What is Thought?

[Birch]

I think of beliefs as just a subset of habit. Belief includes the language component, whereas habit also includes all that pre-language stuff.

 

Of course, some of my habits are habits of avoidance, and those are even less obvious and thus, more insidious. At least attachments make some noise, so I know how to pay attention to them. But the avoidances are self-blindness, and it's hard to see what I don't see.

 

 

Well, I'm not so sure. I've been contemplating this one somewhat. I mean if we really don't see/know. How do we know that there's something that we don't see/know? It's that dog eating grass problem (again )

 

I think that shining the floodlight of mindfulness on everything is helpful, but if you really want to hide yourself in the dark then I'm sure that's doable as well. Concurrently to boot

 

I think we accept 'unconsciousness' or 'the unconscious' as a psychological given when it might not actually be that obvious that it exists. I'm starting to figure that it might not be so. I guess if you're mindful 24/7 (or at least when not asleep) that might be a consequence. I dunno, I think there's a BS alert somewhere around the whole "unconscious" thing. Oh, especially the efforts made by people to keep their consciousness on the down-low...

[Otis]

Well, I'm not so sure. I've been contemplating this one somewhat. I mean if we really don't see/know. How do we know that there's something that we don't see/know?

Well, that's the tricky thing. We won't know until we wake up to it. That's why, IME, avoidance is the hardest thing to change.

 

An example from my own life. Only a couple years ago, I finally woke up to the fact that I have been avoiding mirrors, my whole life. Of course, my grooming was pretty poor, as consequence. Now that I am conscious of the avoidance habit, I've done a lot of practice to shake up that fear (by making faces at myself in the mirror), and I have made a good deal of progress with it. But it still hasn't gone fully away, because my habit of not looking is so well etched into my brain.

[Marblehead]

 

An example from my own life. Only a couple years ago, I finally woke up to the fact that I have been avoiding mirrors, my whole life. Of course, my grooming was pretty poor, as consequence. Now that I am conscious of the avoidance habit, I've done a lot of practice to shake up that fear (by making faces at myself in the mirror), and I have made a good deal of progress with it. But it still hasn't gone fully away, because my habit of not looking is so well etched into my brain.

 

Just as long as you don't think that it is "you" in the mirror I think you will be okay. Hehehe.

 

Hey, if you get a good handle on making faces you could become a clown.

[manitou]

 

 

The weirdness I can sort of get, but the "how in the hell am I aware that it's weird" is something I'm not "getting" - unless I go down the pure conscious awareness blah blah blah route. Oh crap, that would mean that this pure consciousness stuff is either entirely plausible or...???

 

 

As to being the observer of the weirdness, this reminds me of waking up into a dream in the morning - floating along with the dream for a while, thinking it makes perfect sense. Then, when you decide to open your eyes and actually get up, you realize 'Damn! - that was one weird dream!' It's like there's this separate reality in dreams where causation is entirely omitted, and yet at some level we fully understand what the dream is doing. Our waking self apparently requires the cause and effect-ness of our daily understanding. The dream is happening all Here, all Now. I've heard it said that although it seems that dreams may involve a long span of 'time' (to our sleeping perception), they actually occur in a very short time. Somehow our dreaming mind is not respectful of the laws of time or space or gravity.