MIND ALIVE

1. There are seductive states between consciousness and not: dream and half awake. These provide another insight; subsequence and consequence intermingle to form amalgamated spaces. Recondite delight tingles the ultraconscious memory of discoveries recorded, discords resolved, diminuations expanded.

2. What I call mind is very broad. It includes all of awareness and something else which gives form to awareness. This other part of mind is mysterious although people have been trying to fathom it for ages. Some of its aspects include logic and reason, but it is also responsible, at least in part, for science, music, poetry and art, politics and law, indeed all of society and at least the forms of love. Yet none of us really know what this mind is.

3. Liquid mind flowing in the middle, deep rock mind solid underneath, mud mind soft at the boundary, wave mind on the surface where thought is present, wind mind moving dream clouds, star mind above the clouds, sun mind lightening all, sunset mind at the colored culmination, midnight mind above, dawn mind brightening, crystal mind ordering, steel mind holding, wet mind dissolving.

4. Mind alive is rarely encountered outside of limited projections. Mind is usually encapsulated in a medium, a framework which both supports and cages the living mind. We make great effort, many of us, to find and build frameworks, houses and therefore cages for our minds. How can we use frameworks as levers, rather than cages, for our minds?

5. Let me compare the housing of the mind to the housing of the body. Among most of us, the body dwells primarily in buildings. The mind similarly dwells in constructions. But the body can also go free, travel from building to building or wander in nature. Mind Alive needs a corresponding freedom to go forth beyond its habitual thoughts and attitudes.

6. Mind Alive is the living experience of mind. It is awareness with form and sometimes intent. It can also be awareness in action.

7. Mind is alive in daily life. Mind is alive in nocturnal reflections. Mind is alive in thought. Mind is alive in dreams. Mind is alive in study and learning. Mind is alive in games.

8. Some people have the facility of literal vision. Alternatively, we impress awareness from our inner mind onto the fabric of appearance. Try an experiment. Wherever you are, look around, look at your surroundings, focus upon selected views, continue looking, return to some of the same views, notice the differences in aspect when you look at something once and then look at it again, and then again. Continue and repeat this exercise as long and often as you are able.

9. It is a practice to recall your Mind Alive even in the midst of the busy spawn of time. To do so gathers your being and uplifts your spirits.

10. Mind alive is multifaceted with a central core. Mind Alive may have been born when I was twelve years old, sitting on the edge of my bed, putting on socks, getting ready for school. I still recall entering a thought form of conscious intent concerning the nature and particularly the origins of consciousness, how matter came to be aware. I thought then that this was the critical issue, a necessity to understand life and being. And I always thought so until my thought evolved toward the priority of awareness. Now I think that matter is encapsulated in awareness, not the other way around.

11. Mind Alive gradually clears itself. Mind Alive both increases in scale and resolution.

12. Often when I have been exploring different media I have forgone explicit connection with Mind Alive. That explicitness is only occasionally necessary. In art and sometimes in poetry the distance is so great there is only an implicit and unthought connection with Mind Alive. Even in philosophy the differential is sometimes unaware.

13. The concept or project of Mind Alive is only a partial surfacing of Mind Alive. Living mind does what it does and I have no wish to further constrain it; instead I offer methods of deconstraint.