8. Where Mental Clarity Comes From

You know the saying, "A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind"?

That's like saying, "A quiet mind is a sign of a sick personality."

It's a topsy-turvy saying, which is what makes the saying funny, isn't it? sort of.

A noisy mind is a sign of a sick personality.

Oops!  Did I hit too close to home, with that one?  Sorry.  

A noisy mind is sick because it's an ongoing disturbance.

Meditation is commonly used to quiet the mind.  That works only when we're not doing anything! -- and it's doing it the hard way.

There's a deeper kind of quiet that allows for full participation in experience.  It results from releasing the stress patterns that run our lives, constantly, without our awareness, consent or control.

Another term for this kind of quiet is a high signal to noise ratio -- in case you've heard that expression.  It's the kind of clarity and purity that we get from a high-quality sound system -- or the intensity of a laser.  Imagine someone with a mind, like that.

Less stress, a quieter mind; a quieter mind, more clarity -- and more receptivity to clear ideas.

How do we get there?

Balance our four faculties of intelligence.  

That automatically reveals the hidden sources of mental noise and quiets them.   It's a state of effortless receptivity that happens with balance -- the balancing of our intelligence.

Our attention gets more focussed and more coherent (less noisy).

When it's sufficiently focussed and coherent, we call that quality of thought, ingenuity.

When it approaches a certain level, we call it, genius.

That's all, for today.

Easy, huh?  

Next expostulation in a couple of days, or so.

Exploring Our Four Keys to Intelligence

 

Here's something that will stimulate your intuition:  some words that describe the four basic expressions of intelligence -- attention, memory, intention, and imagination.  Here they are, starting with attention.

Locating something is the essence of attention.

The words are,

attention
locating
highlighting

When we locate something, it's highlighted to us.

Repeat the words, to yourself, and notice that they make sense.

attention
locating
highlighting


How about memory?  

Persistence is the essence of memory.  
The triad is:

remembering
persisting
knowing

Without persistence, memory doesn't exist.

Same thing.  Repeat the words and notice that they make sense.

remembering
persisting
knowing


Now, intention.

The essence of intention is causing something to be some way.

Intention's triad:

intending
possibility
to be

Notice how they fit, together.

intending
possibility
to be


Now, imagination:

The essence of imagination is the "unknown Unknown". It's the unknown-ness that distinguishes imagination from memory.

spontaneously
imagining
the unknown

When we imagine something, it appears spontaneously -- unknown by us until it appears in our imagination.

spontaneously
imagining
the unknown


Why are all four needed for clarity?  

No attention, no experience of clarity.

No memory of something, no clarity about it.

No intention, no recognition of clarity.

No imagination, no improvement of clarity.



I know that I've just given you a mindful, so take a few minutes to go through the triads a few times until the special meanings tickle your intuition.  You may feel unexpected releases of tension and shifts of posture, as you do it.

That's enough, for now.  Just know that if you want to have clarity, all four expressions of intelligence have to be working, together, in balance.

Next stop, a biggie:  How do we control attention, when we're distracted?

What's Required for Us to Focus?

 

Here's something nobody ever told you:

FOUR things are required for focus.  

1. attention
2. intention
3. memory
4. imagination

ATTENTION

Focus is a matter of attention, and the essence of attention is locating things.  That's what placing attention means and that's what focusing does.  Everything else about attention follows from that.

INTENTION

Now, about intention, the essence of intention is control.  Intention moves attention and once attention is placed somewhere, intention holds it, there.  But that's not the whole story.

Why?

MEMORY

Because in order to hold attention on something, we have to remember what we're holding on to.  That's where memory comes in.  The essence of memory is persistence.

If we forget what we're attending to, we forget to persist in paying attention.  Some people can't even go from one room to another without forgetting why they went there.  So, where is their attention?  on trying to remember why they went, there!  

Holding attention someplace is what, "paying attention", means.  The "payment" is the effort of intention we're having to make.  The more distracted we are, the more we have to "pay".

IMAGINATION

Now imagination.  

Why imagination?

Imagination is the incoming channel for all new perceptions, even sense perceptions.  Imagination is like a mouth facing the Unknown.  The unknown comes in through the "mouth" of imagination (and memory "swallows" it).

Every experience happens before we know it, at first.  When something comes into our field of perception, that perception is unregistered, by us (yet to be known), for a moment.  It's a little like reaction time; there's a lag.

Imagination has special roles, in focus.  It's also the incoming channel for foresight and insight, which we never know are going to happen until they have already happened.  

A person with no imagination has no foresight and whatever insight they have is limited by what they remember, rather than being closely tuned to the present moment.

When coupled with memory, imagination is the link to conscience; conscience is both imagination-based and memory-based.

So, those four expressions of intelligence are required for us to focus.

Did you notice uneven-ness among them, in you?

That's a clue.  Balanced intensity of all four is necessary for optimum focus.

Balanced intensity doesn't mean "high intensity".  It's when they are of balanced intensity that they integrate, together.  When they are balanced -- even at moderate or even low intensity, they work better than when they are unbalanced with some of them at higher intensity.  

