RE: From Self-Awareness to Pure Awareness – The First Time
Thank you for Sharing this Brenda,
In the last year thanks to my meditation times (for the last 12 years) and thanks for those times from reading books by Thich Nhat Hahn, I have come to realize that I have what seem to me to be 3 parts of my mind. They may be only two parts. The best I can describe it is one part of my mind monitors my thoughts and my behaviors and things I say. A second part of my mind works on its own producing thoughts, ideas and visions which arise from it whether I want them to or not and the third part (which might actually be my first Monitor part taking a more active role than just watching) is the part that takes hold of thoughts and ideas and consciously thinks and reasons them out according to logic or something akin to logic. Before last year, I don't think I became conscious of these different aspects of my own mind except that I was trying to be aware of my thoughts. I'm developing an article for Steemit on this. I believe that Mindfulness and what Peter talks about as the Radiant Awareness is just the Monitor part of our minds but we have started to use it more consciously.
Once your conditioned mind dissolves all these questions about how many parts do we have in our mind, thoughts, ideas, visions...they just go away. A wisdom begins to permeate your perception and insight begins to arise instead.
I was just contemplating what you are saying and what came to me is that when the conditioned mind is not clouding the observer you can see things as they really are, without identifications.
I'm in the part of the book to do the exercise of the 9 areas of life and to write for 5 minutes on each one to get a profile of my conditioned existence. I think this is interesting. Peter talks about doing this before going into how to arrive at unconditioned awareness. Which to be honest I don't think I have ever experienced. I have experienced still times for short periods but thoughts and emotions come back over and over again. :)
They're not really questions that I have but just how I would describe how I experience it.