Not being able to think about ordinary thought, thought regarding an extraordinary version is also obviously out of the question.
If you believe that you are contemporaneously conscious of what you are thinking, you will never understand what is really going on with thinking. If you think that you know what it is to “be asleep” as it is happening – you will always be so.
At first blush it might seem that nothing is more personal to a man than his own consciousness, but from a personally demonstrable, objective perspective, this is plain foolishness. Men not normally noticing this was the original inspiration for the verbally clumsy concepts describing man as being: asleep, deluded and captive.
If it still seems to you that you understand what you are thinking or talking about regarding any subject that you cannot hold in your hands, you have no clear view of what life is really about. All you have, (same as six billion others), is a view of a view – a photograph of a postcard.
Every person who undertakes the search for Enlightenment initially thinks in terms of it being something that they will learn, or acquire. Due to the natural operations of thought, and of non-conscious instinct itself, this is inevitable, in that creatures are not given to making efforts that do not lead to the acquisition of something pertinent to their survival, or pleasure. But that unusual, and unusually informative neural anomaly known as “waking up,” is not food, water or sex, or any other form of material substance that you can bring into your literal possession to fill a present void.
J.