thoughtvoke.

a thought to share

As I was meditating, I was hit by this thought. I was talking earlier to my friend and in conversation we started talking about how incredible reflexive thought is at saving us in high speed situations. Considering driving and all the high speed tasks we become involved with, I assume everyone has encountered a life threatening scenario in which they were in a highly dangerous position in some context in which their reflexes saved their life. Keeping this in mind, the majority of these instructions are passed through ones brain prior to even being consciously identified and issued. These instructions are partially put together by subconscious intellect, and partially prearranged and stored by the conscious intellect.

Since all of the information that is passed into our minds is through language or experience from a multitude of sources, sometimes being supplied with instructions via reflexive subconscious instincts, it can often be very surprising what the contents consist of. I was thinking about how often I am surprised and sometimes dumbfounded by what content my mind is providing me. I previously used the example of how our mind often surprises us by saving us by immediately providing us with the ability to balance ourselves very well for example, in order to avoid some unfavorable repercussion. In our surprise we often think in reflection: “I never knew I could balance so well!” Such an instance is a great example of what I intend on talking about.

Since this happens, I also have been practicing something that I recently read within the Upanishads. The psychological act of directing ones conscious attention to that of watching and observing itself. Not necessarily the act of narcissism, because the idea of narcissism is an entire different subject altogether. But now that I've mentioned it I must then clarify how it is that the act of getting to know the knower, or getting to know your mind, is drastically different from narcissism. Narcissism is that of falling into a emotional state of love with the projected image of oneself. Becoming familiar with oneself is a person developing a fairly respectable memory of what it is that their brain most frequently engages its focus upon. By categorizing their consciousness into a memory, or a series of memories, they become able to better identify, and respond appropriately to events in the exact same manner as one does with reflex-oriented subconscious thought.

This is why I have found the act of learning and refining meditation to be a tremendously helpful activity to practice. One aspect that is very important to this practice is that the entire process of meditation is designed to equip one with a strong ability to combat the ego's prominent tool of craving. Craving within the will is the main instrument that it often selects in order to dominate ones mind completely. By gaining absolute control over the mind by forcing it to submit to tremendous desire, craving is the specific tool that the mind selects for generating said desire. Craving being desire given a direction or path to seek. But how is craving that which is supposed to generate desire if desire is the cause of craving? The logic of cause and effect has a beginning which produces the possibility for an ending. Cause being the beginning and effect being the end point, tremendous desire then in the beginning while craving is the intended destination.

Considering this logical chain of events of the mind, I now what to explore the concept of happiness. Comfortably arriving at a satisfactory answer differs for all of us. Since this is the case, I want to attempt to vaguely outline the conditions for happiness. For this task I will refer to the outline of Buddhas nirvana, which literally means: “blowing out” or “quenching” of desire/craving/grasping. I have personally found that dedicating ones conscious goals toward that of “blowing out” or at least the effort of doing so has very positive benefits, but that is beside my intended point. What I was trying to point out is that terrible and miserable conditions for the human psyche are those that are grasping or desperately reaching toward an alternative realization of reality. The very act that seems to consistently follow all human beings that are in a state of agony is that of grasping or yearning for an alternative position relative to their current position and place in time.

Considering this, what then comes to mind to help a person cease this process of endless grasping? For some they eventually arrive at the choice of physical death, while others select other options that can safely provide them with the means to not be forced to consistently postulate how their mind can be occupied. This gets deeply into psychology, and I am by far no expert in such a realm. I just want to provide one hypothetical example to illustrate this process. Let us take the instance of a relationship ending. We can then divide it into two separate parties. We have person A, and person B. Person A ends the relationship, while, person B is provided with the terms of the ending notion of the relationship. A very common default example. Considering that they had a strong attachment developed between person A and B, since A initially designed the ending terms, it would then seem sensible to say person A no longer had a craving mechanism for person B. But what about person B? If they contained mutual love for one another then it would be sensible to say that both person A and B craved one another companionship. If person A ends the relationship without first working together to arrive at said decision, then the status of person B's level of craving is completely unknowable to person A. Since this is the case, we then arrive where level of craving for person B still exists for person A. How then can person B deal with this directionless grasping they contain within their heart? Just to quickly provide a quick quote from the Dhammapada I recently read: “Hatred can not bring an end to hatred. Love alone can, this is an unalterable law.” Such a powerful quote, but it is one that I due believe completely.

