Reality is made of multi-layered narrow mindedness

I tend to base my perspectives on the awareness. It’s because I’m not even aware of anything without it and also because I think it’s the most basic factor in our perception, emotion, thought, and so on.
The awareness is the basis of all our information processing, so to say.

Although our awareness can be more or less without specific focus, there are multitude of focuses when we observe, feel, or think.
We focus on each item, one by one, when count things. We focus on measuring tape and an object when we check the length. We focus on a subject matter, related matter, conditions and dependencies, theories and structure when we think. We focus on different sensations and impressions and/or resulting judgment in love vs hate, like vs dislike, etc when we are emotional.
In short, without the focuses of awareness, we would not sense, feel, nor think, at all.

So, it’s not just the awareness, but also how we focus is important in analyzing what’s happening to us.

As I’ve written in other threads, we divide the world when we focus on something.
We divide the field of awareness by focusing on something.
But this act of dividing isn’t permanent because our awareness is always changing its density, presence, and especially the focus.
In other words, any focus of awareness is temporary in nature.

Although we can practice “concentration” or any other exercise that tries to maintain steady focus, I don’t think we are obliged to maintain any focus.
Also, any focus will divide and limit our field of awareness and thus makes us narrow minded, as long as it’s held.
And I do think our sense of reality is kept by the semi-automatic mechanism that maintain (and/or revisit) certain focuses.

I think we do focus very often on our physical sensations (naturally, just like any other animal, by evolutionary process or by not very intelligent design or by any other reason or without any reason) and that gives us the sense of reality about the physical world. And by being narrow minded about the physical world, we may think it’s the only real thing or it’s the reality, and so on.
But we may feel this way simply because we (subconsciously) keep the focus of physical sensations and we over estimate the importance/magnitude/value of physical world (projected from physical sensation) in our narrow minded state.

As long as we are not very aware, the grip of physical sensations is pretty strong and it will continue to five the sense of reality.
However, once the focus of awareness isn’t held so much by the physical sensations, it starts to loose the grip and we may wonder its degree of reality.
This may happen when someone focuses a lot on concept, idea, etc, away from physical sensation.
It may also happen to someone who has very fluid state of awareness because this type of person doesn’t have so much of fixed focus on anything.

Now, other than the physical sensation, any belief can produce the sense of reality when the person think about it, act upon it, a lot because beliefs are nothing other than rigidly held focuses of awareness.
Since religions and ideologies are constructed by lots of beliefs, they divide and sub divide the field of awareness into more and more narrowed area in multiple layers. And this makes us very narrow minded as long as these beliefs are kept (often subconsciously, but not always).

In short, the reality, with the very assuring certainty, is made by fixation of the focus of awareness.
And it’s nothing other than narrow mindedness and I think it’s obvious (for someone who is even slightly open minded) that this keeps us stupid.

Recap: Anyone with the sense of reality, certainty, is narrow minded about the matter.

Examples:
Materialists are narrow minded about physical world.
Monotheists are narrow minded about god, prophets, holly shitty books and many many other things I don’t want to know much.
Communists are narrow minded about Marx, Lenin, Mao, Kim, whatever and their books and red flags.
Americans are narrow minded about presidents and constipating constitution and guns and bombs, among others.
Ecologists are narrow minded about garbage, garbage bag, and spending more energy on energy saving.

And the reality of these people are relatively small and rigid.
They are limited in their perspectives.

But pretty much all of us are living with some (or lots of) realities that tie us and keep us from falling, and falling apart.
And we may notice, only after falling and falling apart, that free falling is another name of weightless state, and it was the tiny rigid narrow frame of mind that was falling apart, leaving us in the wildly open space with a bit less reality.

PS.

As the narrow mindedness is the result of focus, we can understand it by examining how the focus is held. Also, many focuses aren’t very clear. They are blurred and not precise.
In the case of beliefs, checking the exact line that divide focused area and the rest will illustrate that the focus isn’t very precise (and probably not really worth keeping it).
In the case of more or less biologically programmed focuses, they are like habits or addictions. So, a little similar to treating them, getting to know the flash back and other symptoms of “starvation” are important.
And paradoxically, keeping the focus in intense manner, will use up, wear, consume, and resolve the focus, if it’s done well.

