The most prominent of them is the notion of identity. I think for a majority of people, we perceive ourselves as the individual person that is experiencing something and thus finite and discrete. The concepts of being connected to a larger being make sense in religious terms, but there isn't a tangible, moment to moment identity that establishes what this link to the divine is or might be.
In this exploration, those thoughts began to come in focus a little more than in the past. I found myself expanding out into trying to leap from one thought to the next, and I began to ask why? Why do we search for something beyond our current understanding of reality? Why is our current understanding not enough? Why do we need more comprehension, deeper awareness, more connection for it to be enough?
It became clearer over time that this pursuit of more thought, more insight, is equal in motivation and dillusion to the pursuit of more wealth, more love, more physical perfection. It started to occur to me that it made no sense to search for more thought, just like it made no sense to search for more wealth or love because my searching in those areas always led me to the awareness that there is always more things to acquire, more love to be had or given, more perfection to achieve to. The pursuit of more is always a pursuit of making time to find what is just beyond us with the hopes that it, whatever it will be, will make us content.
But as can be seen in life, achieving more only leads to the awareness that we need more. The more money you make, the more you buy, the more money you need. The more love you get the more love you must give, and thus the more love you must consume. The more beautiful you are, the more beauty you seek around you.
So as with thought, it holds true.
I found myself running through the normal sequence of thoughts, with a fear that if I were to stop thinking, then what? Would I die? Was my endless stream of thoughts keeping me alive? Without a ticker tape of observations, memories, projections into the future, and anxieties...what would happen? Do I go brain dead? Is that the death of the ego?
So in a moment, I would test making a choice to just accept where I am at, accept that this is where my thoughts might end. I tried to accept that there are others that may move forward, infinitely into time, thinking all thoughts. And even though their thoughts and lives would not be experienced by my own personal incarnation, could I be okay with that? It is a curious experiment because it starts to become clearer that there is the you you've always known, that is becoming conscious of thoughts, and then there is the you in between thoughts.
Silly questions like, "Do I have to think a thought for it to exist? Can it exist in a potential reality and maybe I stumble upon it in meditation and bring it to consciousness?" pop up and being to fill your mind, when you stop rushing forward towards the next thought, the next moment. It's sort of like at a deep level, we have this fear of "this" being it. And because we're not ready for "this" to be it, we then create another moment to see if that moment is the "it" that we can be happy with.
These ideas quickly unravel the normal perceptions of time and experience. It becomes clearer that maybe there are things happening right now, and it's only after a certain "length of time" that we become conscious of it. It's almost like there is a land or realm before time as we know it, in which all manner of things are determined and played out. The effects of that realm are what we become conscious of and thus experience as life. When really life, and all of the past as we know it, is the decayed remnants of a previous moment of time that occurred in the unconscious mind.
This thought creates an interesting prospect: you are not in control. Your life is the echo of a previous experience and the inability for you to predict the future is because you are not able to experience the information contained within unconsciousness. In this instance, you are not the creator of your life, nor will any moment in the future be able to change you. Instead it is actually at much more immediate point, right now, that everything is changing in subtle ways and your mind is running laps trying to evaluate one moment to the next to create a story about what is happening or might happen in the future.
That's a lot of energy to spend when it all happens in the unconscious, no?
It also begs the discussion over our obsession with death and fears about dying. Because if one recognizes that "life" is really just experiencing death, or the observation of now fading away, then it makes the notion of death quite silly. In this scenario, life is the constant experience of death. We are so terrified at every moment that we might be dead that we keep checking only to realize that our desire to check and see if we're dead, creates life or the experience of seeing death.
Talk about the truth being right infront of your face. Each moment is the death of moment that occurred and is now fading into the past. Maybe some day we'll tire of observing our death and being afraid of our dying, and realize we are at a deep level, the source of life, or connected to it. And thus if we are connected to it, then whatever that source is...it is the source that enables us to feel love or fear. It sheds it's skin which we experience as life...when really it is the decaying fragment of life.
And thus, the now, in all of its forms, are the perfect reflection of the source of life. Now is the heaven that we seek. It is the place before consciousness, the place before time that radiates out.
Here's a quick reality check: Are you afraid of never getting mad at someone again? Maybe not? How peaceful it would be to never be mad again,right? But then ask this....Are you afraid of never getting to love another person again or be loved by another person? Maybe so? It occurred to me that people perceive love as the thing that calls us back to life, that love stays with you after you die, etc.
And after the whole gamut of thought above it occurred to me, that maybe it is not love that calls us back into life, but a fear of not getting to experience *more* love. Furthermore, maybe the fear of change that we all experience is the one in which we are afraid of not getting to be " ourself" any more. How silly right? When will you not be yourself? Especially if the self you perceive is really just the emanation from a previous source.
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