182
Looking for clarity?
Try turning off the thought machine.
Clarity comes effortlessly when mind
stops its default dot-connecting.
It’s like a rio abajo rio –
a field of intelligence that flows
beneath the river of intellect
and the streams of space and time.
Stop thinking; it bubbles up.
Trouble is, ‘you’ can’t stop thinking
for ‘you’ are the thinking process!
What to do?
Nothing, there’s no way out.
The discovery of this stops thought in its tracks.
Like Grace, all that’s needed for clarity
is space.
~
echoes from emptiness 
Beautiful as always….
this clarity is felt ~ effortlessly ~ thank you!
Grace is fast coming for it’s Space. ♥
But if thoughts must needs be, arising spontaneously as they do in this restless mind of ours, what better thoughts than those inspired in the poet’s soul, a poet who, as a true lover, is ‘of imaginaton all compact’?
Imagination – here the Power so-called
Through the incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through.
…. (Wordsworth) (I am sure you and your friends resonate with this)Is not unlimited, formless imagination akin to unbounded space?
Brilliant comment dear AM – as always. Thank you. I love the Wordsworth quote, especially “That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, at once, some lonely traveller.” The mind’s abyss (absence) is the womb of all genuine creativity.
Re comparing imagination and unbounded space – I tend to take care using the word “imagination” because its current usage so often implies the mental construction of images from the field of the known. But the words and images that arise freely within the space vacated by thought are of a different order. It’s easy to distinguish them – they shock and amaze the poet/artist/scientist with their radical freshness. I’m sure you’ve experienced this.
Gratitude, love
~ ml
Christine – Shira – Leslie – thank you for leaving your appreciative comments. Gladness that you resonate!
Love
~ ml
You are of course right. Imagination should be distinguished from fancy, which, for Coleridge, is ‘a mode of memory’ with ‘fixities and definites’ (I am not a scholar or erudite; just lucky with quotations, which spring up when I need them, not from memory… may be from the book I am reading at the time).
Going back to ‘thoughts’ (not ‘thinking’, which is active, voluntary), you will also like the following quotation: ‘Samsara, the transmigration of life, takes place in one’s mind. Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks that he becomes’ (Maitri Upanishad).
Dear lucky AM – you may not be “a scholar or erudite” but you are articulate and hang out in very august literary company.
Many thanks for the Maitri Upanashad quote: “…what a man thinks, that he becomes.” My take nowadays would be “…what we buy into, we end up with.” So keep emptying the concept-closet!
Love
~ ml