Song of Witnessing in Its Pure Form

 FREE VERSE, for YOUR CONSIDERATION:

"I" is the imagined -> remembered "owner" of memory.

"I" is entrenched by the memories of self, body and world.

Entrenchment of memory obscures tacit intuition of the formless ground of being.

Entrenchment of memory is like an iceberg with most of its mass submerged below attention's reach.

Attention is memory, located.

As attention's reach reveals what is obscured by memory's unconsciousness, the binding force of memory dissolves and the formless ground of being "emerges" or "surfaces" to intuition as the ground of being "prior to" conditionality: "free-standing", free-"floating", not created or held in place.

That tacit, formless intuition prior to conditionality witnesses the condensations of mind and modifications of consciousness from subtle to dense, from formlessness into form, as in the story of the manifestation of The Dawn Horse.

Seeking, or the urge "to know", speeds the condensation of forms into existence and their entrenchment as memories.

As memories lose their binding force, "priorly" free, formless consciousness is tacitly intuited, forms are witnessed as they condense from no-existence into existence and are realized as merely appearing, non-binding, and unnecessary manifestations-in-consciousness.

Intuitive freedom is realized as the "basis" of witnessing existence, rested as itself without any effort of identifying as itself.

Such is not a thoughtful conclusion, but a direct, pre-mental realization.

Only the binding force of memory obscures that realization.

Never argue with a mime.

On Thinking

more "2 cents" for your consideration and comment from that Mad Poet Rascal, yours truly: On Thinking
The activity of (individuated) "conscious awareness" that precedes and leads to thought is not a thought or the conceptual preparation for a thought. By the time that happens, thought has already happened! We think before we know it. The activity of (individuated) "conscious awareness" (attention) that precedes and leads to thought is feeling (feeling: imagined-remembered attention-intensity). It is the same kind of feeling that wells up in us in the midst of a conversation that makes us want to interrupt to say our piece. It is pre-verbal feeling imbued with intention -- and that is the preparation to think (or speak). It is an itch needing to be scratched. Such feeling is coded into memory as (or with) associated language structures, so that when a feeling wells up, it triggers (or potentiates) a cascade of related, encoded thought-words just a-burgeoning (itchin') to get out. Encoded thought-words are formalized, conventional (and only approximate) patternings of memory, intention, imagination, and attention that show up as speech patterns (the same as with thought patterns). Sometimes, we have no words for a feeling. We are at a loss for words because we have no corresponding language (in memory) for them. Sometimes, we have no words for a feeling but we can, by keeping attention in the feeling, imagine new ways of expressing in words. But it all rides upon feeling. So, no one need "pre-think" a thought in order to think, although one may do so, but it is we who are thinking, in any case. That's how it feels.
However, in that sense of "feeling before thinking", we are still not the origin of thinking because the feelings underlying thinking well up in us before we know it. The feelings infiltrate from relationships and from the unknown Unknown -- through the channels of attention (or relatedness) and imagination (otherness). Only if we abide (only spontaneously and already) at the formless root of feeling ("Witness Consciousness"), prior to particular feelings, can we observe the gathering of attention and force that are the feelings that give rise to thought. The "Witness-Consciousness" is both prior to feeling and thought (prior to attention, intention, memory and imagination -- "The Four Fundamental Faculties") -- and invested in them. In its "prior" sense, the "Witness-Consciousness" is an only-spontaneous total-equilibrium state from which and in which all arises and to which all returns (hridayam). In its "invested" sense, the Witness-Consciousness is intimate (to the degree of feeling identical) to conditional experience (non-separation or love) -- feeling it all. The "prior:invested" Witness Consciousness is a paradox beyond mind, beyond both (turiyatita). When one or more of The Four Fundamental Faculties (as I have just named them) persists in a modified state in a chronic, automatic (subconscious or unconscious) way, one never returns to rest, but persists in the turbulence of "self-identified self". ("Nar-Nar" -- you know) Then, self-modification seems to be "otherness happening to us", rather than our own activity -- something that we must counteract or fulfill. In resistance to "otherness" (or insistence upon it), we cannot consciously intuit Witness Consciousness in its native state. Modification of feeling-attention is an itch needing to be scratched -- seeking -- and it shows up (in one way) as thinking: chronic modification, chronic identity -- chronic self-contraction. Imposition of prior Witness-Consciousness upon the limited, self-invested state (infiltration by communion with an apparent one who is awake beyond identification) presents a contrast by which conditional limitations may be recognized and released (surrendered) into What is Greater (turiyatita). Never argue with a mime.

Humanity has an Elimination Problem

accumulated traditions over 12,000 years
intentional persistence
readiness idiocy

attention : readiness for movement
intention : readiness for a sensation
memory : readiness for the movement of sensation
imagination : readiness for the sensation of movement

One overriding human imperative is to name or identify things, and thus to know them, for the sake of exploiting (enjoying) them or for the sake of avoiding (controlling) them.

This identifying of things involves remembering them and remembering the intention one "should" have toward them -- a state of fixation that gets carried from generation to generation, that piles up and that ultimately becomes foolishness and stupidity as conditions change and yet we still compel ourselves and others to behave that way.

Identity: a complex of readiness states associated with a name or location of self

THE SYMBOL OF READINESS

stress patterns
readiness for action
avoidance of unreadiness

blind spots
various compulsive idiocies
  behavioral idiocies
  linguistic idiocies
retrogressive behavior
  involuntary emotional responses without intelligence
  lack of understanding necessary to recognize the need for transcendence
  lack of means of transcendence

Readiness is a lie.
  no one is ever ready
    no one know how they will respond:  the interaction is ALWAYS with an unknown
  declarations of readiness are bravado
      declarations of readiness are a "go ahead" without certain foreknowledge

means of transcendence
  education
  cultural artifacts
  regulation or wise self-regulation

conditions
create balance as preparation
undermine intentional persistence
ambient education

course correction

restate elimination problem
restate solution

provide means

I think this can be clarified into a kind of simplicity.

