From: SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen) Subject: Re: Psychic energy/Chi/L.V.X. Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 07:55:58 EST Richard M. Romanowski writes: >> Sound advice ... but when you stop thinking about it, plant in your >> mind the true seed-thought that there is no difference between body >> and mind. There is no division. You are not a car containing a >> passenger. Your body is not a box, imprisoning the real you. >> Everything blurs. Bryan J. Maloney said: > Ah, pretty much the thing that modern neuroscientists and others are > FINALLY beginning to accept. If anyone runs into Descartes in their > journeys, kick him in the pants for him setting science back by > centuries of potential work. (I am serious on this point.) It's important in any kind of teaching to challenge the fixed idea that one is in control of one's life much as a driver is in control of a car. For those who are not yet ready to go beyond the dichotomy of driver and vehicle, I find the following useful at times: You think you are, as it were, driving a car down the highway -- but take a more distanced view, and you see instead of a driver in a car, a would-be driver sitting at a video-game pretending to drive a car down a highway. This is a very sophisticated video game in a way: the highway that appears on the screen is derived from the surrounding scenery, only distorted. But the video-game itself is mounted on the back of an old, creaky farm wagon, pulled by a team of horses. On the box sits a deaf- mute farm hand, who holds the reins and thinks that *he* is the one controlling the horses. Since the farm-hand is a deaf-mute, the only way to talk to him, once you notice his presence, is by gestures or pictures [ritual, symbols, whatever]. The horses, moreover, are not pulling the whole contraption down a highway, but through a rural landscape. At times they go down a paved road, at times a dirt one (potholes and all), at times through woods, at times across open fields -- when spooked, they may even go over a cliff, as horses sometimes do. Also, their gait may vary, from a walk to a gallop. So, if all you judge by is the video-game screen, you may think you're getting somewhere, though when you turn the game off and get down from your seat, you may be very surprised at where you've ended up, and how little it resembles what you saw on the screen. If you're a bit wiser, you'll notice the rural landscape from time to time, and may occasion- ally try to communicate with the driver, not realizing that he neither hears nor speaks. This can be even more frustrating. The person well on the road to real wisdom may be attending to the landscape all the time, as well as to the screen; and he may even have figured out how to communicate with the real wagon-driver. This, however, may sometimes spook the horses (wild gesticulating and all that), which can be very dangerous -- or not, depending on the terrain at the moment. A very few of us, perhaps, may be communicating with the wagon-driver on a regular basis, and not spooking the horses, either. Yet even so, the wagon-driver has a mind of his own, and can get stubborn. And beyond the wagon-driver, there are the horses, who know very well where they want to go, and are controllable only at times by the deaf-mute who holds their reins. (Ultimately, of course, you, the wagon-driver and the horses all have more or less the same destination, for their own different reasons; so most people end up more or less where they hoped to go, even if they don't recognize it when they get there.) Finally, as a far-off ideal, more striven after than realized by anyone, there is the person who can get down from the wagon and walk towards a destination from time to time, or who may even just prefer to walk all the time, whether s\he has a destination any longer or is just enjoying the planet of which s\he, ultimately, is a part. This generally shakes up a few preconceptions among my university students. -- Robert (Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL500000@BROWNVM)