Today's musings... The death of thoughts, and you

[RMQualtrough]

Why are you not afraid of a thought ending? If you are thinking about penguins right now (and you probably are because I just put it into your mind hehe), why aren't you petrified of the thought of penguins disappearing, and say, thinking about elephants instead?

Why don't you cry over the death of the thought of penguins when the thought of elephants overwrites it and the thoughts of penguins vanish?

Of course because we recognize that when we stop thinking about penguins, we don't go anywhere. We don't die. The thought about penguins goes away and we remain, and we then think about elephants... We don't believe we are the thought of penguins, and that we end when the thought of them does.

Irrationally, unlike the thought of penguins we actually identify this character as being what we are. Just like the thought of penguins, our entire human character is made of nothing more substantial or real than that... We are made of whatever perception is currently in our mind just like imagined penguins are made of imagination, and a sort of thread which is memory, which threads through all of these completely different moments in our lives and creates a kind of storybook which gives us an idea of what we are...

We grow attached to this "storybook of me", and unlike the penguins we grow to really believe that it IS us. And that unlike the thought of penguins which passes without incident or affect upon us, when this storybook ends, we come to think we DO end. We think this is somehow different to when the penguin thought ends and the elephant thought starts. When it is completely identical.

The entire character is going to die forever. It is going to be completely extinguished, without any trace of your wants, loves, accomplishments, fears, anything. It isn't going to live in heaven for infinite years with your dead relatives. It isn't going to hell either, or purgatory. It is going to vanish. Completely... But you are misidentifying what you are, and this is why there is extreme fear surrounding this, because you cannot possibly believe that just like the ending of the penguins you imagine (who of course aren't living in heaven when you stop imagining them), the imagining of this character will also pass entirely without incident or interruption.

Think for a second what it would be like if you could not form memories AT ALL. No other difference except this. Not even a nanosecond of memory could ever be formed by you. Consider how in every passing moment, you could not possibly know what had come before, and whatever had come before is entirely vanquished and replaced with what is now... Only for that now to be instantaneously vanquished too, and replaced, ad nauseum. It would be like being born for the first time every single moment, and dying in that same moment. Because there is no way for a thread to tie the moments together into the storybook of self that we all carry... Now imagine that is the case at your physical death. The string ceases to thread, and the next moment starts with total vanquishing of what was prior... You have not actually gone anywhere. The storybook has gone. Like the penguins.

And that's it........

[Fernanda]

@RMQualtrough nice post. We seem to have this inherent tendency to create a story in our minds to give our life a sense of cohesiveness, continuity. It is an important part of the dream. We believe in this continuity. If, for instance, I see a dog being beaten I develop a feeling around that event and some hours later I can remember that scene and cry. Can memory be considered a figment of imagination? If I close my eyes and remember is that real? is thought a figment? 

If I am boiling an egg and I remember the egg is done, and I go eat it, there is this sense of continuity, otherwise I wouldn't eat the egg. 

Memory certainly melts away, but we seem to resist it somehow for reasons of survival. It's even more complicated when we store emotions because they are mostly unconscious.

The better we become in manifestation, the less need we have for the apparent logic sustained by memory within the dream, so we can die and be reborn in every moment.

Crazy stuff.

[Breakingthewall]

On 12/5/2022 at 2:13 PM, RMQualtrough said:

Think for a second what it would be like if you could not form memories AT ALL. No other difference except this. Not even a nanosecond of memory could ever be formed by you. Consider how in every passing moment, you could not possibly know what had come before, and whatever had come before is entirely vanquished and replaced with what is now

 Evocative. if that were so, there would be no ego at all, only eternal present, undifferentiated because there would be nothing to compare it to, pure existence without meaning. but it is difficult to stop thinking and comparing. because we need to have the feeling of control, and thinking and valuing we believe we have control. we lock reality into our thinking to believe we control it, to believe that there is someone controlling

[axiom]

@RMQualtrough Very nice. One of the most "enlightened" posts I have seen on this forum. Very well written too. 

It reminded me of a documentary I've seen about a man with a seven-second memory. 

Definitely worth a watch: