Tag Archives: awareness

Thought Balloons

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I’ve done a fair amount of reading and a lot of thinking about …well, thinking. And consciousness. According to ChatGPT (PDF) the two are different but related.

One view that feels right to me is that thoughts think themselves. Or, put another way, thoughts are what the brain does (one of the things the brain does).

For the past couple of days I’ve been visualizing thoughts (?) as toy balloons floating into and out of awareness. (Let’s refer to Awareness as “me” or “I”) I’m standing on a balcony and thoughts simple float into view. Unbidden. Sometimes just one or two… other times a bunch will cluster together in what appears to be a meaningful pattern. (see comment below for thoughts as bubbles and refrigerator magnets)

If I ignore the balloons, they simple float up and away. But too often I reach out and grab one (or several) and hold onto them. Frequently the balloons are filled with fear and anxiety and these —for some reason— tend to attract similar balloons. Why would someone hold onto these?

There seems to be no limit to how many balloons I can hang onto at once. Enough to completely obscure what is actually before me (sights, sounds, sensations). And, as it turns out, these thoughts are mostly unnecessary. The body is, and has always been, mostly on autopilot.

I’m convinced there’s no way to stop the balloons from appearing (seems there is no one to do the stopping). Can I resist the urge to reach out and grab a balloon? Can I immediately let it go? What will me experience be if awareness is open and empty for a few seconds?

The Kekulé Problem

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“The Kekulé Problem” is a 2017 nonfiction essay by writer Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute. It was his first published work of nonfiction. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, “is a machine for operating an animal” and that “all animals have an unconscious.” McCarthy goes on to postulate that language is purely a human cultural creation, and not a biologically determined phenomenon. (Wikipedia)

“You may have read a thousand books and be able to discuss any one of them without remembering a word of the text.”

“The unconscious wants to give guidance to your life in general but it doesn’t care what toothpaste you use.”

“The unconscious seems to know a great deal. What does it know about itself? Does it know that it’s going to die? What does it think about that?”

The essay checked a lot of my boxes: awareness, consciousness, ego, thoughts.

Bubbles

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I’m sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, my feet hanging over the rim. I’m facing the setting sun and the light is painting the canyon walls. Somewhere far below, out of site, someone or some thing is blowing soap bubbles and I’m watching them drift slowly up and out of sight. Sometimes the bubbles are few and far between, other times a continuous stream, too many to count. But they never seem to stop completely.

From a distance, they’re just empty soap bubbles but if I bring my attention to particular bubble, I see it is filled with people, places and things. A tiny world that I recognize. My world.

If I look closely enough and long enough, I’m drawn into the bubble. I’m no long sitting on the canyon rim but part of the story unfolding in the bubble. Unlike most of the bubbles I’ve observed, this one doesn’t pop or float away. The canyon and the other bubbles no longer exist or, perhaps, I am just unaware of them.

Eventually, this bubble bumps into another bubble and the two merge, as bubbles often do. Sometimes these new bubbles are filled with a future world, sometimes the past. The worlds can be wonderful or awful but they’re always completely “real.”

I can spend hours moving from bubble to bubble, having completely forgotten about the view from the canyon rim. Every bubble is small and fragile and can be popped with the slightest touch but, from within, it’s difficult to remember this. Or the Me sitting on the canyon rim.

Ah! There I am. I’m back, watching the bubbles. How long, I wonder, was I trapped inside these shiny little things, drifting up and out of the canyon? How much of the spectacular sunset did I miss?

Green Button

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Imagine having a couple of buttons on your desk. Let’s say, red and green. And everytime you walked by you could press the red button for a negative/angry/fearful thought… or the green one for a positive/peaceful/uplifting thought. Wouldn’t last long, just a few seconds or a minute or two.

Why would you ever push the red button? You wouldn’t, not if you thought about it for a spit second. You’d wear that fucking green button out. But we find ourselves soaking in negative thoughts and — if we’re lucky — have a moment of awareness.

“Whoa. I must have hit the red button. A couple of times.”

All of which goes to explain why people report constantly hearing me muttering, “Green button, green button, green button.”

My friend Kent reminds us the red button state is most people’s default. (Always going for green.) Buddha says “life is the red button state’. Awareness would be the inbetween.

Thoughts think themselves

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For those of us who subscribe to the theory there is no self — that me “I” thought is just a persistent illusion — a frequent question is where do thoughts come from if there is no “me” to think them?

