Is there a clear mind?

Kinfonet Discussion
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Where do we start? Of course we have a job, go to work, go shopping, like entertainment, have activities, and all that. Do we really want to look into what we are all doing, and see that it is basically, psychologically, conditioning? Do we stop and look and see the things on the mind, the things we are thinking about, puzzling about, thinking to solve, are a mind activity, different to the actual activity.

I might go to bed and can’t sleep. The mind is thinking about problems. It seems to me, you, these are particular matters, as you think about them, which need thinking about in an effort to figure something out and to find solutions. It seems this is the only path, playing out the same scenarios, and we go over it all, again and again, even coming up with some more ideas, more resolve.

Here, we are not talking about the actual circumstances, but the endless mind activity of thought. It is not the thoughts in actual practice, in some application, it is the bothersome mind activity of an unsettled mental condition, affecting the health and well being. Its what drives some people to drop out, to throw them selves into some distraction, to look for a way out, and to find peace in an alternative life style, become a recluse, or a devotee in some cult or religion. It is what forces us to want something not as we may think is our complicated and restricted lives we live now, and we will call this freedom.

Can we look at all this disturbing mind activity, look at it fully, not going along with all the thoughts, and see, basically, it is desire? There is an underlying condition. The movement of this mind activity with all the thoughts, is a deeper impulse, not to be solved with thought, called desire. Basically our lives are built on desire in one way or another. There some aspects we like, others we don’t. We go along with some aspects, others we avoid, and some, or all, we suffer. Then we take desire to be inevitable, if not the way of life, and we repeat it all in our thinking. We probably can’t see there is any other way of living. But it is not living, it is a conformity, a compulsion, a complacency.

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Desire and fear are the polar opposites of the same energy. Why do you emphasize desire and ignore fear?

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Desire is not a polar opposite of fear. Fear encompasses all components of the “I”, which includes desire.

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The fragmented mind will see a word and be thinking about this word, and think of some thing, some other word, and so on and on. We could be talking about intelligence for example, but not using the word in its fragmented sense, as an ability to think intellectually, but as the whole free experience, not limited to words. Then it might occur to me, intelligence is love. This wholly different approach to thinking, not limited to words, can see, yes, there is fear, but not fear as a concept, not some other part of life, compared to another. We can see there is the whole way of living, and see focusing on any one word, fear or love, desire, intelligence, or any other word, and thinking this is important, is the product of a fragmented mind, not in the wholeness of living.

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Any honest person who participates in this forum knows his/her mind is “fragmented”. Do you consider yourself an exception?

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I ask myself, am I deluded, am I taking the words, thinking I know what it is, and not going beyond the words, staying on a verbal level, a level of cleverness, not seeing I am the thinker? This is what I am asking, myself. The awareness of the thinker asking questions, doesn’t stick to what he/she knows, in fact this is all in the past, in memory, and there is a movement, a communing, which is all new, fresh, a discovery.

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What is the reader to do with this statement? It makes no sense. What is it that “doesn’t stick to what he/she knows”? Does awareness know anything? Is “the thinker” real?

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What does the reader do with it? I don’t know. Its up to the reader. But I am not a book. I am communicating with people and it is read in the mind of the reader. It is received in the mind. Then the thinker adds all this stuff from their intellect, from memory, and there are all kinds of images, methods and strategies, which they are trying to work through. This is the fragmented mind. This fragmented mind is fundamentally conditioned from some basic reaction, desire, fear, to find a path to safety, security, the known. This is all mechanical, in the mind, and is a false response.