Reference: Course on Human Nature
Mindfulness is attentiveness. Mindfulness brings clarity to what one perceives. The basic approach is:
Observe things as they are, with full awareness of one’s assumptions.
When you look at the profile of a stranger sitting far away, you may see only one ear. When asked, “How many ears does this person have?” you may say, “He has two ears.” This is a reasonable answer because Man is born with two ears. The chances are slim but this stranger may have the other ear missing, which you can’t see at that moment.
Most people make such assumptions automatically, because they are reasonable. But some are aware of the assumption, while others are not.
Those who are aware of their assumptions are mindful.
When there are doubts and perplexities, one should look at them closely with mindfulness. In other words, one should consider them non-judgmentally with close attention to possible assumptions. All ideas, beliefs, viewpoints, and feelings related to observed inconsistency, are subject to such critical examination.
No past ideas and learning in the area of doubt and perplexity are sacrosanct (meaning so “sacred” that you cannot question them).
You continue with the critical examination until the factor generating the inconsistency is discovered, and the doubts and perplexities are resolved.
This is mindfulness.
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Glossary
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is observing things as they are, with full awareness of one’s assumptions. No past ideas and learning in the area of doubt and perplexity are sacrosanct (meaning so “sacred” that you cannot question them).
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Comments
Vin, I’m still looking at the amount of time within one second of standard clock time. The reason that I haven’t posted about it yet is because as I research, I found so many others have already covered this pretty well. I am still writing it, but I have to do more work on it.
The reason to bring it up is that I’ve been looking at mindfulness on a continual basis (duh! what else is mindfulness?) for a while now. Today it seemed to me that I was experiencing a reduction of stress about time. I am feeling less hurried. All subjective sensations, yes; however the reason to mention it is that I feel that mindfulness might be making more time available.
As I have posted before, our daily lives actually use — as a ratio of available time — very little time at all. So little in fact that we hardly exist. Why mindfulness works; the mechanic of why it may be useful is that our attention helps us use more of the available time.
We routinely say that our lives are short when in fact they are nearly infinitely long if we could be bothered to use the time which is available to us. As an example, a man on his death bed with only minutes of life remaining before passing away, has available to him more time than all of mankind has used before him.
For these reasons, I want to say that I support your effort toward mindfulness as it could be a mechanic which moves man forward on his evolutionary path in a constructive way.
It seems to me that as confusion lessens and attention gets streamlined the sense of time expands.
The second would contain a lot of activity when the attention is laser sharp. Don’t you think so?
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Yes, and this area seems to be forming up to be an area that I’m interested in. This and the inconsistencies between life forms, such as the genetic and environmental strengths and weaknesses.
Defragmented and free of malware, the mind would be more free to process information.
That is the area I have been interested in.
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I have been wondering about and turned my attention toward the strength of the human mind as opposed to those minds of other species. I find language ability to be a major difference, one that might be the major difference. It gives us the structure to save knowledge and then without inventing it again, pass it along to our progeny.
Just like body develops in sophistication, the mental fields develop in sophistication as well.
Language is an element of sophistication that came about and it has been accompanied with its own problems.
Inconsistencies occur at all these levels..
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What Is A “Meme”
1 : an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)
2 : a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children & the impressionable.
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We are for sure the most cunning specie on the planet, yet without mindfulness we seem to be little more than elaborate killer apes.
Mindfulness as synonymous with “aware-of-being aware” seems to be the keyhole through which we peek at more elementary levels of mind. The wave-function is one product of this concept.
Mindfulness of the pathetic fallacy can help us avoid many dead-ends in our thinking. For instance, our thinking in these cases is neither dead, nor at an end!
At one time I liked the term “aware of being aware” but no more, because it doesn’t explain anything. It is just like describing a symptom in a psychiatric manual.
Mindfulness, on the other hand, is a clear cut procedure that can be followed. You look at physical objects for what they are. There are chemical reactions. There are interactions between atoms based on the configuration of their outer electronic shell and so on. This is life on a different scale. We can learn from it.
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It goes further than that. It is a tautology. The entire make up of reality seems tautological to me.
“it is what it is”
“aware of being aware”
“be here now be here”
There is an underlying circularity to things which when I stumbled upon it I thought that there was a problem with my looking. Further looking reveals “that’s just the way it is.” — more tautology.
That is correct. 🙂
But it is all knotted up. We have to straighten it all out.
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A day or two ago, you used the word “pretext” when referring to games, and I’ve been wondering about “pretexts” and comparing that word to situations since. This has made me wonder about the nature of goals.