They come from the subconscious whose name happens to be Jeff. Jeff sits in the refrigerator that is your consciousness. He has one of those horseshoe magnets he uses to arrange tiny word magnets on the outside of the refrigerator. Jeff is working backward and in the dark (trust me on that point) so the ideas he strings together are often random and arbitrary. He can sense when there is an awareness on the other side of the door and this makes him uncomfortable so he slows down the magnet work. When he feels the awareness depart he gets busy again.

The Passing Scene

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“Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view. There’s even the moment after the train has paused, when it imperceptibly begins moving again. The appearance is that the train is motionless, but the scenery outside the window is moving. That, too, is a view that life sometimes gives us, a falsely relative view. We make no attempt to control the scene observed outside the train, knowing that wishing that it was something that it isn’t would be useless. And so it is, for the person who relaxes into Absolute awareness. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness, whatever the organism experiences, is viewed dispassionately. The viewer acknowledges that all things change, and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”

— Abiding In Nondual Awareness (Robert Wolfe)

Suzuki Roshi on the inner experience of Zen: “The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track.”

Your Whole Life Is Borrowed Time

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This post by David Cain was clearly written for me personally. Note the reference to “his local high street” in the third paragraph. Unclear about his reference but I spend my mornings at a coffee shop on High Street in Jefferson City. Coincidence? Perhaps.

A man with a boring job is on his way to work when his attention is caught by some unexpected detail in his otherwise familiar routine—a peculiar insect, a pattern in the concrete, a cryptic slogan on a t-shirt.

This detail seems extremely significant to him, but he doesn’t know why.

The strange sight wakes him up from the autopilot-mode by which he has been living his life. He is suddenly aware, for the first time, how complex and interesting his local high street is, and he stops to take it in.

Around him pass hundreds of distinctly different people, each a unique individual, driven by some unseen personal motivation. Shops are filled with thousands of trinkets, tools, snacks, and books. Delivery trucks roll past, music plays from somewhere, buildings rise above him. The scene is miraculous to him.

As he surveys the street, he witnesses something surreal: another version of himself is walking away from him, towards his usual bus stop, evidently not having had this same moment of self-awareness. For reasons he is never told, at that moment his life had apparently split in two.

However, his double does not make it onto the bus: as he waits, an air conditioning unit falls from a window above, killing him instantly. In a very unexpected and unstorylike way, his life ends.

The man has no idea what has happened, and never receives an explanation. The authorities never identify the person beneath the air conditioner, and the man never tells anyone what he witnessed because nobody would ever believe it.

There is nothing to do but carry on with his life. But he is a changed man.

Every morning he is amazed to find another whole day awaiting him. Every meal, every phone call, every greeting from his doorman feels like an undeserved gift, as though he’d mistakenly been given the honeymoon suite at a hotel. He feels grateful even for his problems.

None of the details of his life have changed, except one thing. He now lives with an awareness that he was never truly entitled to be alive; he just happened to be, and still is.

His ability to breathe, see, feel, and make choices now seems to him like an unearned, arbitrary status—one that he may freely enjoy, but which can be revoked at any time without explanation.

He hopes he never loses this sense that his life is essentially a bonus round, consisting entirely of borrowed time, not just from the day of his strange experience, but from the beginning.

There’s more to Mr. Cains post and it’s worth a read.

“Meditation is not about doing anything”

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“Meditation is not about doing anything. It is simply paying attention.”

Not counting basic hygiene (brushing my teeth, etc), the only thing I do every day is meditate. I sit for 30 minutes, sometimes longer. Every day for the last 500 days. I keep track but I’m not sure that’s good idea. Too easy to get fixated on the streak, keeping the string going.

I’ve missed twice in the last 1,000+ days. Once when I was sick and again when out of town attending a high school reunion (#50). I’m not sure why I keep track of my practice. Maybe it’s for the same reason prisoners make marks on their cell walls (do they still do that?). They’re afraid they’ll forget how long the’ve been in prison? I’d rather think I keep track because it gives me a little added encouragement to sit, although I really don’t think I need that anymore. My daily meditation is the best half hour of my day. But why?

Steve Hagen says meditation is useless. The only reason to meditate is to mediate. Which sounds like something only those who meditate would say or understand. I’m sure when I started (10 years ago?) it was for stress management or relaxation or something but somewhere along the way it became an end in itself.

I find it simultaneously the simplest thing in the world and the most difficult. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, focused on my breath. What could be easier? And within seconds my mind has jumped to some random thought… I gently bring my awareness back to my breathing… and the cycle repeats, endlessly. Why would anyone invest half an hour every day doing this? Again, Steve Hagen: “At the heart of meditation is the intention to be awake.”

