Pure Awareness & Thinking
Our usual, unconscious, automatic identification with our thought-world ie cognitive fusion keeps us a step removed from real-time, vivid, direct engagement with life. Western & Buddhist psychology, as well as artists aim to correct this numbing, autopilot or sleepwalking.
"A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!" the Buddha
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” D.H. Lawrence
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, "the pale cast of thought" implies too much thinking weakens us.
"... pure awareness ... is an innate human capacity that is different from thinking but wholly complementary to it." Jon Kabat-Zinn
