A FRIEND AND ENEMY

 Thoughts are contractions and modifications of consciousness.   They come from impressions made in past experience, from memory.   The mind, when it has a sufficient store of impressions from past experience, can develop imagination using ideas and image-structures from the storehouse of memory.   Memories of the past and imaginations for the future are mental functions and very useful for anyone who uses mind for purposeful thinking.   The mind can be the most wonderful friend. When mind runs on and on by its own energy it becomes automatic and mechanical and this is not a purposefully directed mode of thinking; this is the waking dream state which can get to be so habitual and mechanistically reactive that we get into a deep bondage of ignorance and delusion and can stray far away from our clarity, our light, and our real identity. In this way the mind can be a most terrible enemy.

     The root contraction, upon which all other mechanistic thoughts and motivated desire-seeking is founded, is the ego-notion.   The ego is a notion of false identity, a consciousness contraction pattern that keeps unconsciously occurring; it is the root of the conceptual creations of all the false notions of duality and separation.   The ego-notion seems to be a useful device at the stage in which an individual needs to be aware of survival-level necessities; an individual must care for his individual vehicle, the body-mind organism, in order to get experience on this plane of physicality. When this stage in the progression of development of intellect is complete, then the individual monad of consciousness next realizes that the ego-notion is a false identity, and then the contemplative awareness begins to emerge.   The ego-notion begins to be known as a dis-easeful condition and when more and more recognition and understanding take the priority, then the “dis-ease” can be “healed”.