Being absent while engaged
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I was standing on the platform of the train station, waiting for my train, and it was only after I had boarded that I realised that I had been largely absent. There was attention spent standing, and watching the people coming off the train, but this was largely an automated activity. I had fallen into a pattern of behaviour.
It was only after I had sat down in a seat that I was feeling fully aware again. It seems to me that this falling into automated behaviours happens almost by itself, that full awareness comes up and then falls away again as we do little bits of automated activity.
I had not previously noticed it for such short periods. I’m going to try to keep track of what other activities cause my focus to wander, it might be interesting.
Comments
A similar kind of thing can happen when driving a car... At times ones mind turns on autopilot during the drive and goes back to manual when one is arriving at the destination....Like being fully aware of departing and arriving but only peripherally aware during the drive...
I'm guilty of that a lot.
It’s like the brain goes into a kind of waiting mode until a task is completed, because nothing sensible can be done with the time anyway.
Hmmm.
Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and thinking as an all inclusive activity
or is it a simple sanctification of the mundane?
My ego or identity seems to be most commonly constructed and perpetuated when some deliberate dominance or subservience of one sense gate over all the others is occurring. I think such habituated behaviors are just the policing forces of the human condition protecting its own imagined fiefdom.
In contrast....
My ego or identity seems to be least encouraged when all of my sense gates are engaged in concert and common awareness with each other. I think such a collegial interaction of the sense gates with all of the phenomena arriving, living and passing on around us can be likened to an awakening from the very dream that the Buddha exhorted his followers to do.
If this is so...Then "being absent while engaged" may well be more representative of a sleeper's dream than of an awakening from it.
Yup. Me too.
A couple questions arise for me. What does this phenomena say about our conscious mind, the small self and free will? Were you doing the thing or was your subconscious doing the thing? Is your subconscious count as you too, or is if an action isn't in your conscious control is it considered free will?
Or is everything happening as it does when we're aware and its just a matter of when we look back the experience never got written down into our memory, so it feels to us like we weren't aware at the time?