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Posted by josef on 9/18/2009, 10:55 am
24.32.223.X
As conditioned beings we literally experience life in an alternate reality of our thought-world. "Lost in thought" we live in our thoughts, live our thought, create emotions from our thought and react to the self-created emotions as if they were actual and beyond our control, react from our conditioned thought-interpretations of everything.
When a dawning consciousness occurs and we begin to examine our thoughts as "thoughts", a disconnect happens that allows us to wonder what they are, where they come from, what they're made of. When this shift occurs, the whole construct of reifications built over a lifetime comes under scrutiny, even the reified sense of self we call "I". No longer "lost in thought" but awake and attentive, new insights are allowed to emerge, compulsivity fades as direct, bare attention grows.
The "dynamic equilibrium of yin and yang" that ren ying refers to is this, imo: attentive presence in Now. Not lost in thought or emotions, but *fully* present in a way that's impossible when attention is even partially distracted by any thought-word-concept bundles, i.e. opinions, hopes, fears, desires, agendas.
When thought becomes the subject of attention, rather than preoccupying attention, the shift occurs. Thomas Cleary refers to this with a line I like, something like: breaking through and ending permanently mind's preoccupation with its own productions.
Musing,
josef
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"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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