Thoughts are Not Feeling Neutral

Thinking as the activity of intention-generation is accompanied by both feeling and breathing. 

Obviously, breathing does not always accompany our thinking but in the originating activity of narratives, breathing was tied to the thinking. This results in a patterning of feeling/breathing that leaves an incarnate trace effect. Most acts leave patterned deposits. If a similar action is taken in the future, that action will, in turn, build on the prior act and so on and so on until a kind of breath/feeling takes root. Perhaps the metaphor of a sandpile on the beach may serve to make the point. We build a sizeable mound of sand on the beach and then proceed to pour buckets of water on the top of the mound. When the water is poured it naturally seeks its own level downward. In doing so, it will form rivulets in the mound. As we continue to pour these buckets of water on the top of the mound some of the rivulets will attract more of the water than others and consequently they will deepen attracting even more water than the others with future pours. In an earlier blog post, I used the example of the sedimentary rock layers of the Grand Canyon. It was, very importantly, noted that the foundation layers--it is layers all the way down, with no perceivable bottom in this semi-fictitious example--are still an influence to more current and even the presently forming layer. Influence from the remote bottom layers is still effectual when the patterning influence of foundational layers on all subsequent layers is taken into effect. Consequently, the actions taken by our ancestors are still influential as are our actions taken in the present. The present, inclusive of all sorts of conditions which are truly infinite in scope, gives rise to what we of finite perception consider to be novelty. No amount of calculation could possibly be inclusive enough to fathom the prevailing conditions of the present.

Our past lives, for it is only incarnate actions that can take place, are truly ours in this sense. For we are the inheritors of the past into the present toward the intentional future--the only future that may be said to truly exist. 

It should be noted... 

This movement gives rise to inclinations that, in accordance with their repetition and severity of impact, will generate similar acts in future. This is habit, the result of repetition. This is why practice works. Much like form and color, thinking, breathing, and feeling are not separable but they are distinguishable. Distinguishing this triune movement is not always evident. In fact, for most of us, it would take a good deal of practice, especially meditation practice, to access this type of subtle observation. Once gained, this skill proves helpful in attenuating unwanted habits, those that cause suffering are the most relevant to our concerns.

To be continued...

Immunity from the Virus-Narratives

Once narratives or stories or thoughts are repeated, sometimes ad nauseum, remind yourself that all narratives are felt narratives. Their repetition carves out feeling "channels" in which flow the breath along with those narratives. Repetition ensures that the narrative-feelings are sedimented as patterned and therefore they feel right, meaning they feel familiar and are held--by the uncritical eye--as being real. For corroboration, we can always appeal to our friends and family who themselves have probably been exposed to the virus-narratives along with you.

For a more neutral example of what I'm saying is hair. For those of us burdened with hair, the morning mirror check is often an important part of a start to our day. Often, we don't leave the house without it. How do we know when our hair is "right" for the start of the day? Is it exclusively an intellectual judgment? See for yourself. Doesn't it have to not only look right but feel right? Aren't we uncomfortable when it isn't? Our body says, "No, not yet." We have to feel comfortable with our hair prior to leaving. This is not simply an intellectual appraisal.

Now, there is nothing true or false about the morning hair is there? But, there is something it feels like to be right or wrong. Right?


All acts, be they of mind or body, have to feel justified. Don't believe it? Witness this for yourself. The basis of justification is feelings, it is, in the end, the body-feelings that decide. Feelings are of three kinds: pleasureable, painful, and neutral or indifferent. For the most part, feelings decide and thought justifies. 

More on Free Will (The following is subject to revision.)

These are scattered thoughts that I am working on in a continuation of my notes on free will. They are not definitive although some of them may be worth your consideration. See if they fit. 

Here it is. The statements are bold, no less. Read them. Ask yourself, "Why would anyone, this man, say these things?" This is a question that many would not bother asking.

However, once you read these assertions and fully observe first hand, the simple and direct truth of these assertions while the movement of decisions and actions i.e., living, is occurring, then everything will change.

What I actually do is enacted ahead of my reasons for doing it. Reasons are not what guides me, the alleged agent of my actions, in the mode of living of action. Reasons follow upon the enacting of the decision. 

We are not free agents and we do not have free will. 

In fact, why I do and what I do are decisions made without consulting me first. 

If you do observe this in its unfolding from unmanifest to manifest, from potentiality to actuality, it is yours and all of the implications that go with it and all of the implications will gradually become yours as well. This simple observation will be the beginning of the unfolding of these unsettling implications and this process will take as long as it takes.

However, the knowing necessary for doing is a form of unmanifest knowing. It is an unmanifest, silent sentience result-ing from prior acts. 

Do you observe this? Is this something true for you? It is comparable to attempting to see the ground beneath your feet. Decisions are made by the omniscient and sentient-silence of the unfolding of historical determinations or karma.

Coming soon..."The Fundamental Reality"

This is one of the most important things to learn for helpful navigation of living. Here goes:

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The Fundamental Reality is Experiencing: Being is Becoming

The implications of this realization, or position if you like, are, at once, staggering and dangerous. They are also awe-some and magnificent. The unfolding of some of the implications and the dangers of doing so will be the topic of this blog. Stop back soon, please. 

On Mannequins, Portraits and Karma: A Prelude to Ethics

Here we begin with a question put to your memory. Have you ever seen a portrait where the eyes of a person being portrayed seem to follow you? As you move from one side to another the eyes follow as if the person was actually looking at you, or so it seems. Some might even think it creepy. Now, have you ever been, say, in a store or a place where we might find a mannequin? Have you ever said "excuse me" to a mannequin? Have you ever perceived a mannequin as a living person, even if it was just for a split-second? How are two situations like this possible? What might this tell us about our human experience? What must be happening for that experience to occur? What might we learn about experience that will help us, at the very least, to minimize the difficulties that we face as sentient beings?

