My initial reaction to this was to roll my eyes: What a bunch of malarkey!
But I let that settle and had another look.
What is the totality of thought? Who/What’s asking the question: Thought is. So thought is asking: What am I, the whole of me? First thought does a survey: Am I made of ideas? Yes. Images? Yes. Memories? Yes. Speculation? Yes. Emotions and feelings? Well that’s subtler, so: yes and no. And so on. And so on. (And so on!)
Then thought wonders: Am I everything? Am I the creator and maintainer of all-that-is? Am I the one true God?
If not, if I have a limit, what is it? How could I see my own limit, is it like a fish swimming up to the surface and seeing, experiencing the limit of water? Or is it like being in a sealed-off room and feeling the boundary of four walls, floor, and ceiling?
It can’t. It is limited. There can always be something more added to it. But that’s not really our question. Our question is about what it means to meet a problem or a question with the totality of thought so that there isn’t a single fragment left over to cause mischief. Then there is only the question or the problem. And thought has altogether disappeared. That’s the totality of it. The totality of thought is in its complete absence, not in its partial presence.
So that every tool, type, aspect of thought is directed towards the question. Ideas, intuition, feeling, logic, images, imagination, memory, extrapolation … all, as a whole, investigating the question.
That kind of investigation must always be limited by the experiences of the investigator. It will always be a partial response. It is only in the total absence of thought that a complete response is possible. When you are faced with an impossible question which has no answer to it in immediate memory then this is the only sensible approach for thought to take. It disappears altogether. And when it is necessary, useful, sensible to use memory, it comes back in. Thought has learnt to act intelligently. And this too is then part of its memory; it doesn’t have to go through the whole process over and over again.
Yes, intelligence, right thinking, skillfulness … these involve knowing when thought is the proper tool for the job and when not. In this forum, for example, you draw upon thought to read and understand and write postings. But to answer questions brought up in postings you often need to turn to a different tool, more of a choiceless awareness looking.
Your insult aside, my point is that images, sounds, and spectacles have significance, and the fact that words are used to label their significance is secondary - not primal - as you stubbornly assert. We are rooted in the imagery, sound, spectacle, etc., that have significance for us - not in the words we attach to images, sounds, and spectacles. We are rooted in the wordless, but because of our condition, we are limited to language.
Then where is the insult? Who is it that is feeling insulted? That’s the reality in which you are rooted, not all the other wishful stuff. You see, you don’t face these things seriously. You would rather stay lost in a lot of crazy theories.
Love is not related to the mind, it can be understood by negation.
" Love is not opposite of hate, Love has no relation to jealousy, Love is not attachment, Love has not relation to peace, Love is not pleasure and Love is not a desire"
Love is just a state of mind. The word “LOVE” in the sentence “I LOVE YOU” was misunderstood in our society, I guess.
But what is there to learn about love? It is there or it is absent. We can’t fill the gap with our learning. So don’t be limited. The moment you say, ‘I am limited’, you have imposed that limitation upon yourself. Then love becomes an escape from limitation, an ideal. This isn’t a view or an opinion; we are just seeing the simple facts. Looking at these simple facts together may be the essence of love, not that far-off ideal.
Are we together looking at the same thing? Then love or the lack of love won’t be an issue, will it?
Worth it for whom? Here is the whole issue exposed to our view. Are we engaging in this dialogue as two, three or four separate entities? Then we’ll always come away with our bellies empty. Or thought is having a dialogue into the depths of itself, into the heart of what is commonly called our human consciousness.
That is impossible, even between the members of the same family. There will be some disagreements on some topics, it does not mean that there is no Love.
We are physically and mentally separated, each in our own spaces and first-person heads. We might imagine we are together, but is that really ‘together?’
