Imagine the most boring friend you could ever have and multiply this by ten billion times and then you are getting close. There is nothing more banal than this – this is banality itself. There is an indescribable banality to this business of being serially stuck in our own thoughts, our own ever-multiplying mental objects. The one thing that thought doesn’t lead to is reality this is one ‘stop’ that the train never pulls up at! It’s all a continuum and it all goes around in circles. There is never a time when one thing doesn’t lead to another. There is no natural end or break to the continuum of thought because one thing always leads to another. There’s no end to the hurrying because it isn’t actually going anywhere – it’s ‘hurrying for the sake of hurrying’. It’s hurrying along and hurrying along and there’s no end to this hurrying. There is a kind of ‘momentum’ to the train of thought that we’re caught on that won’t let us off. The mind-created world is a Great Forgetting – it’s a Great Forgetting because when we’re immersed in our thinking we have no time for anything else. ![]() We fall back asleep and when we’re asleep we forget everything. Who isn’t to say that we couldn’t spend our whole life like this, stuck to our own thoughts, unaware of anything outside of them? What’s to stop this happening? In practice breaks (or bardos) do occur – as Sogyal Rinpoche notes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying – but we very quickly fall right back into the hypnotic flow of our thoughts again. ![]() We can see this happening just as soon as we take an interest in observing ourselves but the point is that we don’t take an interest – we could very easily go from day to day, month to month, year to year without ever being aware of our absorption in the mind-created world. So what goes on in the course of the day is that we jump from one thought to another, one mental object to another, without there hardly ever being a break. This is as far away from ‘being aware’ as it is possible to get! To be stuck to our mental objects is to be ‘blind to the world as it is in itself’ and if we’re blind to the world as it is in itself then we’re blind full stop! To perceive one’s own prejudiced perceptions without seeing that they are prejudiced is to see nothing– this is not awareness at all. When we go to the trouble of actually noticing what is happening to our attention however we see that ‘to be aware of our mental objects as they themselves present themselves’ as being is to be aware of nothing. We will probably say that we are aware of things, rather than being ‘helplessly stuck to our mental objects’, in some kind of a foolish or gullible way. We will probably say that our attention isn’t stuck to anything, that this is the wrong word to use. Instead of being ‘the passive unconscious host’, we have to be alert and wary, like an investigative journalist who never takes what he or she is told at face value. ![]() ![]() In order to see what the object of our attention really is we have to be not stuck to it. We’re ‘unconscious’ because all we know is what the object of our attention presents itself as being, which is not the same thing as what it actually is. It’s a curious thing to see this – to see that having our attention stuck to something means not to be aware that it is. One thing that is very interesting straightaway is to notice the way in which we don’t notice what our attention is stuck to! We don’t really notice what our attention is stuck to and we don’t notice that it is stuck. It is interesting to notice what our attention is stuck to during the course of the day.
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