A look at these experiences may function as a heuristic opening a door to the realization that it is in and through our own experience that other living beings become what and who they are and bear the meanings they appear to embody. In a very immediate sense, sentience may be granted to a mannequin. It does happen that we may perceive an insentient mannequin as a sentient being, a person. Or we may perceive a painting as being haunted when its eyes appear to follow us as we move through a room.

The sentience-granting function of our own pure form of subjectivity, i.e., the manner in which we feel alive as the I-am sense, is immediately attributed as the sentient other or, as Edmund Husserl has said, "constitutes" the other, by our own sense of self-existence at that very moment. All others, in this sense, live through us. We are truly the "lights unto the world(s)." This process lives in each and every conscious moment of our existence. In one critical but obscured and forgotten sense, there is the experiential possibility of seeing that the sentient other--and this includes more than I will state here--is, in a very real sense, an embodiment of your own pure form of self or radical subjectivity.  


What the others are or become is granted or imputed by our own repertoire of beliefs and concepts that have been historically given by the past (incarnate) acts of others and our own contributions. This repertoire or storehouse of knowledge results from the prior incarnate acts--including experiences which are also acts in their own way--of sentient beings. This past lives within us and functions to constitute our present experience in our intention-filled acts toward an anticipated future. All acts are incarnate and remain with us in fractal-like sediment of a living past. In this sense, the past may be said to live in each act seeking fulfillment as intentional acts. This is what is called by Buddhists and Yogis karma. The past is alive constituting the present toward an anticipated future. These intentional acts not only constitute present circumstances but the living others in our experience. Who people or other sentient beings become (their what) is the doing of living past acts (karma) as incarnated in each and every circumstance we face.

At this point, it almost goes without saying that the circumstances we face result from past acts. We face these circumstances intentionally. Not as free agents willing what is but as embodiments of past acts that aim toward.  Our desires, i.e., intentionality, will organize the circumstances based on what either fulfills or thwarts the intentions. The future is an intended future that lives now as experience moves as time. Time, in this sense of the term, is synonymous with the ephemeral movement of experience structured by past actions of body, speech, and mind. Each moment is organized by the past toward an intended future and as an evanescent appearance and disappearance of phenomena--including the composition and dissolution of self-senses. These self-senses also incarnate ephemeral time ever appearing/disappearing. Selves are movements in dynamic meaningful circumstances organized within the appearing and disappearing intentional movements of experience or living. As the Buddha suggested, we may note five continually aggregating meaningful movements of perceptions, feelings, consciousnesses, intentions, and objectivities--intentionally structured ephemeral aggregations of experienced elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space, rise and fall as meaningful and intentional experience. As time, as experience, this happens too fast for the conceptualization process to account for. It attempts in vain to picture or freeze into ideas or concepts that either take stock of ephemeral experience in their fabrication or unintentionally overlook the manner in which experience occurs, based on axiomatic historically driven presuppositions that give rise to deleterious outcomes, i.e., suffering. One of the major axioms in place is the notion that we are a self within a material universe that exists independently of its constituting and dynamic elements. We ignore karma at our peril, as should be evident by now.

A careful look at the conceptualization process itself reveals it to be one ephemeral element of the movement of experience as time. Concepts rise and fall in relation to circumstances and their ephemerality and their historical constitution are overlooked in favor of attending to them as referential. What they say about becomes more important than what they mean and are. The danger of the about is not seen as they perform well for the notions of self and world that they seem to refer to as a result of mistaken usages of their heredity.

Of course and as always this examination will remain incomplete for readers to make of it what they may. History, intentions (intentionality), prior acts will not only weigh in

This is an unedited version.         

  

Choice, Free Will, and Karma: Experience Shows the Way

Let me begin by making three assertions and one prescription.

1.) There is no free will.

2.) The self is ephemeral and does not choose, i.e., choice does not happen in experience. If choice is perceived, then you are not observing experience you are simply inclined to mistake a false narrative as a true one.

3.) The self is an ephemeral manifestation that makes its appearance via a narrative, whether one is aware of its occurrence or not. What defines the self in this sense of the word is purely narrative in nature.

4.) Do not rely on anything that moves. 

The Meaning of Living (or, as they say "life")

The point of it all is it all. The point of life is living. The movement of experience good, bad, or indifferent is the point of it all. And, here is the kicker. The experience is not ours. We, as the self, normal everyday experience, mystical, inter-dimensional, sacred, profane, happy, or sad is what life, as it is lived, is all about. The experience is not ours. That is the point. We do not live. We are merely instruments for that which does. I use the word that loosely. This is not metaphysics or ontology. This is not a statement of conceptual fact. This is what we live every day. No self-continuity is obvious to us in actual, full-blown living. No matter the quality of it, the living is taking place and we are merely a phenomenal component of the movement. Experience is selfing through it all. Selfing is what experience does. The reality of life is experience itself. That's it. The meaning of life is experience itself. That's it. The point of it all is living. Living as experience is all there is. Here is the proof, and watch it happen, after reading this, we will make something of it whether we want to or not. Just watch. We can't stop it. We don't have a choice. We have to act. We must do. It is the first real commandment. Thou shalt act!


The good try to change things for the good. The bad try to change things for the good, for themselves.

--Yogi Ananda Viraj