The Well Swept Mind

When our practice of sitting meditation is well established we are ready to enter into the active phase of spiritual adulthood. When the mind is kept well swept, intuition has creative sway in the activities necessary to everyday existence. Our load is lighter and our day is brighter. It is actually noticeable that colors are more vibrant as light streams un-filtered into the well swept mind. It is also immediately noticeable how modern manipulators of popular thought actively maintain a barrage of distractions tailored to every appetite.

Bon Appetite 

An ancient master when asked about the state of his dwelling replied.

"The dust comes from the outside"

Cave Dwellers

Without question sitting meditation is a powerful exercise in preparation for the awakening of Pristine Awareness.

That said, an ancient master referred to those seeking refuge in sitting meditation as 

cave dwellers

The Inner Life

Any adept in the world of meditation will be familiar with the existence of an 'inner world'. The 'outer world' is one we know the existence of only because the mechanics of manifestation provide a barrage of sensory stimulation. As it turns out this barrage of stimulation creates a remarkably accurate reflection of a material world. The field of this reflection is The Mind.

The foundation of the inner world is pure un-formed Awareness: infinitely supple unformed Awareness. This unformed Awareness is the foundation of all life. Its existence is the fruit of molecular order, and in the maintenance of that order it must access and mine external forms.

This dependence upon the mining of external forms for sustenance results in the emergence of Mind. And Mind is the driver of the sophistication of form.

By the time we get to creatures such as human beings Mind has, in its quest for sustenance, developed layers of complexity leading up to a sublimely effective behavioral property: consciousness.

Though a tool of extraordinary efficacy, consciousness is the outer-most layer of Awareness and patently superficial ('superficial' as in 'surface' not as in 'without merit') . And this surface of The Mind is brilliantly reflective. So reflective in fact, that there exists an entire spectrum of Mind that is so autonomously effective in its process that in the light of ordinary consciousness it is invisible. We now have a name for it: The Unconscious Mind.

The point of this excursion is to point out that all aspects of Mind are superficial to Awareness.

If our identity is in Mind then our identity is superficial

Nature

 

Nature does the savagely joyful busy-work, refining the rainbow expression of Awareness

The Intent of Existence

Anyone, regardless of their level of confusion, will have to admit that there is an Existence. Even if we decline to paste a conceptualization on it there exists an Existence. Because there is an existence there exists inevitability. Inevitabilities engender the existence of atoms. Atoms are an agglomeration of affinities, and affinities make the formation of molecules inevitable. The field phenomenon generated by the behavior of electrons in certain complex molecules result in what is known as Awareness, and Awareness has an agenda.

The polytheists of old had noticed that there were categories of intent that infused and subsumed the will of humanity, and they gave to these categories of intent a term: "The Will of the Gods". Well, the will of the gods is simply the inherent intentions of nature. Proliferation and all that it implies, even in a biologically advanced creature comprise the foundational intentions that influence what is imagined to be the will.

The Zen doctrine of No Mind is a form of house cleaning. When we have silenced the inclinations of nature in the halls of the mind we then directly experience the intention of Existence, and experiencing the intent of Existence will directly influence the will.

The intent of Existence is Awareness.