Culture is rooted in the spirit in which each person lives and conducts their life and individual inquiry.
For the writer, questions that have shaped this inquiry remind one that however expansive thought may be, life itself is not bound by it.
So can observation and inquiry shape ones life in such a way that it has that quality of the boundless, timeless, while living in a world full of anxiety and conflict and of becoming this or that?
I have found that to have any meaning, such a question requires one gives our wholehearted attention to what is actually taking place within and around us.
Can this have the quality of one undivided movement?
If so, then the questions we ask of ourselves and others will have gravitas..
Authentic inquiry has an inner tone to it, which is never tuned to ones own advantage.
With this in mind, is it possible to observe, to listen so carefully, that one can penetrate beneath each inflection of the word, thought and feeling and in so doing make it possible to end the
constant chatter of the self ?
Is there any sense of ones own continuity without the chatter?
With care and attention one can observe how thought always attempts to escape the sense of limitation and vacuity in its own processes.
This has generated deep seated fear and frustration at a conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious level for millennia.
The chatter of thought is clearly distinct from well reasoned understanding and creativity, but as we can observe, they are constantly being modified and evolved in terms of knowledge, practice
and so on.
Great art or a beautiful mathematical equation can in someway intimate the transcendent, of love, truth and beauty.
We may feel and act as the controller or navigator to thought but is there any separation between the thinker and the thought?
If the thinker is inseparable from the thought, any movement of thought to free itself from self limitation is self delusion.
Delusion can generate extraordinary energy and conflict, not just within ourselves, but with each other and life in general. Any value and meaning we achieve in this way can be seen to lead to yet
more dissatisfaction, self obfuscation and suffering.
All this would indicate a bleak future for mankind were it not for the perceptive potential and timeless vitality of the quiet mind that deepens the sensibilities.
Perceptive freedom begins when thought is seen to drive distraction and screen off the fear and insecurities that bind us to the endless loop of time and thought. To carefully follow this process
and see it for what it is, clears this fog of self obfuscation. Then we begin to see how consciousness is caught up in the collective confusion of the psyche.
Beyond all that is the mystery and wonder of indivisible presence which thought cannot touch. Indivisibility touches the lives of everyone, consciously or otherwise with the simple truth of inner
necessity.