UNDIVIDED ATTENTION

      The senses receive information which is monitored by the mind.   The mind is not as most people presume it to be, however.   We cannot prove the mind to be an entity unto itself, for when we look for it, it eludes our grasp.   All that is possible to say about the mind is that it is the nearly incessant flow of thoughts and thinking.  The thoughts and the thinking can be found; they can be perceived, recognized, and inspected, but a mind is never seen.   Sometimes the brain has been thought to be the mind, but recently science has shown that the brain is more like a switching-board, a circuitry panel that directs sensory impulses throughout the physical nervous system. The mind seems to be connected and interrelated with this circuitry, but not dependent upon it.   Science has a lot of work left to do before the mind and thinking will be even minutely understood.   A mind divided by the dichotomies of discriminative error becomes the creator of illusionary dreamscapes built from sensory information and tainted by faulty observation, lack of reason, and aberrated discernment.   Add to this an unbridled and rampant imagination and then come the mental sets based on false views and blind opinions.  This is the ground and support for the further structuring of fictitious identity complexes, the ego-notion, and then the dualistic dance spins a great web of confusion.  People get absorbed in a hypnoidal life story and living becomes focused on a materiality and a hedonistic outlook dominated by a divided mental state.   The process will continue to proceed until some catalyst, usually the experience of suffering, gets a person’s undivided attention.   Then there is potential for enquiry and a possibility for conscious intelligence to step out of the dualistic dance.

©2014