Let's use some of the terms He used:
~~ power of repetition
~~ being uncomfortable
~~ the programming
~~ the secret workings
~~ garbage softwares
~~ supersophisticated nervous systems:supermachines
"Power of repetition": alludes to memory. Memory is repetition. It's not merely mental memory; it's the persistence of ANY and ALL forms. In computers, memory refers to the persistence of electrical charges in semiconductor chips. The Universe is a scenario of materialized memory, persistent and yet perpetually changing, as memories do.

Among living beings on Earth, humans are the ones so memory-intensive. The memories have to do with living. They evolve from generation to generation -- but humans don't just substitute new memories for old ones, from generation to generation. Humans have very little control of memory, in the current form of humanity. Humans accumulate memories mostly automatically -- and otherwise with great effort.
Memories pile up automatically from generation to generation, passed both subliminally -- implicitly -- and overtly (explicitly) -- but humans, for the most part, have no capacity to dissolve memories. Thus, "The sins of the fathers are passed on to the children to the fourth generation."
"I'm impressed, newly impressed, with the insanity of human beings! Animals, plants, inert things are much more intelligent. They are simpler, more pure." (talk, Walking the Dog)
The pile-up of way-of-life memories, memories that have their use in their own generation, but that have piled up in this "late time" generation -- that pile-up produces a kind of massive, subconscious-and-conscious confusion -- "garbage softwares" -- that we experience as dilemma and discomfort.

Not all of it is garbage software, in any current generation. Some of it is functional, such as the "software" that maintains physiology or the "software" that produces the sophisticated technology of which He spoke. It exists in "nested" form, with some softwares (such as physiological softwares) supporting others (such as technological creativity). The supporting softwares are the "secret workings" that work in and for all generations.

The creative ones in any generation are those who are free of the binding effects of previous generations' softwares and so capable of originating something new. Their freedom lies in their freedom to remain "current", rather than mired in the past (memory).
Their freedom to create, the ability to recover comfort, the freedom from ego-patterning (idiotic programs of existence) comes from transcendence of the binding force of memory. "Transcendence" doesn't exclusion; it means to remain intelligently present to the content of experience without being bound by or to it..
The discomfort comes from the clash of obsolete memory-software programs that no longer function in harmony either with each other or with currently evolved conditions. The "pile-up discomfort" generates the sense of dilemma and leads to a kind of desperation that most people attempt to handle by acquiring new knowledge in the form of "solutions".

But those "solutions" become part of the mass of memory that causes the discomfort. Seeking solutions is exactly the wrong direction; therefore, conditional seeking is also exactly the wrong direction.
What is needed is transcendence of the binding force of memory.

The missing program, for the most part, is the "transcendence program."
The transcendence program emerges as people come to confront their interiority, their uninspected programming. At first, it occurs in a piecemeal fashion, as uninspected assumptions (memories) surface to attention from out of the background of life's automaticities.
Prior to that emergence, those programs operate outside of the reach of attention, hidden by their very familiarity, their, "the way things are", veneer -- the "memory program", itself. Then, programs operate as automatic intentions and imaginings confined by the force of memory to things close to what is familiar because of memory.
Later, commonalities of insight emerge. It is discerned that all programming involves FOUR fundamental programs:

Memory
Imagination
Attention
Intention

Those four fundamental programs are, in themselves, inherently "empty" or without inherent form. They are transcendental. They are the "superprogram" of the "superintelligent machine". They are "the first emergence".
They are made "immanent" (or experienceable) by self-definition -- the modifications of consciousness that persist as memories of function. They become defined, local, active and persistent. They become the flavor of "defined selves" and "defined experiences" in all of their forms.

As long as any or all of the Four operate outside of the reach of attention, conditions and conditionings (programs) persist, along with chronic discomfort and the "garbage" quality of experience (frustration). Experience is binding (bondage).
But an odd thing happens when all Four aspects of any event in consciousness surface and become recognizable: events in consciousness (forms of experience) soften, begin to mutate, and then, when all four are balanced and integrated, there emerges a sense of "encompassing" (containing) experience, rather than being contained by experience; the free-Witness position becomes intuitively obvious -- and then the event loses its form to the degree of disappearance. The intuition of a kind of "forceful radiance" appears, one with very consciousness, formless, but present.
The awakening and integration of The Four is the "transcendence program". It is the experience of consciousness awakening to its four-fold nature, paradoxically experienced as Emptiness or Formless Potentiality -- Conscious Light.

Thus, the Four, inherently empty, are also the substance of all experience. Emptiness is form.

Thus, creative life is entirely compatible with free consciousness. "Not-two". Creative life EXPRESSES the free condition in all its forms.

Thus, I have accounted for a bunch of stuff, including:


~~ power of repetition
~~ being uncomfortable
~~ the programming
~~ the secret workings
~~ garbage softwares
~~ supersophisticated nervous systems:supermachines
~~ transcendence
This is not a matter of an intellectual exercise on my part, some sort of mere analysis. I can speak so clearly of this only because I can refer to the intuition of it as a matter of direct experience.

The transformation is progressive, even as the fundamental intuition of this dynamic play is what it is, from the beginning.
Did that "ring your bell of intuition"?
(I've been poised upon writing all that up, for a while, under the prospective title, "Humanity Has an Elimination Problem. This post was the provocation that got me to write it. I wrote it in one quick pass, and made a few tweaks and additions upon the first reading of it, aloud.)