Men continue trying to look at their mind with their mind, with none ever being the wiser of the folly. But with the few, who not only want to know the mind, but who want to know the secret of improving it – their predicament is magnified.
The mind cannot directly study the simple, secret fact, (which is the exposè and butcher of all study). So the mind invents and then studies a teaching about the fact.
“Never look right at the sun,” ‘tis said.
“Catch it in a mirror, and study its reflection,” – and there you have it.
“To see the light, study a teaching” – cover your eyes with words.
There is no way in which a person could ever even get started in this sort of activity without initially finding and adopting a teaching about it that feels right to him. It is unavoidable and FUN!
The mind is constructed to learn; it wants to learn. When it is not so engaged with physical objects outside of itself, it will turn its hunger to learn inward on itself, and on those non-physical affairs fabricated by other men’s minds in their leisure time.
It is pleasurable to the mind to be engaged in any sort of apparent learning. But when it begins to deal with non-material matters that the mind itself created, and which cannot be sensually experienced, it loses all objective perspective, and is able, (and just as likely), to treat ideas concerning the causes of The Renaissance with the same seriousness it would the reasons for Dallas’ domination of the NFL during the ‘70’s.
J.