Where intelligence is concerned, integration is the name of the game, isn't it?

That's all, for today.  Stay tuned for the next one.

The Difference between Peace from Suppressing Emotions and Peace from Releasing Emotions

Peace from self-suppression or the peace of relaxation -- a world of difference.

Self-suppression is an effort, a drain on our energy.  It's more a strategy than a relief.  Peace from self-suppression is no peace.

Relaxing is a cessation of effort.  It's relief without strategy.

Imagine a cat luxuriating in an armchair.  No self-suppression, there, is there?  No strategy.  It's natural, for a cat.

Now, the human condition.  Imagine you’ve come home after a difficult day and you’re feeling a mite irritable.  Many of us use alcohol, other substances, or pleasurable distractions to escape our feelings -- or we just try to push those feelings down.  This might look like peace, to others, but it doesn't feel like peace; it’s self-suppression.  How do we know?  We're emotionally loaded and it doesn't take much to set us off.

A cat doesn't have that problem -- have you noticed?  The cat's peaceableness is effortless and soft.  

What's the difference?  A cat has no agenda, no worries.  A cat releases her stress as soon as the need for it is over.

The difference is a matter of mind -- or the absence, of it.  We humans value our mind as the source of solutions to problems.  We seem to have an unending agenda of problem-solving.  So, we rehash memories of problems -- and the worse the memory, the more we rehash.  That's the meaning of the word, suffering, by the way.  It's not the pain; it's the rehashing, the revisiting of disturbing memories again and again, seeking relief through approaches that can't bring relief.

Well, with humans, this behavior is common.  In fact, it's regarded as normal, so normal that it has names:  stress and its big brother -- overwhelm.

We humans may carry our stress into sleep -- and wake up tired or, if we use sleeping aids, groggy.

Unless we have found how to release (rather than suppress) stress, it tends to accumulate (as unpleasant memories tend to accumulate).  Then, we might experience situations where our emotional state seems too extreme for the thing that triggered it:  seemingly irrational (unrelated) emotional reactions and personality characteristics.  Suppression doesn't work.

Some people mistakenly use the word, "release", to signify acting out emotions in an exaggerated way (catharsis), as if "to get the bad emotion out".  That also doesn't work.  While it may temporarily discharge the force of an emotion, it reinforces the pattern -- and then the charge rebuilds in the reinforced pattern, which ends up being suppressed for social or psychological reasons -- or indulged.  It's a vestige of a failed psychological approach.

One habit that builds stress is to persist in frustrating activities -- such as work tasks that are not going well.  By our insistent persisting in those activities ("I'll just finish this."), stress gets driven into us and reinforced -- whatever our good intentions or sense of necessity.  It's self-inflicted pain -- and self-inflicted pain takes longer to ease up than pain when we stop sooner, than later.  With self-inflicted pain, we're particulary tempted to use methods of escape, like alcohol.

In difficult situations, there's another reason it's wiser to walk away (temporarily) than to persist:  Our state of mind carries over into the results we produce.  Think of an angry argument versus an easy going discussion:  what's the aftermath likely to be?  Self-suppression doesn't work.  It's self-defeating.

Have you ever tried to imagine or remember peace?  It's a bit of a strain, isn't it?  That's because stress lurks beneath appearances and resists being "overwritten" by good thoughts or whatnot.

True peace isn’t a state we can imagine or remember; that kind of "peace" is superficial.  Peace comes from releasing.

Releasing doesn’t come from pressuring ourself to "feel peaceful", avoiding emotions, avoiding disturbing others -- or anaesthetizing ourselves.  It's a matter of stopping inflicting pain on ourselves. 

Cats don't need to learn that.  Humans do.

So, the next time you seek peace, stop for a moment and notice:  Are you using a suppression strategy?  If it feels like effort, it's suppression; if it involves a cover-up, it's suppression; if it feels like relief, it's release.

How do we learn to release? There are faster ways and slower ways, more direct ways and more roundabout ways.

Next stop:  mental clarity.

Next expostulation in three days.

What Does Peace Feel Like? It isn't what we think, at all.

Do I really have to say this?

Yes.

Why?  Because it might not be what you think.  Peace is neither a state of mind or a product of mind, not even an emotion.  It's beyond perception of any state or object -- and not some kind of objective to be reached when conditions are right.  It's relief from concern about conditions.

The usual approach to securing peace involves creating preferred conditions.  That approach starts in a state of conflict with experience and puts that state of conflict into action.  Even if preferred conditions are achieved, we then have to monitor them to maintain them.

That's why people have such trouble achieving peace.

Some people equate peace with a kind unmoved stillness -- or perhaps the relief we feel after conflict ends.

Peace is just ease in the midst of conditions.

Peace is the absence of compulsive involvement with the content of experience -- either to delve into it or to resist it.  It's compatible with all experience because it is nothing, in itself.  It's the baseline of all experience before experience occurs, the baseline to which it returns and before the next thought or experience has occurred, and easy freedom during experience.

