The usual, or sensual mind, is always seeking experience.
Its primary source of this "food" needed to sustain itself is the unconscious
chain of reaction that constitutes mechanical, associative thought. The hunger this nature has for this food is that with each
reaction there occurs within it a certain contraction that is both painful and
pleasurable for it. Pleasurable because this contraction creates a momentary sense
of self, a "false" self created from being in opposition to what it considers.
The painful aspect of this contraction is that all such actions cut off, or
isolate, the nature in experience of it -- which becomes a source of suffering for it --
in that this same nature also longs to reach a state of wholeness. While experience may serve as the path to self-knowledge,
still it remains the lesser half of the path to self-knowing. Self-knowing is
not experiential. It has no one apart from itself. It does not take place in
time. Self-knowing requires risking the self that fears being no
one; a "risk" that becomes an inevitable choice once the seeker sees that all
pursuit of experience, whose root is secret self-confirmation, is powerless to bring an
end to his sense of isolation and loneliness. Following are 9 insights and instructions to help you begin
placing your wish for true self-knowing over the experience-seeking sensual mind. 1. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
seeks forms of familiar stimulation (which it calls being industrious) so it never
considers that what would be best for it would be to quietly explore its own self-induced
desires. 2. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
is trying to hide from itself the fact of its own essential emptiness. 3. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
wants to be, and in its own agitated effort to become fails to see that for
it to exist at all proves that Something already is. 4. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
will willingly pour itself into a thousand meaningless actions rather than see, once, the
futility of its own pursuits. 5. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
excludes, by the limited field of its own perception the possibility that, in reality,
there exists no time outside of its own point by point considerations, and therefore ...
that there is no place to reach, no separate self to complete, and so ... nothing to do. 6. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
can't consider that the best use of its "time" would be to see into the
unconscious movement of its own thought process as it creates not only the question of its
own "best use", but also the self it needs to search for the answer to its
question. 7. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
sees being alone and unoccupied as states having no value, to be avoided at all costs,
because its only system of self-evaluation requires the ongoing presence of the opposites. 8. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
is a mind in pursuit of those sensations produced by time; i.e., the sense of running from
one point to another (from thought to thought) for the sense of self that this movement of
time creates. 9. The mind that asks what's the best use of my time
seeks experience, and because of its own conditioned nature is unable to see that what it
really wants is: the unexperienced -- a state of itself that cannot be sought.
Guy Finley
All Rights Reserved © 1998-2006 Guy Finley - Permission to Reprint Granted With Author Credit
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