Friday, November 25, 2016

Empty-headed

To create I have destroyed myself; I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist on the inside except externally.  I am the empty stage where various actors act out their plays.

Fernando Pessoa, the Book of Disquiet

Believing that you are a physical object in a physical world whose thoughts happen inside their head is not only delusional its also extremely limiting.  The feeling of your body, of being ''in'' your body is exactly that, a feeling or sense of yourself  which is being displayed in your mind along with all the other sights, sounds, smells and feelings of your sensorium.  You are not rooted in your feeling of body self any more than you are rooted in a passing scent.  They are all your thoughts.  This mental universe is the reality you live in.  To mistake the feeling for the actual thing itself is the shadowy cave that most of us spend our lives in.  Although we assume this mental impression of the self is mirroring the physical self, when it itches we itch, we also know that sometimes what we are feeling may have no genuine cause in the physical world - i.e. delusional parasitosis.

Whenever you touch an object, you never touch the object itself, you ''feel'' your ''feeling'' of it, you never see an object directly you see the impression of it in your mind.  If people grasped this simple truth about the mental universe and lived that way they would realise that there are no thoughts in their heads, the thoughts are flowing in the air around them, because the air that they percieve is literally the mental impression of that air in their mind - the feeling of the air is made of thought. Understood and lived in this way the world around you becomes your outer mind and allows your higher self to communicate directly from the objects themselves.

For instance if I observe a tree then I am not directly observing the tree, (assuming the physical universe is real) I am observing the mental impression of the tree created in my mind by light signals bouncing off the tree, activating photo-receptors on my retinas which send a signal to the visual cortex which then converts it into the image of a tree which I observe from my sense of self awareness from somewhere else in my mind - I only ever see with my mind's eye in this way, never directly through the physical eyes.  Alongside this, my impression of the tree includes all the information that I know about trees in general and this specific tree in particular - my mind includes this knowledge in the image.  I don't have to engage actively retrieving information on the tree, my consciousness has embedded it in the image itself.

I started thinking about this when I was reading someone's face and body with physiognomy the other day.  There is no part of me that was analysing them or the information presented from inside my head.  The information is delivered directly from the physiognomy of the person to the words that I say to them in the reading without any kind of ''interior'' middle man that analyses them or chooses the words to say.  The only thing this delusional middle man seems to do is cause interference with the activities of the intuition pulling information from the outer mind through its various egoic noises - pride, pretensions, anxiety, etc.

I mentioned in an earlier post about there being ''nothing'' above your head because you can't look above your head.  Of course you can look in a mirror to see above your physical head, but from the sensory location of your consciousness. you can't see above your mental head.  In the mental universe this empty space, this nothing above your head is in truth occupied by the magickal lamp it is the position from which light flows into the mental impression of objects that exist in the mental universe - the source of inner light.  Thoughts flow from the objects themselves and concentrate just in front of the mental impression of the face. Similarly there is nothing ''inside'' my head.  The idea that there are ''thoughts in our heads'' is simply a delusion that we buy into because we sadly mistake the mental for the physical most of the time and therefore believing ourselves to be physical we fill up this interior non-space with babble.  As I mentioned previously magical study should flip understanding every so often and this lesson is no different.  Your head itself is empty, it is the world around you that is full of your thought.

All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air that I breathed.  In this moment of seeing I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I always thought I was a citizen.  At the heart of my thoughts, I wasn't I.

Fernando Pessoa

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