Invisible Consciousness Patterns

The forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, the 20th century American linguist, believed that different languages influence cultural thoughts about reality. His 1956 work, Language, Thought and Reality, was published 15 years after his death.

Expressing our thoughts is a product of the cooperation of the conscious mind and the brain. Thoughts and mental associations are living things. They are energy formations, and they are assembled in invisible consciousness patterns. Thoughts surround themselves with like thoughts. They love associations and they magnetically attract like thoughts so our emotional and mental life is a framework composed of these thought structures.

We are born with basic beliefs, but most of our directional beliefs are handed down from our parents. They make us feel safe. There is no reason to be bound by these beliefs unless we limit our perception of our reality using specific language that reinforces those beliefs. When the imagination is stuck in antiquated beliefs, our emotional responses follow that course and the body consciousness if affected.

Thought structures have a direct impact on the physical cells in our bodies. Our body image and the language we use is a reflection of those structures. Some thought structures become beliefs and truths, and others move through this dimension and manifest in another. Thoughts are energy so they are always in motion and in that sense they are eternal.

Clear Water Of Consciousness

A Wood in Sound The pine tree sways in the smoke, Which streams up and up. There’s a wood in sound.

My legs lose themselves Where the river mirrors daffodils Like faces in a dream.

A cold wind and the white memory Of a sasanqua Warm rain comes and goes.

I’ll wait calmly on the bank Till the water clears And willows start to bud.

Time is singed on the debris Of air raids. Somehow, here and now, I am another.

Shinkichi Takahashi is considered a master poet in Japan. His 20th century work is regarded as Zen discipline. Subjective thought is buried in the confusion that spins around the conscious mind. But the conscious mind digs through its own rubble, and exposes the inner self. That self dusts itself off and shouts in unheard syllables. The vibration of this unity catapults through the complete psyche, and this incredible interaction gives credence to our physical manifestations.

We think the conscious mind and the inner self are at war thanks to our belief in the power of superficial exterior stimuli. Takahashi explains that one self waits for the other as we imagine our physical experiences. The conscious mind is the vehicle the inner self or soul uses to feel itself physically. Our conscious and unconscious beliefs form our reality. Some of our conscious beliefs are singed debris. They are the fallout from external air raids that influence our feelings and imagination.

Beliefs automatically attract appropriate emotions. Beliefs are reinforced through our imagination, and they cause the body to react in certain ways. Our personal relationships, our body and its condition, and our environment are the result of this fallout. The conscious mind perceives the fallout and our ego detects the presence of our inner self. Somehow, in the here and now, we become conscious willows that start to bud in our own clear water of individual consciousness.

Consciousness Is Not Limited

Wean Yourself,

Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood, Move to an infant drinking milk, To a child on solid food, To a searcher after wisdom, To a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate. There are wheat fields and mountain passes, And orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight The beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up In the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.” I only know what I’ve experienced. You must be hallucinating.

Rumi’s words stimulate an innate presence within us. He uses mental pictures to describe how our beliefs create our experiences. Our beliefs surround us like an electric fence and we use that fence as our physical boundary. Consciousness is not limited; they are no boundaries that contain the self. When we realize that the self is a form consciousness that functions in more than one reality at any given moment, we begin to breakdown our self-created barriers.

Rumi, tells us to connect with our inner feeling-tones and sense the self that is not restricted by space and time. When we listen to these feeling-tones we wean our ego from some of the baggage created by our belief structure.

Ancient Consciousness

Eternity and time, we say, are two different things, the one belonging to the sphere of the nature which lasts forever, the other to that of becoming and of this universe; and at once, and as if by a fairly continuous application of our concept of them, we think that we have a clear and distinct experience of them in our own souls, as we are always speaking of them and using their names on every occasion.

When we try to concentrate on them and so to speak get close to them, we find again that our thought runs into difficulties; we consider the statements of the ancient philosophers about them, who differ from one another, and perhaps also different interpretations of the same statements, and we set our minds to rest about them and think it sufficient if we are able, when we are asked, to state the opinions of the ancients, and so we are satisfied to be freed from the need of further research about them.

Plotinus wrote those thoughts in the 3rd century. Plotinus had a major impact on the Western World. He is considered the founder of Neo-Platonism. Neo-Platonism influenced Christian thinkers like Augustine, Bonaventure, Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius. Islamic and Jewish thinkers like Maimonides and Abu Nasr al-Farabi also used Neo-Platonism. They found it in Greek and Arabic texts.

Trying to explain consciousness is like trying to part an eyelash. The first thought is to separate it. We like to separate things. The ego separates things for the conscious mind. We like to limit the conscious mind so we can understand it and assign a definition to it. We use that process to understand time, space and everything else that is hard to put in our box of facts and figures. Just like the air, we know consciousness exists, but we have no idea how to describe it. It surrounds us, and infiltrates every aspect of the self, but we can’t adequately define it even though we absorb and express it.

It is easier to let the ancients define consciousness for us. But the consciousness of the ancients is not the same as the consciousness we are aware of now. Consciousness is energy in action and that action creates expansion of the self who is experiencing individual as well as mass consciousness. Consciousness is a whole within a whole and as the whole expands we find a group of selves traveling within infinite boundaries of consciousness.

The Well Of Consciousness

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, In the forest at night cherished by this Wonderful, unintelligible, Perfectly innocent speech; The most comforting speech in the world. The talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges. And the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it; nobody is going to stop it. It will take as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

Thomas Merton, the author, poet and social reformer, was one of the most influential monks of the 20th century. He wrote more than 60 books and scores of essays and reviews. He was proponent of inter-religious understanding. He met and had conversations with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and D.T. Suzuki. Merton liked to have conversations about individual beliefs and the value of religious unity.

Merton understood that the inner self is a portion of our consciousness that is not controlled by our perception of time and space. Merton was Catholic, but he was also a student of Zen. He believed that Zen is an aspect of the inner self. Sitting in the forest at night, he physically experienced his inner self. He discovered the voice of the conscious rain. He perceived the voice using his religious belief structure.

We all interpret our experiences using aspects of our religious and scientific belief structure. The ego with all its bodily connections must deal with the beliefs created by our sensual perceptions. We live in a body of beliefs, but the inner self is free to listen, and to act as it creates more rain from the well of consciousness.