Discernment is the quality of original thinking

Jeroen

This came to me during a meditation... We all strive for awareness, but I am finding of late that a receptive awareness of mind can often degenerate into a blank watchfulness, the staring onto a cave wall where though you can perceive the smallest details you are still just finding what you expect to find.

True watchfulness, that is capable of catching the unexpected, is about marshalling one's qualities of original thinking. It is in finding a still pool of originality that you can truely connect to being aware of one's deeper self. It seems to me to be necessary to cultivate the unconventional self, the self that does more than learn from books or stay on the trodden path, in order to gain access to true watchfulness and discernment of what lies within.

Thoughts?

lobster

I'll join.

Being original, breaking convention for the sake of ego aggrandisement is not the Way. The Way is as you say discernment. Realising why ones opinions, thoughts, feelings cling to a certainty that others with equal conviction find in different or opposing directions ... What do we do? Ideally we recognise the difference between karmic or lesser truth and a higher Truth that in essence has no opposite. It is empty and impartial ...

Jeroen

Ideally we do recognise higher Truth, but that comes much later... if you just want to discern the truth in yourself, your reactions, the sources of your emotions, then you need that sensitivity to your own reactions and the originality to accept answers outside of the box.

I'd suggest the first task is to know yourself, the second to know Truth. It is easily done to go chasing Truth in scriptures, and to forget to turn within...

DairyLama

@Kerome said:
This came to me during a meditation... We all strive for awareness, but I am finding of late that a receptive awareness of mind can often degenerate into a blank watchfulness, the staring onto a cave wall where though you can perceive the smallest details you are still just finding what you expect to find.

True watchfulness, that is capable of catching the unexpected, is about marshalling one's qualities of original thinking. It is in finding a still pool of originality that you can truely connect to being aware of one's deeper self. It seems to me to be necessary to cultivate the unconventional self, the self that does more than learn from books or stay on the trodden path, in order to gain access to true watchfulness and discernment of what lies within.

Thoughts?

I'm not sure what you mean by "original thinking", but I have found that thinking more creatively or "outside the box" seems to be a by-product of practice. Somehow stepping outside of habitual patterns of thought.

lobster

In order to test the capacity to make sense of nonsense, I created this page. Part of it is computer generated. As pattern seeking apes ... maybe just me mes ... we find for example that one unstable person (note that they ignored the warning) refreshed the page seven times, thinking it made sense. Some of it may do ... not all of it ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070905224814/http://www.zen45800.zen.co.uk/projex7/cpa.htm

This level of insanity is in contrast to genuine multilayered prose, poetry, songs of realisation etc which bring revelation and progress ...

The awakened one does not seek truth--
Does not cut off delusion.
Truth and delusion are both vacant and without form,
But this no-form is neither empty nor not empty;
It is the truly real form of the Tathagata.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/zen/shodoka.txt