The string that strummed?
Does a guitar ever live? When it is sitting in a case, it is just a piece wood with strings attached but when you play it, does it not sounds alive, full of emotion and tension, every pluck and strum brings it back again into existence, every note is born, lives and dies for a lifetime of mere seconds. The guitar never thinks of itself as alive, it never makes claims that it is so, you could just say it was a process where energy that changes from kinetic to sound waves. However, imagine for a moment that the guitar had consciousness that it experiences an awareness that arises as it is being played, it wakes upon being strummed, it has a thought which it's experiences as a musical note and then it is gone, how would that be different from your experience of a thought which also arises from and passes into nothingness.
You might say, but I play myself do I not? Do you? Do you intend to play every thought you have, are you the one who decide what every note the instrument of your mind is strumming? Alternatively you are being played, is every string of consciousness waiting for the universe to play it, if the external world did not exist would the mind even play at all, or would it be like the guitar in a case, frozen in limbo for the next time it was taken out for a jam session in the world. Try to find a string in your stream of consciousness that you can not trace back to something that happened in the external world, sure there are knock on effect, a reaction to a reaction but there is always a root cause in world around you.
If you observe for long enough you will notice how negative thoughts lead to negative feelings which in turn lead to more negative thoughts, the mind can amplify the negative or positive, this amplification is a feature of our consciousness to keep our attention on what is important for the physical body, and maintenance of our instrument is a good idea, just do not mistake for a stable, permanent self that need protecting, it is the vehicle that is the body making sure it continues to exist by any means necessary. We might have twenty thousand thoughts a day, but it is all repeats and variations, when was your last truly original thought?
What those thoughts do is keep us on track to maintain the existence of the body and our relative position in society (as social death is the same as actual death in our minds), the price we pay for all this activity is not having the spare attention and awareness to notice the body and mind's mechanical nature, whilst beautiful, a musical instrument is still mechanical in nature, a guitar can only sound like a guitar and not a piano, and a human can only make human noises. What makes the sound beautiful is that they mimic our consciousness in their vibratory nature, our thought and feeling vibrate with energy, that vibration is beautiful to our mind especially when they are free of emotional resonance, the neutral experience of vibration is inherently blissful, it is own natural state, observing the vibration of the life experience is what our attention and awareness does.
What is unpleasant is the stuff we lay over the top, the interpretation of that raw experience, what it means, how it feels, the trapping of energy instead of letting it be, by letting it come as it is, without which letting it go is impossible, just like a wasp in a jar, it is a lot more frightening and loud when it is trapped than when you let it go again. We never really have to let anything go, if we did not interfere in the first place, and it is the mind that traps energy and the body that suffers for that decision, and we hold that energy tightly in the first place because it is so loud initially in our consciousness, we have to learn that we can tolerate any vibration that the external world causes, we have to build the faith and strength but that is what growing up is suppose to teach us, it is just no one did, there was no lesson in school that taught us about the energy of the mind, we think that we should be conducting the orchestra when in reality we are the audience enjoy the show.
This is what we have to let go of in mediation, we have to recognise that we are the source of pain in our lives, it is the very act of resisting suffering that is the cause of our greatest suffering. The way through this is to pay attention to the vibrations of our mind, to stop seeing the mind as something that we are conducting, instead just observe the strings of consciousness being played, how the mind react to the world around it in a purely mechanical manner, not like clockwork but like the beautiful instrument that it is. By around it, we also have to include our subconscious minds, they play our consciousness mind as well, there is no way to define our subconscious minds as part of our consciousness they are mutually exclusive process that interact within our consciousness mind, note how there are one consciousness mind and many subconscious minds, and they range from temperature gauges, heart monitors to feelings. We never claim that our central heating is alive, but when this information comes from internal monitors we give them a sense of being part of us, and they are part of the body, though expressly by definition not part of our consciousness awareness or else they would be conscious.