This is why people living honestly and fully according to what they want are more likely to end up with less sense of rigid and permanent realities.
But it needs to be done with the kind of intensity, honesty that can be qualified as “crazy”, “too much” from the perspective of many people.
So, most people will live happily (or not so happily) with their realities, for long long time.
And there is nothing wrong (nor good) about it.

I wonder how much work it takes to keep a mind narrow. It strikes me that it must involve a tremendous amount of energy. Then I wonder where all that energy would go if the person just relaxed and let go … imagine.

That energy is something which cannot be defined and which cannot be understood. Not that I am mystifying it. The moment the dead thought tries to capture that energy, thought is destroyed. Thought is matter. The moment it is created, it has to be destroyed.

Nah,

I think you have some overall points to this, particularly that a sustaining concept of some objective “reality” requires–in your use of the terms, as I’ve understood them–a habitual and specific (spotlight) focus of (a limited portion of the various mentally distinguishable “things” in) awareness…in contrast to a floodlight, for example (as Watts would differentiate the two).

However, I often find what I consider errors in your expressions. Whether or not these come down to lingering “narrow-mindedness” (some habitual perspective, that you may or may not be aware of), or simply my feeling you are choosing words (and ways of using those words) that–having tendencies to be interpreted in certain ways, or various conflicting ways–seem to get in the way, rather than promote, your point. Maybe you were aware of this possibility and chose the words according to a specific audience, feeling it would make a nice bridge for them, but for me the overall OP feels off.

I have something to do so I’m not going to go back to find and quote specific examples, but off the top of my head I think some of the issues for me was the idea of “dividing awareness” when you focus on something, and your overall value judgments of “narrow” and “open” minded.

Sorry, I don’t see the logical necessity for thought destruction there. It’s my understanding that matter and energy are never really destroyed, so thought as matter would never be destroyed either.

Lately, I’ve been buying into the thought of narrowmindedness as addictive thinking that is very hard to break. Thus, it’s a pretty amazing phenomenon when the narrow received views and answers of one’s family, tribe, society, religion, or nation do get broken up enough for a person to be able to have breakthroughs and to see and think about things in new and wider ways. Sometimes I also wonder whether this kind of thing is a part of a human’s individual destiny, but that’s getting into a form of determinism which might (or might not) be dangerous ground here. Who knows…

Thought is born and is destroyed, and again it is born and again it is destroyed. But that is the very thing that we resist. The only way you can give continuity to thought is through this constant demand to experience everything. This is the only way you try to maintain the continuity of the `experiencing structure’.

Without knowledge you can’t experience anything. What you do not know, you cannot experience. It is the knowledge that creates the experience, and it is the experience that strengthens the knowledge. At every moment of our existence, we have to know what is happening outside of us and what is happening inside of us. That is the only way you can maintain this continuity.

Finishedman, I’m not sure why you’re separating thought and experience, since you didn’t seem to separate thought and matter. As far as I can tell, there is no distinction. Doesn’t every experience have to be a thought? Take thought out of that picture, and there is no experience. The same for thought and matter and energy, which can never be destroyed.

Also, thinking in that kind of holistic fashion leads me to believe that it would then become important to fashion one’s thought and expression, to the degree that you want it to become immortal and existant forever in consciousness.

Although it’s not commonly known, our mind and physical body are closely related.
Sometime, it’s a physical muscular tension that holds certain focuses in place.
(It’s similar to the “banda” in yoga)
And it can make a person literally stiff and rigid.
Possibly, certain form of yoga and other exercise have the effect of loosening up a bit tension, and also relaxing the mind.

But there are other ways we cling on and revisit certain focuses, and some of energy is accumulated in different manner, I guess.
I have seen different manifestation of the energy being released in myself and in others.
Sometime, it hurts because nerve system isn’t used to increased amount of energy, but we can get used to it.

Some of “blissful state” can be seen as the result of sudden release of stored energy.
When we get lots of energy, it floods our information processing system (brain, nerve, whatever), and that gives the impression of “white out” situation. And it’s somehow very pleasant.
But we would usually faint or tense up again to control the amount of energy flow before we get into this “blissful” state, probably out of biological self-preserving programming.
So, it only happens when someone accumulate huge amount of energy (by concentrating on something, usually of negative nature), and then the person suddenly give up to hold the focus in the way it even overrun the protection system.
The object of concentration must be of negative nature because we don’t withhold the energy from positively perceived things. We let them flow. But we block negatively perceived information and energy.

