Conscious/Unconscious Mind

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

When I become distracted or space-out is that coming from my conscious or un-conscious mind?

When I’m distracted and am thinking about “something ” it seems as though I am conscious of my thoughts about it and just not present to the rest of my body/mind/energy as I am trying to meditate.

So what would that fall under?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi Kevin, I am not doing the inner dissolving or meditation classes and I wouldn’t know the details of the practices. However, I think I can contribute some ideas about meditation in general.
Consciousness is our innermost self. When we are born as a baby we are just consciousness starting to get to know our physical body and exploring ideas and thoughts and language. That is, we have a physical self which is the obvious part and we have the intellectual, emotional and pranic or chi which I will lump together as the subtle body. The more subtle the body the more difficult it is to pin it down but it is more powerful in every way.
In our present state our consciousness is 100% attached to the physical world and our thoughts and intellect is also fully concern with the outer world. If we can switch off the outer world (the body) we are just consciousness with a mind and we can if we also switch off the mind then we are left with a pure consciousness in a state of truth, eternity and enlightenment. All major spiritual school are trying to get to that and it takes a whole life time to learn and to practice and still almost nobody reach that. I would guess less than a handful reach that in one generation, but on the way there are many level of attainment which are very difficult to ascertain both by the one practising and by outsider. There are therefore many many gurus in the spiritual world, some are true, some are self deluded and some are simply fault.
Taoist school also teaches this high state which is beyond taichi and then wuji.(no more chi, no more mind) and is a” nothing state” When the consciousness is of nothing in terms of the present here, it is conscious of everything in the higher realm and that higher conciousness include knowing the mundane world. Traditionally for that kind of practice we have to find a teacher (Master) and live with him. One or two generations ago these are secret arcane knowledge which people hardly get to know or come close to. Now a days the highest of high secret are in the internet for free. Needless to say a lots of people who are not prepared or are not suited for such practice will be wasting their time and court danger, to suit, in dabbling in such .The new age school comes out with a lots of distort, variation and unhelpful spiritual ideas.
Bruce mention in his book that he have notice that most high level spiritual practitioner only concentrate on their inner world and neglect their physical self so that they are often physically unhealthy. In this respect the Water Tradition is definitely unique because it teaches meditation from dissolving the physical body first. Meditation function can be consider a process of cleaning and the meditator is involved in cleansing his inner self so that when he is cleaned he becomes pure consciousness. Here the process is clearly meditation but the process started at a known, safe, physical level. The next level is then the emotion or more subtle level which is going into spiritually higher level. But this are still physical and mental state and purely speaking is not in spiritual states.This is definitely a good start because if the first step is not clean or faulty the practitioner is stuck and cannot progress.
Most of the spiritual school (traditionally) only accept student who are ready to rough it out and the training do included basic preparation for whose who need it. Typically a novice monk started life in general study first without going into meditation.
I have divert a bit, but I hope it give an overall picture of the consciousness,mind and intellect, and how water tradition meditation is relevant in meditation and in our everyday life. A by product of meditation is clear and strong mind, good focus and attention. There are a lots of meditation class that aim at a better brain or health but those are often playing with meditation technique and is not for spiritual betterment.

Regards

[Anonymous]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts as they were helpful reminders. I as well appreciate how Taoist practices focus on making the body conscious and aim to balance being a spiritual being in the human experience. I’m grateful to have such ancient, authentic and profound practices that allow us to build that solid foundation from which the “wonderful accident” as Bruce puts it is more likely to happen.

Kevin

[Anonymous]

Hi Kevin
After having written the above post, I think I would try to answer your original question.
When you talk about the body do you ask about conscious body and unconscious body_. unconscious body would mean dead body. Body and mind is naturally conscious and you do not refer to the mind as unconscious unless you mean the mind is asleep. The mind is naturally conscious and is known as a thinking machine that never stop churning out thoughts. All the difficulty in meditation is about keeping the mind still while we are still awake.
Space out is when you lost you focus or attention on what you are doing, you may be dreaming, thinking of any thing that the mind happen to like (it is a thinking machine and is famous for thinking non stop according to its fancy) or even fall asleep. Deep sleep and having a still mind is not the same in meditation! One is down while the other one is up.
When you are meditating and the mind spaced-out, distracted or day dream and when it got enough of the running out it then remind itself of the happening and try to go back to meditation. This is what the mind do and I think there is such a thing as a higher mind and a lower mind talking to each other.
Long term meditation makes the mind strong, concentrated and clear in thinking.
Is it confused thinking?

Regards

[Author]

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