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.