The importance of the moment and the ramblings of an over active mind

 

Subject: The importance of the moment and the ramblings of an over active mind.


The importance of the moment that almost indefinable pause between this moment and the next can be the focus of who we are, in that we are not just the summation of all those moments, not the aggregate but the distillation of that moment.
Our perception of ourselves in that moment assists us in clearing away the clutter of the past and the future with all their confusing perceptions of what might have been or might be since reality is actually in the moment and if we are to understand ourselves at that moment we have the opportunity to base future moments with some sort of surety for life in general.
Life throws at us a range of hurdles to get over and we can only succeed if we recognise the need to even try. Life’s program from birth to death is therefore not about self so much but about distilling self into a far more refined alchemy, the philosophical reasoning behind all our actions. The impulses, the impurities, the successes and failures which we envisage when we engage in collective thought, might if we were able to de collectivise and simplify, to rather refine those impulses by breaking them down into actual needs and separating them from the dream we are engaged in most of our waking life. This sense of disengaging from thoughts of being ‘special’,  striving to  ‘attain’ things or attempting to move away from who you actually are to discover who that person is.
The excitement of the treasure trove locked away in your actual persona and its potential to affect your relationship toward others is profound. But discovering these touch stones for a better sense of who you might be comes with a lot of self analysis and self destruction as you have to destroy many of the shibboleths on which your life to date was built.
It’s often thought that by minimising something you break down the complex into the smaller more easily understood parts that are more easily addressed. But breaking down into simple issues removes the essential interplay of thoughts and actions of the world at large and in this sense we are in danger of over simplification. Our bodies are not a set of stand alone organs but only makes sense when working together to allow the mind to function and give us perspective and a personality to imagine ourselves as being alive as a force for good and bad. This collective interplay of body-organs illustrates that our psyche is also made up of the interactions of a collective consciousness and the singling out one emotion from another, as we do in a Periodic Table of chemical elements, is too simplistic. The forces which combine to make the drug addicted person, or the socially aware person can be traced back to a sort of addiction, one the drug the other the bond we have to humanity.  One we might call one bad and the other good, the outcome is a complex admixture which, in its infinite Buddhist meaning its our responsibility to discover it but might also be described as over emphasising the mindful in-an effort  to describe the actuality.
The sense that our awareness of who we are is not entangled with that sense of who we wish to be and also who others might wish us to be is fundamental only if we are able to disconnect our being from the other beings around us. One of our most comforting experiences in life is learning about that connectivity with others but first you must discover who you are without the emotional props of others. It’s a question of demolishing and then rebuilding interpersonal relationships with better, more secure foundations built on self knowledge. The old adage “no man is an island” is both true and false in the sense, to be true you have to be true to yourself and therefore know yourself before you can be true to others.
In a world where our reliance on others is accepted, even cherished, firstly towards our mothers at birth and for the first years after birth, and then on our teachers and role setters from who we pick up the characteristics of who we grow to become, the cultural norms and beliefs on which we secure our behaviour, all this has to be picked through by a Buddhist for an accurate justification, a paring away of the assumptions to reveal the basic tenants of who we are and build from there. This new “awareness”of an innate quality of mind is what Buddhists strive for through meditation and debate, posing and justifying  a proposition, ringing its neck with claim and counter claim until it becomes factual, or at least factual until it clashes with someone else’s factual.
One of the factualities of our lives is that we are not only what the mind decrees we are but we are animal and like an animal we have body functions which are not pleasant for our minds to contemplate but they are just as much a part of us as the most beautiful thought. . The body waste and its smell we shrink from such things and evolve all manner of subterfuge to cloak that aspect of who we are. We deodorise the sweat and wash away the grime and yet these physical aspects are as no much a part of our person as is the accent through which we communicate. Therefore who we are is not so clear cut and we can’t disengage the mind from the body without enacting some crooked kind of subterfuge.
“Cogito, ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am” was a Descarteian rule of thumb which presumed that without a mind I don’t exist. In the Buddhist analysis of the mind and it’s implicit identification of who we are, might we not disrupt this pristine evolutionary principle  for a more Calvinistic model where our flaws are gods business to address, not ours.