The undercover outlaws pursuing their own private prize outside the city views supra specified, do so with a non-personalized sense of the opposition to their goal; they picture it in such terms as: ”Man’s mechanical state of consciousness,” the mind’s natural inclination to run on autopilot. They do not believe that this is the result of divine retribution for some earlier faux pas, and they do not see other humans as being the cause of the condition.
They recognize that everyone is in the same fix – but that other people do not realize it. These individual wanderers-from-the-herd perceive their sole enemy to be their own mind, (in its present, unsatisfactory condition, of course), and with the goal plainly being to: “Increase its consciousness; awaken it from its sleep; bring it from the dark, into Enlightenment”). Erom involvement in such a conceived effort, do few of these rebel adventurers ever emerge.
Do now consider the “laughability factor” that your own mind is your enemy?! Forget for a moment all of the negatively connotated modifiers that can be attached to the word mind, such as: asleep, mechanical, subjective, unenlightened, and ask yourself simply, “Is there not something completely ludicrous about me picturing my mind as my enemy?” In me thinking that my mind, for some reason, opposes my efforts to improve its operation?
You might be tempted to say that the idea is not silly, that your mind opposes your efforts to change it because of its low level of consciousness, and mechanical nature…which sounds plausible until you remember that it is your mind giving this response, and that its own” mechanical nature,” operating at a low level of consciousness, was the original source of the desire to overcome this mechanical nature, and increase the level of consciousness.
How has it now become the very thing opposing this effort that it alone motivated? For what possible reason has it become its own enemy? No one but an ordinary man can answer that; only a person with no understanding. Do you understand? If you WANT to understand, and you sincerely ponder the above words and what they say about the mind, you will eventually HAVE to understand. (Either that or your mind will explode like a rotten cumquat in the sun…which is about the same thing as, “understanding.”)
J.