You are probably referring to the following comment: http://isene.me/2012/12/30/happy-new-year/#comment-27454
“I find the thetan to be attached to considerations under the pretext of playing games.”
To me a game is like being interiorized into this universe.
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. . . or any universe, and really, isn’t that the point of identification?
Yes, attachment is identification. So, here is another inconsistency not dealt with by Hubbard in Scientology.
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Brain is tied to electricity. Electricity is the interface between the brain and mind. Mind could very well be an electrical field around the body. A part of this field probably guides the movement of electrically charged enzymes throughout the body. This electrical field (mind) does seem to interact with other electrical fields around other bodies.
There seem to be several levels of this “mind as a field” phenomenon. The more flexible and fluid the field is the better it seems to operate. Parts of this field seems to be less in motion than others. This is natural. But none of the parts are fixed into any patterns. This brings to mind the decimal string in the fractional portion of the mathematical ratio of PI, where no repeating pattern exists
Any areas of fixed patterns in this field of mind would seem to be like “disease” that would affect the fluidity, and hence the optimum functioning of this field. This would affect the physical as well as the mental opeartion. For example, fixed patterns in the electrical filed around the body may affect the proper movement of enzymes throughout the body, by fixing a certain status quo.
Similarly, these fixed patterns in the finer structure of this mental field may form the basis of filters (bias, prejudice, assumptions, etc.), affecting the proper movement of thoughts.
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We are seeing this the same way. I have been mulling over the reason for the blogging to become “stale” where people simply dig in their heels and stop looking and I’ve seen something which agrees with this post that you’ve just written and refer to “any areas of fixed patterns in this field of mind would seem to be like ‘disease.'”
People begin looking and discussing about those “electrical fields” which are easily altered; the top layers. Many times I read people being quite open minded and looking very well at other realities but then sooner or later, these more “malleable” layers evaporate and now we get into the person’s more fixed points of view. The person doesn’t look for why should they? Their fixed ideas provide stable data — the “bedrock” of their reality.
SELF (thetan) is such a bedrock of reality for most people.
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Revised on 7/25/2016.
I have coined a term. I call it selective open mindedness.
So, what must we do to break free from the shackles of self-imposed imprisonment and to prevent further trouble that can ensue from false certitude? What can be done about the closed-minded presumptions we make that fortify the edges of our own biased frame of reference yet, in-so-doing, block our view of other perspectives and hinder our passage towards true freedom? The answer here is a simple concept. It is simple because it is about managing more effectively something that we already, naturally have. It is about double-checking the familiar perspectives of reality and entertaining the unfamiliar all-the-while maintaining an attitude of appreciation for both. Our license to liberty and our conceivable, future progress will always come from a humble place of mindful consideration of all points of view. Liberty and progress will always pay tribute to selective-open-mindedness. We all seem to have the ability to open and close the mind to new ideas and, apparently, by responsibly dilating the mind’s aperture, with wise discernment, to both familiar and unfamiliar viewpoints we could unlimit the limitations that we place on everything we perceive and we could learn to better cope with the uncertainty of our conclusions and theories about the self and everything else. With that, we can enable ourselves a fuller, richer view of nature and our place within it and begin to cherish the paradigm shifts made possible from acknowledging alternative frames of reference. We can begin to achieve maximum potential.
Well said. We all have certainties. We can always improve upon those certainties.
So, what must we do to break free from the shackles of self-imposed imprisonment and to prevent further trouble that can ensue from false certitude? What can be done about the closed-minded presumptions we make that fortify the edges of our own biased frame of reference yet, in-so-doing, block our view of other perspectives and hinder our passage towards true freedom? The answer here is a simple concept. It is simple because it is about managing more effectively something that we already, naturally have. It is about double-checking the familiar perspectives of reality and entertaining the unfamiliar all-the-while maintaining an attitude of appreciation for both. Our license to liberty and our conceivable, future progress will always come from a humble place of mindful consideration of all points of view. Liberty and progress will always pay tribute to selective-open-mindedness. We all seem to have the ability to open and close the mind to new ideas and, apparently, by responsibly dilating the mind’s aperture, with wise discernment, to both familiar and unfamiliar viewpoints we could unlimit the limitations that we place on everything we perceive and we could learn to better cope with the uncertainty of our conclusions and theories about the self and everything else. With that, we can enable ourselves a fuller, richer view of nature and our place within it and begin to cherish the paradigm shifts made possible from acknowledging alternative frames of reference. We can begin to achieve maximum potential.
I shall treat this as duplicate.
i’m not sure if my comments are being posted
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