After a brief pause father continues. “Mind, (which is nothing but the endless flowing of thought), takes itself to be a something with a substantial existence, and anything with a substantial existence is subject to alteration – it can be changed. Ergo, say the more distant relatives of our family’s special bloodline: ‘My mind is asleep, deluded and confused, but through the certain method I have discovered and adopted, I will awake, inform and enlighten it.’
This is the common, and apparently well founded view of the situation inside the conscious operations of a man’s brain, but is, in observable fact, a mirror talking to its reflection in a mirror. It seems to take quite awhile, (if ever), for those who seek a radical change of consciousness/mind/thought to ever realize the neural circumstances for what they are, but when you do, nothing is ever the same. In one sense, you are only then able to start making efforts which produce actual results. For only then do you have a personal recognition of what is real, as distinguished from what all ordinary men’s minds say is real.
A person’s true individualism lies in the silence of their genetic temperament. But the more civilized you are, the greater claim thereto does thought make. Just as a person’s weight or muscle bulk can be changed, so too does thought say it can be altered. After all, it can add new facts to itself rather than muscle, and can shed ignorance instead of fat. Consciousness can be changed from a state of fragmented, uncontrollable impermanency, (being asleep, unenlightened), to one of ever-calm, unified wholeness. The truer telling of this delightful endeavor is not that it is about changing a present situation, but about unwittingly trying to establish one where none now exists.
Trying to awaken is the attempt to create something stable and substantive, out of something ephemeral and ethereal. You are not actually trying to awaken a sleeping self, or mind, you are trying to create one where one does not now exist.”
J.