing new in this question, and yet it continues to move towards the horizon.
I’m fascinated by the way my individual mind moves--it is my moving and playing, that I can observe as my body is still. And then I watch how I/it shifts focus to “the mind”, mine to ours, from individual to species. This mind is the mind, yet it still exists in the sight of this particular mind in one time and place. I can stand between the two and know myself as the link between subject and object, as in, this human is every human. So one of my primal fascinations, which is, why am I fascinated by this or that?, shifts to: why is the mind fascinated, what is fascination. If I follow the pathway of one thought to another it is the mind which is doing this; I am the pathway of the mind.
This is not Buddhist meditation, which requires that one be fully aware of thoughts but hold no interest in them; meditation is pointedly disinterested, cuts at the root of interest as a form of desire. Fascination, which here fascinates me, is rather like a light guiding me down the path of the mind. It is desire, and my desire is to know it not extinguish it. I didn’t say, know about desire, but know it, as the Delphic oracle didn’t suggest to us to know about ourselves but to know ourselves. I take that to mean, face to face and suddenly, or finally, speechless. And I could speak forever about desire, but to know it is to know myself as desire, and to face it speechlessly. That has nothing of renunciation or opposition in it, but nonetheless a kind of extinction and silence. It is extinguished not as something that we overpower but by its own strength and fullness. ¶ 6:43 AM
