How do you know when you are thinking? To know that you are thinking there has to be a you and then there has to be thinking, something the you does. If thinking is something the you does, then it shouldn’t happen unless you do it. Is this not so?

I can gauge how well I am thinking when I play chess or hearts on the computer. Sometimes I just space out and don’t pay attention. Also I have a hard time remembering words when my brain is foggy which makes things like role play difficult.

If I don’t wash dishes then no dishes will be washed by me. If I don’t think thoughts, in my experience, thoughts will occur to me anyway. Why is that if I am an actively thinking being? Why would thought occur without my control?

The brain is always working.

It would seem to imply we’re receivers.

If the brain has thoughts on it’s own, then how did it ever have thoughts in any other way?

By clinging to those thoughts? Making a story of them? What is this clinging? What is it that clings and how does it do that?

The ego, and it does this in order to make itself appear solid?

I have memories that would seem to suggest I have an identity. A history and reasons for what I do, but in my experience these can’t cling to anything, gather anything or create anything new. Their presence is always old, always static, if left to themselves.

If we have the illusion that “we” are thinking, rather than it happening to us, then we appear individual, no?

The brain is like a car on autopilot that is always moving, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. You can let it go all by itself, or you can take the wheel and steer it.

What is it that directs the brain?

I’m not sure but I’ve noticed that will or intention is a force of some kind.

Superego? Ah, superego is very passive, reactive, also incoherent. It typically triggers frequent cognitive dissonance. This is why we have experiences of conflicting emotions and values. Super ego is why we get confused, and to perhaps clarify, when most people speak of the evils of the ego, what they generally are speaking of is Freud’s super ego. What supposedly should be, how you supposedly should act, or how you should feel, as opposed to how you actually are.

How do you know how you are?

Inventory of tensions?

Mood.

Recognition?

I know how I am because of the physical clues.

The world is filled with countless things. The inner world is equally filled with countless things, which of these is you?

The witness to these things? Does the witness only witness? Does the witness remain untouched? Unchanged by experience?

I don’t think so.

In my experience, if we recognize the difference between the witness and the witnessed, yes, it can remain unchanged, but do we want it to? 

The truth is paradoxical. It both does and does not. The genuine realization to be had there is that the witness and the things witnessed are the same thing. There is a lot of talk about this from various meditation authorities generally advocating an effort to immerse the self in some supposedly superior state of unity with all things. I question the usefulness of that.

When it comes to self, nothing is right or wrong, nothing is normal. Everything is normal. Unity. Actually, when it comes to the self, there is only right and wrong, only normal and abnormal, only the experience of creative differentiation. The reality this process occurs in is another matter all together.

So can you observe what you choose? Do you see what you want to see? Experience what you want to experience?

Perhaps with extreme effort, but ultimately I’m not sure we can.

In a sense…if you change your perception then you see things differently?

The reason I do not espouse the concept of mystical unity, is to my intuition, my inner experience, we are not meant to exist as a cog in a vast cosmic pattern. We are meant to be active components, active individual agents in the field of experience. Is this an unreasonable view?

Or perhaps it’s always what we want and we deny it.

No, I like that view.

You say, “we are meant”…who decides that?

Maybe a better way to say that would be, we mean to. The observer and the intended are one and the same being. If you seek the self, seek to experience the genuine self, then the experience of the process of structured perception, creative direction of attention, is where you will find that. Just as the baby grows to be familiar with it’s limbs, we can grow to be familiar with not only what happens in our experience, which is the same thing as what happens in our mind, but also why. We are not simply beings of light. We are beings of information, formation. Information is formation, is creation.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~