Peace is freedom to change -- or to stay the same.  Peace is free to be energetic -- or quiet.

Peace is a formless intuition.

It can't be imagined, remembered or intellectualized.  Peace cannot be "understood".  It can be intuited, only.

Peace has no description.  It needs no description to validate itself; it's self-validating.

Peace is a space without center or discernable boundaries.  Some people describe that lack of center or boundaries, as "vast".

While that's understandable to someone who has already intuited peace, "vast" implies size and entices us to explore "vastness".

Can't be done.  The very act generates a form of tension --  the sense of an explorer moving into involvement with the content of experience -- a sense of self with a location who is pressing attention in some direction.

Peace cannot be remembered or efforted toward. Try it.

Peace surfaces when remembering and effort stop.

Peace might be said to be a kind of faith that everything is "going okay without my involvement" -- but without that thought.  It's NOT faith in a person or a belief.  That kind of faith is already a state of distress hanging on to an imagined source of help.

Peace shows up in the moment of release from entrapment by memories, or imaginings, or any kind of experience that can be identified by name or form -- freedom from complication by mind.

Said another way, peace is natural rest and spontaneous right action -- the very experience of being so much "in the zone" that we forget we're in the zone.

It simply involves getting out of our own way so we can enjoy our natural state.

Ring any bells?

Stay tuned.

How Do We Escape the Traps of Memories?

Behind all of our habits and repetitive experiences, in life, is memory.  Memory is the persistence of an experience.

Memory is one of the four expressions of intelligence.  It works hand-in-hand with imagination.  Without memory, imagination evaporates without a trace.

Memory is our way of capturing our ideas, giving substance to foresight, voice to conscience, and getting good grades, in school.

So, we prize memory above all of our other expressions of intelligence.

Wrongly.

Two reasons:

Other expressions of intelligence are necessary for memory to work:

attention:  For memory to work, we must pay attention to it.

intention:  For memories to have any meaning, they must be flavored with an intention.

imagination:  A little twitch of our imagination calls up our memories.  (If a little twitch doesn't do it, a heavy effort of remember rarely works, have you noticed?)

All four are needed for any one of them to work.  None of them is superior to the others.

That's reason #1.

Here's reason #2:

Memory, without balance by the other three expressions of intelligence is a trap -- the loss of peace, the trap of stress,  or obsession, or compulsion, or bigotry, or willful ignorance -- or stupidity, the incapacity or refusal of intelligence.  We forget what peace feels like.

We have a little clue about how to overcome the persistent force of memory and very good reasons to do so.

The clue about how to overcome the persistent force (or alternately, the incompetence) of memory lies with the other three expressions of intelligence.  There's an oddity, about it.

This is the oddity:  As soon as all four expressions of intelligence come to balance with each other, all four become optimized -- and experience automatically loses its entrapping quality.  Said another way, the seeming substantiality memory evaporates, leaving mental space.

The trap of experience evaporates, and yet all four expressions of intelligence -- including memory -- are optimized.  Odd, don't you think?  No teacher ever taught you that, did they?

Well, here's the rub:  How do we balance our four expressions of intelligence -- attention, intention, memory, and imagination?

There are ways -- slow ways and fast ways.

So, how do we know we are trapped by the force of a memory?

We're just a little bit ... annoyed ... or obsessed ... or inconvenienced by conscience or foresight, or that song just won't stop running through our mind.  But mostly, we're just bothered.

The first step to overcoming for force of memory is to recognize that we've lost our peace.

Recognizing that takes just a bit of intelligence -- actually, a lot because we tend to get buried in the details of our daily experience.

Stay tuned.

Next expostulation in about two days!

Why do we seem to lose our peacefulness?

 Why do we seem to lose our peacefulness?

Peace is our baseline condition -- but it doesn't seem that way, does it?

Instead, it seems we must either struggle for our peace or suffer lives of disturbance!

Why is that?

We exist in a vast realm of possibility that shows up as our unexpected lives.  We have a sense of how things are and of how they should be -- so often contradicted by our experience.

That contradiction by life of our values and expectations creates our sense of disturbance -- and yet we seem unable to resolve that contradiction, in ourselves.  Peace seems lost and inaccessible.

Instead, we experience a state of imbalance triggered by our attention to the unbalances of the world -- imbalances that change our sense of reality to a state of imbalance.

Our memories of experience color our sense of the present moment.  Our stored memories overpower our sense of the potential of our imagination and the power of our intention -- and there seems to be little we can do, other than struggle to make the world conform to our sense of rightness or suffer our failure to do so.

The imbalances of life unbalance our intelligence.

If we are to recover our sense of peace, we need a way to recover our own balance -- and struggle is not the way.  Struggle is a state of imbalance.  We've already seen that.

There's another way.  It's the way of releasing, recovering our balance despite the imbalances of the world.  Releasing is a state of less effort.  It's a kind of grooming that removes the aftereffects of life, leaving us in our natural state of intelligence -- the sense of peace that surpasses worldly understanding.

It's a way of less effort, not more effort.

How do we do that?

Stay tuned.