Opening up of mind, or small break through of narrow mindedness may come as “culture shock”, “marriage”, or any other encounter with different focuses.
But depending on the situation, the person may even narrow her/his view to preserve her/his rigid world view (a.k.a reality, for the person).

Sometime, we can just relax and go, but it’s often practically impossible because the focuses are held subconsciously and we don;t even know that we are narrow minded.
And even when we are slightly aware, the mechanism behind the focuses can be very addictive and/or strong that it’s not always easy at all.
Also, subtle things can be more difficult to notice, to stay aware of, and to resolve. And there are lots of subtle focuses that keep our reality.

Yup. It’s hard to break because most of thes are subconscious, as I’ve said in other reply, but also it’s because our focus and awareness has built in tendency to be stickier than it needs to be, in my opinion.

Anyway, “reality” of each person is a particular set of pigeon-hole s/he dwells, in this perspective.

I think we are already a bti narrow minded when we are born, although we tend to see baby as something open.
And then, babies absorb different focuses and connect them to make up basic structure of “infant reality”, most probably.
Upon it, more of realities such as emotional realities and intellectual realities would be built.

At the early stage of our development, we tend to take the incoming information for granted, without doubt. So, we are creating more and more fixations and narrowing our mind to create more rigid reality.

Then, the teenage period of questioning happens with the development of logical mind.
At this stage, some of realities are questioned, and even sometime broken.
But this leads to the possible unstable state without much structure in which one can feel safe.
(Maybe it comes from the mentality of caveman who would feel safe when s/he is placed in a (pigeon-)hole and gear the open area.)
And many of us adopt semi-intentionally some fantasy, story, like religion and other ideologies, to stabilize the mind.

After that, one may question again, when s/he looses important things, when s/he encounter something that cannot be handled within one’s reality, when things that supported one’s reality is gone, and so on.
They we can become more narrow minded, again, after that, too.

So, I don’t know if there is any predestined direction in narrowing down and opening up.
I guess it depends on many factors, and most of us swing and vibrate (and circles) within certain range, just like any matter.

They appear as “errors” in your reality, most probably.

I feel that you are still trying to read and fit things into your way of classifying things, rather than simply trying to follow and trace the perspective of others.
But tracing perspective of others isn’t very easy for many of us. I practiced a lot, when I was young, and later.

I’m mostly writing in the way it might be easier for certain type of readers to absorb.
Also, I usually write in the way that may create contradiction in the mind of readers.
But it’s not the contradiction within my writing but the the contradiction within the different perspectives of readers.
As most of us have many contradicting perspectives, it’s not that difficult.

In other words, I rarely write something that sounds entirely good for readers.

When you focus on something, you are dividing the field of awareness.
It’s like focusing on the left side of paper, and you divided the paper into two, left side (positively focused) and right side (which is out of focus and forgotten, for the moment).
So, focusing is narrowing the angle of vision and dividing the world (which is the filed of awareness).

I’ve already written about this in other threads, too, if you are interested.

The effect/nature of focusing: Separated reality = virtual world

Beginner’s guide to “Perspective Logic”

As for the value judgment, I think it’s mostly yours.
I don’t care if you (or me or others) stay very narrow minded or open minded.
It’s a matter of preference.
Although I do think narrow mindedness will make the person more stupid, especially if it’s very rigidly held.
But I’m not against being very stupid, as long as the person doesn’t bothers me, a lot.

I do tend to promote more of open mindedness because I do feel that most people like to be less stupid.
So, I’m mostly going with what many readers want.
But if you prefer to be more narrow minded, you are perfectly free.
And I do like certain type of very narrow minded people.
I like single minded people, to be precise.

Hey Nah,

I like your views on energy and focus, but one part I don’t understand.

What do you mean when you say that a person should have a negative focus before releasing energy?
How does that work?

And I agree, while narrowmindedness is for the most part constrictive and deplorable, I also find some
narrowminded people very lovable and wonderful in some ways.

Thanks in advance,
jonquil

p.s. – Also, it’s easy to see narrowmindedness in others but not in oneself. Lol. That’s why I liked your posts. It got me thinking about myself and where my thinking might be getting too rigid or fixed. It will probably take me several days or weeks to explore those areas, if I can find them. Since they are basically unconscious, I might have to look at the effects of my expressed thoughts on others. Feedback can be a great tool in that respect. Then I might try some other avenues of exploration like more meditation, which I have some difficulty with so I usually use guided meditation tapes, and at some point perhaps I will try hypnotherapy. I sent an email to a hypnotherapist to find out her fees, but she hasn’t replied yet. I have back pain issues I’m dealing with, plus I’m interested in retrogression. I told her I was interested in retrogression from the Great Memory angle, but I have to say… after further reading… there might be a reincarnation angle to it as well.