Meditation Now or Never (PDF of favorite excerpts)

Fear Hologram Projector

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The brain has the ability to generate vivid, life-like images and scenes. It does this seemingly on its own. These scenes can appear in one’s consciousness at any moment and they can be nearly indistinguishable from reality (‘out there’ as opposed to ‘in your head’). These thoughts, in my experience, are mostly beyond ‘our’ control. They happen to us. And while we can’t prevent them, we can — with practice — observe them. See them for what they are. The analogy that best captures this for me is a Fear Hologram Projector.

“Fear” because the scenarios that trouble me most involve fear and worry and anxiety. “Hologram” because these little mental vignettes are so incredibly real. I don’t know why the brain (some brains) persists in creating these but the brain in my head pulls from a lifetime of images and situations and mashes them up with the most negative of emotions and ideas.

It’s like walking down one of the endless passages in my brain and suddenly finding myself in one of these holograms. And the more mental attention I give it, the sharper and more detailed it seems. The hologram seems to need the energy of my attention to project. The fear hologram can loop endlessly for days or weeks. Or longer.

The brain can, of course, create a more positive, pleasant scenario. We like to imagine good and happy things happening. It would seem to be just as easy to create that kind of hologram as the awful kind. If ‘I’ am going to imagine some future, why wouldn’t I choose to something pleasant? The only answer I can come up with is I don’t get to choose. These mostly just happen. They come unbidden.

How do we turn off the Fear Hologram Projector?

Well, we can’t turn it off until we recognize what’s happening. We can’t see the projector when we’re in the middle of the hologram loop. The key here is probably mindfulness. Seeing what is really occurring. Not in your head but in the real, objective world around you (if you believe in such a thing). We might think of this as “experiential reality.” What we see, hear, touch, smell, taste.

When I find myself trapped in a fear hologram, it feels dark, like a movie theater. The images on the screen are more vivid in a darkened theater. And I can’t see the projector because I don’t know to look for it, or where to look.

But if I can be mindful enough to recognize I’m in a hologram — something generated by a (I choose not to say ‘my’) mind — I can bring up the house lights of my awareness! And in that instant I can see that the images are not real. They’re brain stuff. Stuff ‘I’ didn’t choose. Under the bright light of my awareness, the hologram images fade and as my awareness stops powering the projector, the images disappear. My belief, my buy-in is necessary for the hologram to exist.

I’m reminded of lines from my reading about Buddhism and Taoism.

“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.” – Ten Zen Questions

“Belief is at best an educated, informed conjecture about Reality. In contrast, seeing — raw, direct, unadulterated experience — is the direct perception of Reality Itself. […] Base your actions on what you see, rather than on what you think.” – Buddhism Plain and Simple

The bad news: our brains (okay, fuck it! My brain) have an endless capacity for materializing FHP’s (Fear Hologram Projectors), twenty-four/seven. And a lifetime of material from which to create the loops. Access to all our fears and anxieties.

The good news: it’s pretty easy to hit the house lights, spot the projector and pull the attention plug. If we can stay mindful. Of course, mindfulness doesn’t necessarily mean a state of meditative bliss. If you’re rocketing down a black ski slope; lining up for a night landing on an aircraft carrier; or in the middle of brain surgery… you’re probably not trapped on some mental fear loop. And lots of daily, less challenging tasks, can help us stay in the moment. But the mind never stops. You can hit the house lights and pull the plug on the fear projector… and find yourself back in some anxious future 30 seconds later. And this can repeat over and over, day and night.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I am either ‘awake’ or not-awake. Not-awake can take several forms, of course. There the subconscious which is probably what I’ve been talking about. How frustrating that it handles all of those life and death tasks (breathing, heart, etc) without any help from the conscious me…. and still finds time to gin up endless fear and anxiety scenarios.

Then there are dreams — which tend to be more real than the Fear Holograms — but there’s nothing we can do about those. Fortunately, mine seem to fade quickly upon awakening. And I’ve read that we also experience unconsciousness most nights. Dreamless sleep. Would like to have more of that.

I expect to be reaching for the switch to the house lights for the rest of my life. Endlessly pulling the plug on the FHP. But I find some comfort in the belief that “Thoughts think themselves.” I don’t control them. That’s the subconscious, forever and always.

And I have the cushion. Meditation. Observing the mind, allowing it to become quieter (rarely quiet). Awakening, if only for a moment.