When was the last time you were awake but without thoughts popping up?
The automated thinking, or
"inner commentator" disappears when playing
with the cat or dog, or busy with an activity like for instance watching
a sunrise or composing a song. That observation already gives a hint:
the "inner commentator" is superfluous and its activity is likely to have
resulted from suppression of the desire / need for expression in early
childhood, like wanting to scream to air feelings but knowing that to be
forbidden.
The so called "natural state" is but the absence of the "inner
commentator": awareness is unbroken and events are observed as they
happen - no comments unless a situation requires them. This is the
natural state for most animals when they are relaxed: they aren't
planning dates & dinner for the rest of the week.
Observation shows, the natural condition (relaxed, silent yet alert) is
easily disturbed - interpretation of many events is hardwired and what
for man looks like another man wearing a surfboard on his shoulders,
looks like a dangerous, giant bird of prey for a little turnstone,
until it learns, that has been incorrect all the time. For man that
mechanism isn't fundamentally different: the scope of interpretations is
different, there are more thoughts and feelings able to disturb a state
of relaxation and the more society gets alienated from life in "wild"
nature, the more (powerful) potential for disturbance is generated.
Thusly, polar pairs arise as comments, like
holy & profane, beautiful &
ugly, right & wrong, entertaining and boring, higher & lower, subject &
object etc. etc..
For a mind with "inner commentator" a thing of the past, such
polar pairs are helpful to suggest a division where there isn't one. Instead,
a description of observations and the interpretation leaves but the
interpretation up for discussion - which depends on content / context /
perspective. The issue then regards functionality.
Does a label like "i" or "you" actually exist apart from relationships
where such labels are functional (meaningful)? If a thing like "i" would
exist as a center, doesn't that imply the assumption, the rest has to be
i-less? Why would such a center be more important than the others?
Sensational differences?
Books that say so? Who then was the first guy
to write it down and what made him and the readers believe it? Surely,
sensations first and interpretation / speculation, next, followed by seeking
verification.
A master-slave relationship is expressed by one center controlling the
others, a notion of "i" being the first (and root) of other notions, the
king (or god) and his subjects,
the enlightened holy (wo)man and the
unenlightened unholy seekers,
the producers and the consumers etc. etc.
Such master-slave type acceptation with subsequent subservience is man's
hardwired blindness enabling to destroy an entire planet in the name of
"fate / karma / the lord &
his self-appointed deputies" (who cleverly
appointed "the lord" first, as an infallible aid to borrow authority
from) without the least sense of dysfunctionality in the majority of
those, on whom the role of "subject" successfully has been imposed since
birth: the label "dream" (object) subsequently is attached to "external
world" to objectify it, as if that makes a difference...
So the majority goes on, somnambulating in service of "the lord and/or
his deputies". History suggests, there has been a time when that was
functional (like the order of Melchizedek) as a phase in human
development but mostly it has led to what now looks like a polarized
society of mutually dependent conditioned "providers" and "consumers":
the consumers are providing the providers to consume the joys of
provision (profit). Free from the conditioning are those, knowing the
"natural state" as that leaves unadulterated functioning as the joy of
life which doesn't need adornment.
The "natural state" is essentially
void, the potential to disturb
(forget / veil / mask) it can be diminished by domestication-like
efforts (work) and can be made to vanish completely - with greater
effort. Various terms exist to denote stages regarding the irreversibly
reduced potential to disturb the natural state, classified by the
accompanying effects which for humans are the same, so serve as pointers
in a "nowhere land" where parrots are abundant but guides are rare.
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