It is this mixing of external stimulus and internal information that our sense of self sits between, on the surface between these two flows of energy, it is little wonder that we decide that the surface area between them is special, it is, it is the point of view and inflection between two world, it is just not a permanent, stable self that needs protecting. Instead what it really is, is a very complicated process to make decisions, strings of consciousness that form a rat's nest that is completely interdependent. That is why you are so full of tension, worries and anxiety, they help you to make every decision, from whether you put some sugar in your cup of tea to what career you want to pursue. The process is the same, it is just that the impact of the outcomes are different, you pour more energy into more important decisions, however the process never really stops, have you ever noticed how when you resolve one problem, the next one immediately pops up, like the worst game of whack-a-mole in the world. The mind purpose is problem solving that is it's purpose, it will carry on doing it whether you want it to or not.
Given this,instead of fighting this problem solving machine, why not give it a real problem to help untangle it, you could ask it, “who am I?” chew on that for awhile and see how it can not solve it, is it your body, no, your job, a label like mother, son, no, you will come back to answer that you are what is your consciousness is experiencing, and that is an answer that can not be formed with words, it must be known through direct experience and that means paying attention to what is happening in this present moment, that is the only way answer the question. That is why it is worth building up the power of your attention with concentration exercises, which is the same as any other strength training, repetitions and increasing weight, in this case, the repetitions is the time you spend concentrating on the physical sensation of the breathing, and the weight is the subtlety of the sensation you can pay attention towards for that time.
Then turn this power towards what is happening in your mind, can you experience the strings of consciousness being played, it is fine having this mental model in your mind before meditating, but whilst you are paying attention to the sensation of your strings being played, you should just listen to the music that they are paying, the nature of the vibrations, how those vibrations lead to thoughts, feelings and emotions, that hit other strings of consciousness. This might well feel more like the orchestra warming up in disorganised chaos rather than actually playing a symphony, this is normal, and normality of our everyday life, stuff is just clanging in there. That is where your concentration practise comes in, as stable attention quiets the orchestra, by just concentrating on one instrument, your breath, the other strings quietens down, which gives you a fighting chance of recognising the nature of a single string of consciousness, and once you see the nature of one of them, the rest are just the same.
That is not to say, you could not stumble into this recognition by listening to the whole orchestra, it is just more difficult, though, doing nothing except listening will lead you there in the end, it just more time consuming. It is also a real shame to have high levels of concentration and never turning towards your own mind, it is like having the key to the magical kingdom and never opening the door. Spend time both on building the skills you need and opening yourself up to the beauty of your own mind, one without the other is a waste of a great opportunity, the real break through come with the second options, but without the strength to really pay attention you will probably never break through to the greater understanding of how we exist in this world.
When you stop trying to play the music and instead listen to the beauty of your internal world that is a real insight that changes how you relate to the world, you stop trying to control your internal world and let it unfold in it's natural manner, you stop swimming upstream and turn into the flow of life. You stop trying to have the thought and feeling that you want to have, and instead allow the thoughts and energy you have to flow through your body and mind in their own way. You let go of the dreams of experiences you are never going to have, in it's place you have the full realisation of the experiences that you are actually having in this moment, and it turns out when energy flows that is the beauty that you have always sought, there is peace in stopping fighting and flowing with where you life is taking you anyway, we do not choose the events of how life, but the quality of our life is how we experience these event as they are happening.
Unbelievably, painful events have a pleasant tone within the painful ones, suffering always has the companion of pleasure, it is not the case that you are changing the story, more that you are experiencing a more mature version of the simple children stories that you have been experiencing all your life, because you were never told the truth. There is suffering that is inescapable, and there is joy in every moment of your life, you can listen to the joy or choose to suffer, that is up to you, and every time you choose suffering that is what you will get, or you take the radical decision to always choose joy in defiance of the problem solving machine that is the mind.
You can instead choose to listen to your strings of consciousness play, that is why you should start listening in the quiet times and not wait until you are deafen by the natural unfolding of your life. Treat your mind with gentleness and kindness, it is not your enemy or friend, it is a process for you to understand the world, you can use it for mere survival, and sometimes that is all you need, if you are in a lifeboat you do not need a full orchestra, but the best use of freedom is not making more money, it is to give yourself more freedom, it is after all not a pass fail standard, rather freedom is a scale that has no limit except for what you impose on your self or what other try to dominate you from a place of fear, and freedom does generate fear, because once you are liberated there are no restriction upon you, you get to choose and live with the consequences of your action in the full knowledge of what you have done, and it all begins with listening to the strumming of string of your own string, so enjoy the music.
