MIND ALIVE

What is called mind here is very broad. It includes awareness and something else which gives form to awareness. This other part of mind is mysterious, although people have been trying to understand it for ages. Some of its aspects are 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 some of the forms of love. Yet none of us really know what this essential part of mind is. And neither are we trying here to say what it is but we suggesting some ways of living with it.

There are categories of connected forms, such as science, mathematics, art, music, poetry, philosophy and the various crafts, skills and trades. These are genera in which creative mind acts. There is also something like mind itself, aware alone or in communion. I forsee a future in which the categories are transcended by creative mind alive. Presently, media are combined and this will expand into more substantual connection. I challenge you to go forward and bring this about!

A deeper integration can be conceived and then it calls for us. That is to combine mind alive with life, thought with seconds of experience and action, ideas with hours and theories with days, all in a synthesis dissolving boundaries between names. We can and should become one in our being and mind alive. Even now the gates are open and we have begun to tread this evolutionary step. An integration and increase of reality comparable to genetic transformation and occupation of the starry night.

Thoughts and feeling can clog the mind. So does focus on a subject. Let it go sometimes. Especially release beliefs and so called values, which imprison both ourselves and our awareness of others. Decommission judgment, which is not being alive. Decline fear. Hold desire lightly and mostly desire what is. Let anger go begging. Stretch and rest both the body and the mind.

Mind Alive is also cloaked by labor. While the ends of labor may be productive and useful, the direct effect is to dull and shroud the mind. The question arises: Should we work or not? Suppose we make a distinction between work and labor, calling work that activity, that effort, which we perform for our own ends, ends directly valued by us. We can call labor the effort through which we produce results primarily valued by others, effort which we make by necessity, often for pay but sometimes under force, rather than as an emanation of our own nature. Work is clearly honorable but labor is questionable. Both cloak Mind Alive, although in different ways. Work absorbs perhaps even more of the attention of mind than does labor but work also energizes the essential self in a way that labor contradicts. Work may absorb all of our attention but labor usually does not. A part of our awareness is restless in labor; a part which, although it may be weak, is at least a little bit of living mind.

Our minds are surrounded by experience, entangled in webs of expectation and assumption. These are the walls and furniture of mind; they divide, enclose, protect and take up space. Some of these positions are explicit, like scientists who believe in evolution and some religious who do not. But much of the structure directing our thought is hidden. It is not the explicit beliefs or thoughts so much as the hidden ones that most circumscribe and limit the mind, a great entanglement of our time that the web of thought encloses. It is the invisibility of the web of unseen thought that imprisons us. Mostly we are unaware of the web and that unknowing is our prison. And when we become aware of the idea of the web and look for it, even so most of it is invisible, untraceable. We cannot escape.

Fortunately the situation is not so desperate. The web is inevitable but flexible. We cannot escape but we can move around. When we move our thoughts about we both sense the web and push it back a little, giving us more room to move... Our thoughts are not free, never entirely, but we can think.

Of this web of inner assumption that substantially controls our thought, some is shared but each of us is an individual which no one, not even ourselves, can entirely know, although, with intent we can partially illuminate our selves, and thus, to that degree, free us from its automatic control. This is one of the reasons why meditation and inward reflection are so valuable to the mind. But another, and sometimes more effective, freeing of the mind comes via surprise, in new experience of time and the world. And of vital importance, we can act.

In order to guide and create action mind must be as completely awake, as alive, as possible. This occurs in the path of Mind Alive. Action is motion but some motion is more active than other motion. Action is directed motion. While most of our normal physical motion, walking about and such, occurs at various levels of intent and awareness, so does most of our thought. We can also think more actively. One form, or several forms of active thought and motion, is creativity. Creativity is on the interface of thought and motion.

Mind action is an other species than physical action. Mind can act upon itself as mind, as well as construct intent and guide action in the world. The living mind is often held back from its full vitality and freedom. Many things absorb the energy of the living mind: hunger, work, heat and cold, tiredness, emotion, company... Since we can only occasionally avoid all of these encounters, we can strive to keep the mind alive in their presence.