We are so easily fooled. We are looking ahead of or through the problem without actually seeing the problem itself because we are not recognizing it as the problem. How do we surmount this?
We do this with thought. We ‘observe’ ourselves: observe our thoughts, our actions, our reactions, our movements physical and psychological, et al, but in doing so we separate who we think that ‘we are’ from that we are observing when they are actually the same machinery ‘dividing itself up’ to give the illusion of separation. This illusion of separation causes us great grief and sorrow and we are constantly trying to remedy our grief by putting salve on the wound caused by perceived separation which is an illusion.
Why don’t we go to the heart of the matter? Because we have to perceive it first. That is the issue. We don’t see it; we don’t perceive it and therefore we don’t have the instant Insight that would end the separation and the psychological suffering. The funny thing about this Insight is that it is not something that you can ‘own’. You can see it in one instant and then lose it in the next. It cannot be ‘owned’, ‘collected’, ‘kept’. Thought cannot imprison it; cannot own it and yet it wants to. It wants to ‘save it up’ kind of thing. “I have the answer now”, it says. “I have seen it. I understand now.”, it says and tries to apply that dead perception to future living moments, but that does not work, because the Insight has to come to consciousness in real-time as thought is perceiving its own activity and the moment that thought tries to ‘store it up’, it is already dead because the living-ever-present ‘NOW’ has already moved on. That is why that all that thought can ‘grab’ is the past and the past is dead.
This is why the analogy of the image maker is used. Thought makes images, all these images, but what we concern ourselves with is the ‘image maker’. Who is this image maker and can we be aware of the image maker; of the image as it’s being created? That is the question. The image maker is the question, the focus and the key, not the image that is being created.
You cannot be aware of the image maker if you are resisting the images being created; then you are back to struggling with the machinery of thought itself rather than being aware of the movement of thought. It is a subtle difference, but it is the key to the whole machine. It is a living mystery that is revealed from moment to moment if one is free to look, to observe and in this observation there is the universe. It is closer than your breath. You are consciousness.
The word is not the thing. Words are here as pointers, only. A symbology to signify something that cannot be defined, that can only be pointed to. It is like love. We cannot define it, we can only say what it is not and by that we are left with the mystery of its boundless existence which we can only skirt the periphery of through the action of negation (knowing what it is not).
It is the same with thought. Thought is limited and by being choicelessly aware of it as it is created moment by moment we can come to the border of the limitless, but we cannot define it or capture it or own it in any way or even conceive of it. We can only sense its presence and revel in its energy: undefined, unowned and free. Anything else is to fool ourselves in the machinery of thought.