Inner Thought Processes

In analyzing the inner processes which now condition our illusion of not living in the state of enlightenment, we will see that they are our imaginative-emotive processes in which our vital energy is disintegrated and we will try to define clearly what incomplete functioning of our attention conditions in its turn these imaginative-emotive processes.

Hubert Benoit wrote those thoughts in his 1955 book, Zen and the Psychology of Transformation: The Supreme Doctrine, which is considered a classic in Zen literature among Western thinkers. Benoit points out that we all live in a state of enlightenment; it is our eternal state independent of our birth and our death. We are constantly showered with inner gestures in the form of thoughts and ideas. We then conceptualize, objectionalize and divide them in a dualistic fashion. Benoit calls this process the imaginative-emotive processes. All material manifestations are composed interior light and sound energy that is woven in electromagnetic patterns. Ideas represent our psyche intent. Our emotions and imagination are fueld by ideas that activate interior patterns.

There is always a screen between one self and the enlightened self, as the ego wraps these impulses in beliefs that contain symbols,rules and maps of intention.These beliefs may not resemble the territory where they originated because the ego, which is the eye for the conscious mind has its own free will.

The question is: How do we allow our natural state of enlightenment to manifest in pure form without the influence of the ego? Benoit offers a solution in the same book:

My attention ought not to be awakened by the mobilization of my energy, but before that; and this is realized when instead of seeing the imaginative-emotive processes which are being produced, regard the processes which are about to be produced. This is realized when instead of being passively attentive to my mobilized energy and its disintegrating future, I tend actively to perceive the very birth of the energy. A new vigilance now superintends the mobilization of energy.

To put it more simply, an active attention lies in wait for the advent of my inner movements. It is no longer my emotions which interest me, but their coming to birth; it is no longer their movement that interests me, but this other informal movement which is the birth of their formal movement.