Any suggestions?

And yet you missed mine completely.

It seems with every attempt to provide you constructive criticism, I become less skeptical that it may just seem you don’t “walk the walk”.

You take yourself too seriously.

To have “blissful state” type of experience, we need to have lots of energy to be release in burst.
When we have positively recognized things, we do not usually block them.
We will let the energy and information pass through our system.

However, negatively perceived things, things we don’t like and things we fear and so on, are often blocked by different channel. Some of nerve signal, blood circulation, and lympathic fluid can be blocked by keeping muscular tension. The information in our mind such as impression, perception, interpretation can be blocked and compressed in subconscious area by evasive and denial attitude, which is nothing other than maintaining certain focus, perspectives that would not allow these information to be focued.

When there are lots of energy and our subconscious (and sometime conscious) effort to block them is overloaded, the blocking mechanism can wear out and break. This will allow sudden flow of stored energy, and we are filled with the amount of information/energy that cannot be treated in normal manner. So, we end up experiencing them as simple burst of energy, just like a white light.

But it’s true that we can have similar experience with any burst of energy that is too much for our brain, I guess.
Sometime, we get “white out” situation in sexual orgasm (Both male and female).
I got once when I went to dentist and the pain signal was too strong (I don’t like to bee numbed by drug).

I wrote the OP for that.
I mean, anything we feel/think real is indicating your narrow mindedness, at some level.
And it’s not just “reality”, but also anything you think as certain, sure, fact, truth, and so on, because things are uncertain by nature, purely logically speaking (and in the sense of what I call perspective logic which take conditions and limitations and each logic/perspective into consideration a lot more).

Another way to detect is your emotional reaction, and especially that of anger and fear.
The anger is more violent form of fear, so to say. We usually get mad because we are too scared to be calm and cool.
And we tend to anger when we feel our “reality”, beliefs, etc are threatened, whether it is the case or not.
So, by analyzing what we are afraid of, we can find our narrowmindedness.
Often, we are afraid of simple stupid things.
But they can be tough to face.

As far as meditation goes, there are many types of so called “meditation” and it’s hard to say.
I tend to think that guided meditation (by tapes or in group) to be a bit like guided imagination trip.

If you want to detect subtle things, it’s imperative for your mind to be very calm.
It’s simply because if your mind is scattered and chattering, the mental noise cover interesting but subtle things and you won’t go very far.
So, reducing mental input and sensory input can help, at the beginning.

Also, if you don’t have fine control of the focus of awareness, you won’t go far in this field.
For this, concentrating on something for more or less long time (at least 15 -20 minutes) with great precision can be helpful.

As a child, I was curious and I played a lot with my friend to keep our eye lids open as long as possible, or stare something and don’t move eye ball at all.
I think these silly plays were useful in developing a bit of skill in focusing.

Any sports, job, hobby that require great precision would help to foster better focusing ability, too.

But it’s hard to say what is better for what you really want, unless I get to know you very well.
And even then, I’m not sure if I can provide precise advice because I don’t have much experience in giving advice in this area.

As for the hypnotherapy, I wouldn’t recommend.
It’s because I consider awareness related matter to be a very personal one, and I think it’s more fun to explore by ourselves.
Other than that, hypnotherapist can project lots of things to you (or to the interpretation/explanation) and it can be confusing for you.
And I think regression is even more touchy. It can foster the attitude of indulging in the idea that you were like this and that, at the earlier age or even in earlier life.
Although certain events in our life before we became adult can be seen and understood in the perspective of past life interference, I don’t think it’s required nor desirable in most cases.

So, I’d suggest you to basically play on your own.

I think this post of yours lacks reasoning.
Isn’t it simple emotional denial post?

Nope. You might want to take a more careful read over my first one, and then read your OP, and then look at your reply to it.

You definitely have a decent theoretical knowledge of what you’re talking about. Your posts don’t seem, for me, to demonstrate a practical use of it, though.

