Our "Uncommon" Understanding
Our common understanding results from a combination of
1) an ancient part of our brain. We experience its autopilot-like activity & resultant reactive behavior almost nonstop. Our bodies breathe, pulsate, digest, excrete, sweat automatically. We're "driven to" seek food, shelter, mates & safety - "doing";
2) our ability to use language (words, ideas, concepts). The English language is self-referential, self-creating, self-reinforcing. We experience this as almost continuous self-talk - "noisy ego";
3) our consumer culture's gross over-emphasis (quasi-religious idolatry) of materialism / scientism.
Benefits of our common understanding: progress in science, technology, communications, & material wealth.
Drawbacks of our common understanding: rigidity, dogmatism, radicalism, existential angst, anxiety, cynicism, emptiness, hopelessness.
“I don’t know what you learned from books, but the most important thing I learned from my grandfathers was that there is a part of the mind that we really don’t know about and it is that part that is most important in whether we become sick or remain well.”
Thomas Large Whiskers – Navaho Medicine Man
Our uncommon, yet universal capacity to understand, is experienced in stillness & silence. When our noisy attempts at self-preservation & self-promotion quiet down a bit, awareness - our state of "being" - who / what we are, manifests briefly.
This is beyond our ability to comprehend at the level of words, ideas, concepts, either spoken out loud or as self-talk. Nevertheless, artists, mystics, shamans, saints, prophets & other evolved individuals point towards a reality that they have directly experienced and that we ourselves also can.
“… how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our own thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range. Perhaps we fear that with silence we might hear the cries of our own suffering and the suffering in the world.
Yet silence and solitude are the very basis for our engagement with the world. They are expressed in the experiences of inquiry and listening, nonviolence and nonduality, patience and concentration, connectedness and intimacy, authenticity and stillness, understanding and compassion, and seeing beyond language and intuition.
The wisdom of the peoples of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the postmodern world, one that we must begin to accept as the crisis of self, society, and the environment deepens. This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony, and vision.” Joan Halifax
“It is better to have a heart without words
than words without a heart.” Mahatma Gandhi
Other terms & descriptions for common & uncommon understanding: http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Two-Levels-of-Consciousness/c17jj/56f14e0c0cf266a292561f27
