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Answer this question:

What keeps the planets in revolution around the sun?

Now, we’ll come back to that in a moment. But first, let’s talk about something called Awareness. Usually, we think of Awareness as being aware of the things around us, such as cars and people and chocolate.

But what we fail to see is that Awareness is really internal – everything you perceive is really just processes inside your head. If we hooked you up to a machine that fed directly into the sensory portions of your brain, you’d have no way of knowing if there was an ‘external world’. And if we’re really honest with ourselves, we can’t even know right now if we are perceiving an external world or merely images in our brains.

And This Goes to Show What?

The point here is not to prove that there is or isn’t an external world. It’s simply to point out that there is a lot of activity going on inside our heads. And it’s activity that we’re largely unaware of.

We’re unaware of it because we insist in believing that we’re perceiving an external world. For instance, if I imagine that the person I’m perceiving is a real ‘thing’, then I can attribute all sorts of qualities to them. I might decide that the person is really rude! But if I realize that my perception of the ‘person’ is internal, I begin to realize that most of what I ‘perceive’ about that person is actually what I ‘think’ of them. In other words, I might think the person is rude, but in reality it is me who is frustrated with their actions.

We live largely unaware of our mind’s activity. Because of this, we live in a world that seems to ‘happen to us’. A person makes a snide remark, and because we’re unaware of our mind’s activity, our thoughts run off into all sorts of assumptions, and pretty soon we’re quite indignant about what that person said. On the other hand, if we are aware of our mind’s activity, we’ll see the ‘snide remark’ for what it really is. In this way we’ll become very compassionate, because we won’t be automatically jumping to conclusions all the time.

Gaining Awareness

There’s an art to Awareness. But once we begin to see how our mind works, it’s not that difficult. Its processes aren’t hidden from us – each thought or activity of the mind is happening right there at its surface. It’s just that we’re so used to letting our mind run on auto-pilot that we let thoughts lead from one to another, until we finally arrive at a thought that is so powerful and settled that it demands our attention. We call these thoughts ‘frustration’, ‘depression’, ‘worry’, or ‘stress’. These are the end-states after lots and lots of mind activity has gone into creating them. If only we were aware of our mind activity all the time! Then we’d never have to arrive at those end-states, because we always have forty or fifty chances to stop them before they get there.

Answering the Question

So what does all this have to do with revolving planets?

The planets show us that Awareness can be fun. By playing games with our assumptions, we can see how we really think the world works.

For instance, many people studying Zen or non-dualism will say that they believe the ‘world is oneness’. They’ll claim that there are no separate things. But usually, they are just deceiving themselves. We discover this when we ask a question such as the one we started this article with. What was your answer?

Most of us, even if we think ‘the world is one’, will say ‘gravity’.

Now, consider that there are different ways we can view the world. For instance, we can see the world as separate bits that interact with one another (our usual way), or we can se the world as being evoked by our consciousness, or we can view the world as a mutually arising entity, like a tree that grows ‘all at once’ instead of bit-by-bit.

If we truly had a holistic view of the world (the world is oneness), we might say that ‘the planets revolve because of the whole universe’. And it’s certainly true that the entire system supports the rest of the system. Even if we were only to remove our sun from the equation, gravity would no longer hold the planets in orbit. The sun, of course, is the gravity.

If we had a perceptual understanding of the world, we might say ‘the planets revolve because we’re asking the question about their revolution’. And there’s a deeper truth to this, as was perhaps hinted at when Einstein said ‘It is the theory which decides what we can observe’.

And if we have our usual, broken-up view of the world, we’d say ‘the planets stay in revolution because of gravity’, because we’ve been taught to lay a framework of cause-and-effect over natural systems, and have then gotten into the habit of isolating certain causes within the system and giving them more importance than others. So we can extract gravity from the sun, and call this one aspect of reality the ‘cause’ of the planets staying in rotation. Again, the point isn’t to get to the bottom of what makes the planets stay in orbit. The point is to notice how our mind is framing the world. To develop Awareness not of ‘how the world really is’, but of how our mind works. This is our chance to see what we’re up to all the time. When our mind is working on auto-pilot, it’s basically creating our ‘reality’ without any input on our part. We’ve all been trained into certain ways of viewing the world, and we’re just blindly following our training. Some of us even go so far as to mock other animals who are following ‘herd instincts’ or otherwise behaving in not-so-intelligent ways simply because they’ve been trained that way. But here we are, doing the same thing every day! Since we like to imagine that we’re the most intelligent creatures on this planet, perhaps we should put our power of thinking to work. Even our greatest thinkers get caught in this trap. If you read any book on philosophy or science or theoretical physics or theology, you’ll find that it’s full of unexamined assumptions. We’ve been so well trained in jumping to unfounded conclusions that we do it habitually. Perhaps the most powerful question we can ask ourselves is this:What do we really Know?

Not ‘what can I ‘know’ within my framework of assumptions’, but ‘what do we really Know’?

We may reject the very question, because we have a sinking feeling that if we’re really honest, we don’t know much at all. We feel like we’ll be paralyzed into a state of inability to function in the world. This is because we’re trapped in the same old, unexamined way of thinking, and we can only imagine that ‘not knowing’ means being an ignorant fool. But when we truly examine that question with clarity, we discover what it means to ‘not know’, and it has nothing to do with a lack of knowledge. It has to do with the ability to see things as they actually are.

Ask yourself what you really Know, and see what you come up with. You might just be surprised.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 12:23 am and is filed under Awakening and Reality, Understanding Dualism. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.