By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Sedona News (July 10, 2021) What if thought isn’t the problem? What if thought doesn’t create good or bad? We’ve been conditioned to believe that thought creates our experience of the world and to carefully watch what we think. What a heavy load to carry — a cross of immense proportions.
What if it doesn’t? What if the thoughts aren’t even your thoughts, but simply thoughts, one of the variables of the dream, no different than the backdrop scenery?
What would that mean? If you don’t need to control your thoughts — who has ever succeeded at that — your body can let go of its vigilance. Your mind can relax into a pool of calm. You can stand down and simply play out your life in peace and happiness. When there is nothing to do, you can simply be.
Does thought have any more basis in consciousness than perceptions, feelings or sensations? They arise in the same stuff — in aware consciousness. When you explore consciousness — simply and with curiosity — you find that wherever you go, however far afield the knowing being you are wanders, there you are. You can’t outrun consciousness. You can’t hide from consciousness. You can’t even slip away during deep sleep. What is it that knows you’ve slept deeply? Aware consciousness itself.
Consciousness is the experiencer of all experience. When thought, perceptions, feelings and sensations fall away, consciousness remains — empty, eternal, infinite, timeless, dimensionless presence. Thoughts, perceptions, feelings and sensations arise within consciousness, that which is empty of all things. If they arise from emptiness they must be made of the emptiness for there is nothing else there. That makes thought empty, toothless, a dream in consciousness, just like every thing that appears in awareness and that includes you.
By stringing thoughts together — the pastime that creates the concept of mind — we make meaning out of nothing. Meaning feels good to the insecure neurotic fixed on fixing themselves in time and space. You explain your predicament by using the past to justify the future. Of course, past and future don’t exist but that doesn’t stop you. That’s part of the game here. It’s all a game of make believe and believe what you want, nothing changes the outcome.
Thought is not a precursor of what’s to come. That ludicrous idea assumes time and space in timeless spaceless consciousness. Without time, proven not to exist by physicists and spiritual travelers, where is the thought that came before? It is simply a memory, an echo of movement in consciousness.
That’s why thoughts seem to be accurate … or least one explanation. And in that wonder of circular logic, that’s what maintains the belief in thought — its apparent accuracy — and your complete and utter mesmerism with this world and your place in it.
Exploring what’s here is a kick. Doing it with a completely open mind and heart is priceless. Someone says something and it creates a wiggle in the field of understanding and off I go. Today it was thoughts. Seeing the underpinning is nothing but, well nothing, kind of takes the oomph out of them. Isn’t that grand!
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