Do you find yourself ‘waking up’ more then once a day? Do you find yourself in the middle of a task before realizing you’re doing it? Let me explain to you why daydreaming and habits are the enemy of consciousness AND how to combat them.
Motivation for daydreaming is based on emotions or feelings, which are whispered into the mind. The mind, low on resistance, succumbs to daydreaming as an attempts to avoid the efforts of conscious work; a definite aim, going a definite direction. There is also a tendency of emotions and feelings wanting to repeat to themselves, to keep alive or to recreate experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, that have been previously lived through or ‘imagined.’
Daydreaming of disagreeable, morbid things is very characteristic of an unbalanced state in a person; after all, one can understand daydreaming of a pleasant kind and find logical justification for it. Daydreaming of an unpleasant character is an utter absurdity. And yet many people spend nine tenths of their lives in just such painful daydreams about misfortunes which may overtake them or their family, about illnesses they may contract or sufferings they will have to endure. Imagination and daydreaming are instances of the wrong work of the mind.
To observe the activity of imagination and daydreaming forms a very important part in developing your consciousness. This is how you combat unconsciousness and remain awake. See what is going on, and you will no longer be reacting to it, you will be engaging with it.
Our next object of observation is habits in general. Everyone consists wholly of habits, although they are often unaware of it and some even deny having any habits at all. This can never be the case. Man can never know himself until he has studied all his habits. The observation and the study of habits is particularly difficult because, in order to see and ‘record’ them, one must escape from them, free oneself from them, if only for a moment. So long as a man is governed by a particular habit, he does not observe it, but at the very first attempt, however feeble, to struggle against it, he feels it and notices it.
Therefore in order to observe and study habits one must try to struggle against them. This opens up a practical method of self-observation. It has been said before that a man cannot change anything in himself, that he can only observe and ‘record.’ This is true. But it is also true that a man cannot observe and ‘record’ anything if he does not try to struggle with himself, that is, with his habits. This struggle cannot yield direct results, that is to say, it cannot lead to any change, especially to any permanent and lasting change. But it shows what is there. Without a struggle a man cannot see what he consists of. The struggle with small habits is very difficult and boring, but without it self-observation is impossible.
Even at the first attempt to study the elementary activity of movement, man comes up against habits. For instance, a man may want to observe how he walks. But he will never succeed in doing so for more than a moment if he continues to walk in the usual way. But if he understands that his usual way of walking consists of a number of habits, for instance, of taking steps of a certain length, walking at a certain speed, and so on, and lie tries to alter them, that is, to walk faster or slower, to take bigger or smaller steps, he will be able to observe himself and to study his movements as he walks. If a man wants to observe himself when he is writing, he must take note of how he holds his pen and try to hold it in a different way from usual.
Observation then becomes possible. In order to observe himself a man must try to walk not in his habitual way, he must sit in unaccustomed attitudes, he must stand when he is accustomed to sit, he must sit when he is accustomed to stand, and he must make with his left hand the movements he is accustomed to make with his right hand and vice versa. All this will enable him to observe himself and study the habits and associations of his movement.
This post is quoted and based on from In Search of the Miraculous(below). I highly suggest this book for it’s great story, it’s amazing way of describing the universe. It has inspired much of my own recent thinking. Without this book, this post would not have been possible.
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