Techniques and Theory
Six: Pure Mindfulness
It is deplorable that human beings are so immersed in habit that they are unable to break free.
When a person is habituated to see only physical things in his thoughts, it seems to him that thought itself is a physical and sensory phenomenon.
If this is your belief, you have erred, and not only regarding imagery and thought. Do not be so sure that even your senses are entirely physical. After all, you have never seen the sense of sight nor ever heard the sense of hearing. You have only sensed those things that sight sees or hearing hears. But once you are removed from the object that is seen or the sound that is heard, your sense of sight or hearing disappears. You do not sense them. And so in truth, why assume that the sense of sight itself is physical and can see nothing but physical things? Perhaps it is capable of seeing everything, including nonphysical thingsBbut since you only bring it physical things, you have habituated it only to use its physical sight.
I have elsewhere spoken of how Athe wisdom of a man illuminates his face@ (Kohelet 8:1). Everyone can recognize whether someone else is intelligent or foolish, pure or coarse. Such sight is not physical, for whether someone is intelligent or foolish, pure or coarse, does not affect his features.
At every stage of a person=s ascent, there exists the stumbling block of an inability to transcend habit.
No matter how much we may want to explain reality to such a person, no matter how much we might wish to enlighten him, it is difficult to successfully bring him to realize that truth is the opposite of what his eyes perceive. His habit elicits a sort of hidden stubbornness in his heart that does not allow him to shift by a hair=s-breadth from his original conceptions.
How can we raise such person beyond the earth? When he hears words such as these, words that contradict his habitual experience, he thinks and exclaims, AWhat is this man talking about? Is he saying that this world is not physical and that I myself do not know who I am? This man of the spirit person is mad!@
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Essentially, what you lack is the ability to expand your thought to pure mindfulness, stripped of physical form and image. You demand of every thought that arises in your mind a physical form and image, since you are habituated only to these types of thought. If this does not appear, you do not even recognize what you are experiencing as thought.
In truth, I am not saying that imageless thoughts never arise in your mind. They do. However, our consciousness possesses a critical filter that screens and checks all of our thoughts. Any thought not similar to this-worldly existence appears to that filter as counterfeit, and it pursues this thought and wipes it out of your mind.
For instance, although thoughts of impossible things arise in a child=s mind, such as that he can fly, and so forth. They do not enter an adult=s mind. The filtering faculty that has grown within him evaluates this thought and compares it to the things of this world that he can see and hear. So efficiently does it expel and deny any counterfeit thought that it seems to him that the thought never even entered his mind. This filter is so developed and has such influence on his mind that it blocks and intimidates any counterfeit thought from crossing the doorsill of his consciousness. He does not even sense this filtering faculty. Instead, it appears to him that these thoughts simply don=t occur to him.
And now in regard to our topic, it is not that you do not have any thought stripped of physical form. Such thoughts do arise within you. But since the filter in your mind is habituated only to thoughts with form, it chases away any pure thought. Since you do not even sense this filtering faculty, it seems that no formless thought or imagination exists within you at all.
In truth, however, once a person is convinced that a true thought cannot resemble a this-worldly image, and once he has expanded and broadened pure thought within himself, when such a thought arises in him, he thinks, imagines and sees in accordance with the state of holiness and throne of glory of the root, the place from where his soul is hewn. He is not bothered by a lack of physical form and thus his filter does not block his thought.
However, when he starts to analyze this experience, asking AWhat am I thinking and seeing?,@ he has already descended, and he can no longer understand himself and his previous thought. This analysis is a return to comparing his every thought to the thoughts and forms of this world.
