The mind is the only thing known to man, and in man, that consists solely of what it does – produce thoughts. Without those, it is nothing. Other organs, even if non-functioning, are still, something. A dead heart at least lays there on the dissection table.
Mind displays no memory of itself or of what it does. It is as though it has a natural aversion to doing so. Is it to compensate-for or cover-up-for this lack that men and their minds recall and talk so much about what has happened to their physical person? Are copious memories of physical experiences to make up for the mind not having any of itself? In trying to study itself it is as though the mind must continually rediscover things about itself that it had just realized, a day or a minute before. It makes the same discoveries over and over again, and forgets them as fast as they were found. each time treating the re-discovery as though it were the first time it had ever been seen. Is this why men cannot be mindful or self-remember – because it is actually the mind trying to remember itself and it can’t?
Awakening is not as much a change in consciousness as it is an understanding OF consciousness. Nothing in the second reality is as much changed as it is rearranged, and nothing in the second reality can be understood – only the nature of the second reality itself.
Each morning, in bed, immediately upon awakening, one man says to something in himself; “Hey, don’t get me started!”
One Master would answer all metaphysical questions first with an apple and then a shovel. When monks took this to be a metaphor, he would shake his head No, and tell them they needed to go pick an apple or dig a hole.
J.