Nah wrote:

Thank you. This makes sense to me. It sounds a bit similar to the breakthrough the Pacific Grovers in Ed Rickett’s circle took so much to heart in their great love and appeciation of Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Roan Stallion.” Sometimes the Soul wants to speak to something that might close the rift between the spirituality and psychology of different cultures and time periods. That solution could be defined by the concept of “breaking through,” so eloquently put by Jeffers as the “Tragedy that breaks a man’s face, and the white fire flies out of it…”

I don’t think I understand this point of view. Yes, we have learned about quantum uncertainty, but there is also a way that there is no real uncertainty if the entire quantum field were known. As for uncertainty in the world of matter, which has been described as frozen light or much slower energy, I think the same logic would apply. If you have a better explanation for what you’re getting at, though, please share it.

I’m not sure that all expressions of anger work that way, though certainly some do. Sometimes anger is absolutely justified in order to set boundaries.

This idea of quieting thoughts and focusing in a new way is starting to make sense to me. I’ve been reading about the views and experience of Sri Aurobindo, and apparently all the yogis teach that.

I still haven’t heard from the hypnotist I emailed. I’m not really pursuing it strongly right now… just sort of putting out feelers. However, I’m having stronger feelings of curiosity about it than I used to, and that might mean something in the future. We’ll see…

That will be easy, since I’ve already been doing that… but every so often I also look for guidance. Thanks for your replies, Nah. You have good energy.

Again, your post doesn’t contain reasoning. It’s just made of assertions, and suggestions without logical precision. Can you see this?

I don’t think you can understand what I say unless you can see the near total lack of reasoning in your last two posts.

There might be similarity, but I don’t know of these people.

From the certain point of view of awareness, any friction or resistance is pain.
Also. from a bit different point of view, any movement is pain.

And the life or existence is made upon the balance between movement and resistance/friction.
In other words, from these certain point of view, there is nothing but pain in the life/existence.

So, the pain (in this sense) is the essence of existence and the basic material that makes everything. in certain perspective.
Pleasure can be seen as a range of pain that we ar programmed to react positively, somehow.

For human, we try to run away from pain, usually in vain.
Pain (and fear and other negative stimulus) is the energy to move us, motivate us.
It pushes us towards (often imaginary) positive goal/ideal.etc.

We aren’t so different from a rat in the running wheel.

All logical certainty is conditional and limited. They are useful, practical, applicable, (and right) only within certain range/scale/perimeter. Out of that, they may become inaccurate, unusable, etc.
In other words, logical certainty cannot be absolute/unlimited certainty.
But we tend to take all sorts of certainties in unlimited/unconditional manner.

I think the lack of awareness about the conditional nature of logic is the source of this idiocy.

So, anytime we think something is certain (without clear awareness of logical condition that comes with the logical certainty), probably we are taking something too seriously, too unconditional way, overestimating it, and creating a fixation that would keep us narrow minded.

This is why examining any certainty, the sense of reality we might feel, can be very revealing if it’s done carefully.

Well, I think you are showing one of your belief, here.
I don’t think anything needs to be justified.
And then, “absolutely justified” seems to be an expression of pretty sticky fixation.

[/quote]
Yoga, and many other schools recommend that because it’s something that becomes evident for people who wants to be aware of subtle things.

As far as Sri-Aurobind goes, I guess he is similar to Ken Wilber.
They talk a lot about many things but I’m not really sure if they practiced as much and experienced much. So, I’m not very interested in them (and some others).
If you want to superficial knowledge to get confused with, their books can be excellent, I guess.

Anyway, I think it’s better to go with your own preferences no matter what others (like me) say.
As long as you are doing what you really want, you will be satisfied in a way.

1. I never denied a limited demonstration of reasoning to the post. My “no” referred to the emotional denial.

2. Everything you wrote in your OP is obvious to me. You’re not saying stuff I simply don’t get. However, I have such a comfortable, natural (as in effortless) understanding of it that I can see several points of conflict between what you say and how you say it, which makes me suspect you’re not quite as “open” as you think you are. I have asked you questioned, pointing out what I have seen, several times, and each reply from you made assumptions about my own perspective–assumptions that were way off–simply because I disagreed with you, so you assumed I must lack what your pots demonstrate.

As I said, you take your self way too seriously. If it weren’t for that you’d have an opportunity to see a lot of your “narrow” thinking habits.

Deny as much as you like. I see the game you like to play.