What I was trying to get to what the wonders of the spontaneous list of thoughts we are provided with the moment we awake. Many of these thoughts are prescribed by the routine and nature of culture and language. I can say with a strong sense of certainty that what type of thoughts we dealt with consistently as prehistoric homo sapiens were vastly different from those we deal with as modern homo sapiens. Anyways the main topic I am still trying to get at is that of pessimism. Just as desire is the cause and craving is the effect, I suspect that pessimism is the cause while depression is the effect. Just to state that I do not at all claim to be providing a complete and thorough comprehension of depression, this is simply a simple example similar to how my previous example concerning love was as simple as possible. Love can manifest in a wide variety of ways thus making it a highly complex thing to build an example upon. Precisely as with love, depression can develop due to a large array of different circumstances. My little example placing pessimism as the root cause of depression in many instances may be completely absurd, but I am going to use that logical model using my personal experiences in regards to sadness.

One thing I developed was a very pessimistic voice in how I interpreted things in relation to other things. I think the primary reason gravitated toward this mode of rational was that I believe the efficiency and rational accuracy of a darker more negative depiction of things and their relationship with other things, was ultimately superior to that of optimistic linguistic practices and emotional modes. I think it also was more artistically interesting and a more dynamic manner of conceptually imagining the world we live in. Another thing it really resonated with in regards to me was that of humor. I also believe a was fairly interested in how things functioned, and in understanding how something functions, deconstructionism plays an essential role in systematically disassembling something to understand the logical chain it plays a part in. Pessimism also plays an essential role in the logical process of deconstructionism. By trying to take things apart, you have to think of the exact opposite logical sequence of putting something together. In doing that, by taking something apart piece by piece, you are refining your eyes sense of where to find weakness or the critical point of attachment to then weaken it to be able to successfully separate the thing that was intended to potentially never come apart. But I was able to derive great joy in my taking of thing apart and discovering how they worked. This was also a key strategy in developing a good strategy in order to compete in sports, video-games, card games, chess, go, ect. Also, the colors correlated in negativity resonated with me emotionally much better and suited the depictions of things more appropriately. Finally I must mention one of my major artistic contributions that influenced me toward a pessimistic mental voice. I think I will best attempt to explain this by my fascination with Frederic Chopin. Truly the person who grabbed my minds appreciation of conceptual beauty, and slung me toward that of absolute desire to reproduce such sound with my own two hands. First it was my father and singing at church, then later my father and his talent, then it was Jimi Hendrix and the guitar, but finally I arrived at Chopin, and in my love of the piano as an instrument I began to investigate other pianist and I was hooked.

Although I feel as if that is a fairly interesting reasoning behind the why pertaining to the cause of this cause-effect duo, firmly clinging to the identity that created such reasoning is the opposite of acquiring the supreme goal of arriving to nirvana. Arriving to the destination of nirvana is that which is supposed to liberate one from the perpetual cycle of rebirths (samsara). I have also neglected to mention all of my terrible life instances due to sadness. The main thing that has consistently ruined my aspirations toward every goal I have set was that of sadness. Ultimately I am writing this post to attempt to express my goal and intention to abolish sadness the best that I can. Such a goal is by far the most challenging one any conscious entity can attempt to aspire to, and most likely I will fail miserably. But openly expressing myself in this manner is the first step I am going to attempt.

I initially wanted to end this in a completely different manner. I already failed in that I start rambling on about myself and not what I wanted to end with. So what I was previously talking about was how our mind is always issued a prepared list of items for us to consciously focus upon. What I intend to try to saturate my mind with is Buddhist notions and directions of thought that will begin inhabit my natural conscious list of things to do rather than my old manner of how my mind grew accustom to providing me with. The one exception I've made that I refused to part with but has already begun to deteriorate significantly is that of classical piano. I have the old habit of improvising music on the piano that I want to continue, thus I am combining that discipline with the Buddhist idea of creating a mandala. I suppose I am just going to paint musical mandalas.

Cheers

周培森