720. The Interweavings
of Beginnings, Changings, and Endings
A basic process to further understanding of a Being's interaction with this Universe is the awareness of how things begin, change, and ultimately end.
This process is probably predating Gotamo's teaching by thousand of years and thus perhaps the first consciously performed 'process' on the humand mind in the currently 'known' history of man.
It can be applied to all observable processes in nature and technology. It is 'naturally' to apply it to the most basic process in life itself, the process of 'breathing', and a lot of people stop right there and don't go any further, thus having become a victim of one or more prep traps.
As an exercise it seems
trivial enough: the observer calms the rational and emotional minds for
a moment, selects a subject, let's say 'eating an apple', and goes
through a basic recall process to look at how the observer started to eat
an apple,
how the apple became
'smaller' over time until only the core was left, and finally how the observer
ended eating the apple.
Now, for every beginning there should be a change and an end. This is immediately clear to everybody, right?
Brace yourself! The
abstraction of 'begin, change, end' (or 'Start, Change,Stop') as it was
called by Hubbard, appears only trivial because of the labelling of its
(likewise
abstracted) components!
It is (at least in modern times) an excellent example of indoctrination. The student is given 'data' to study.
These 'data' are extremely 'high' abstractions. The 'cycle of action' is a top level abstraction since there is only a single enumeration in its class (every process can be 'reduced' to a cycle of action).
The student then stops thinking because s/he now 'knows' it all!
There are a couple of 'dead give-aways':
- The confusion of
the label 'beginning' (Pali: bhaava) with the label 'existence' in major
parts of the 'Buddhist' community despite lengthy and repeated efforts
of Gotamo to make it clear that there is no static 'existence' in nature
at all, but 'only' beginning (or 'becoming'), changing, and dissolution,
and that all three parts are
_different_ from each
other.
- The compulsive urge to 'complete cycle of actions' based on the view that, since every beginning must have an ending, the only thing that would be wrong with a person would be that it didn't 'finish' what it started.
An interesting hypothesis
to explain these phenomena of gross over-simplifications and misattributions
is what could be called the 'session effect': the assumptions that
resolving 'case' would
be limited to either a meditation or an auditing or processing 'session'.
In a 'session', however, 'life' is seen exclusively through the filter
of
the person, literally
in an 'ivory tower', and without any correlation to the 'real' life 'out
there'. The 'session' filter, however, are made up by 'abstractions' which
are
exactly what may be
wrong with the person in the first place.
This 'Little Purple Notebook' does not provide any kind of instructions except as examples of how process templates could look like.
Besides the circumstance
that there is a wealth of 'how-to' guides out there already, the rationale
in this book is that any kind of 'how-to' guidance is, in one form or
another, an open or
disguised indoctrination that bypasses the understanding of the 'student'.
If the understanding is by-passed, however, the student is liable to perform a process based on abstractions that were formed at the time of the indoctrination process.
In other words, instead of looking at his own 'case' or at phenomena in nature, the student looks at the structure of words and its internal representation in his or her mind.
This bypass may be practical in many situations, for example to 'jump-start' a person's cognition process. In the long run, however, 'understanding' is what really counts.
A classic example:
Some 'schools of Buddhism' improperly claim that the 'only' exercise that Gotamo would have explicitly taught would be the 'breathing exercise'.
They blissfully ignore a collection of other fascinating exercises. They are also don't realize that the early reports of Gotamo's teachings, as summarized in the so-called Pali Canon, are more or less randomly compiled excerpts from his speeches.
Drawing conclusions from coincidental circumstances like 'how many times a certain word occurs' appears, in this light, as outright foolish.
Even worse, these schools alter the process of 'observation of the various kinds of breathing' (including the 'cycle of action' involved) to 'intentional changing the rhythm of the process'.
In other words, instead of having a person 'recognize that a long breath was taken', the person now sits down and takes long breaths for a couple of hours every day for some years, counting the seconds during every stage.
But the latter is clearly a form of putting a yoke (Pali:Yoga) onto the body, a practice that has been _explicitly_ rejected by Gotamo as not leading directly to awakening.
Here, the _form_ of a process overrides the _intent_ of the process and the result is further interiozation and a freezing of the person's focus.
In short, it is a _contraction_ instead of an 'expansion' - it is making awareness _smaller_ instead of _larger_.
If, on the other hand, the process of observing 'begin, change, and end' in one's environment is actually being practiced for some time, several concepts will emerge:
- the discovery of
the fractal structure of nature itself: the structure of the whole
is mirrored in the structures
of the parts.
For example, any 'beginning part' of a process consists itself out of a
'complete' cycle of action - it has a start, change, and end in itself.
- the discovery of superposition or layering of cycles of actions: no cycle of action exists by itself alone, except in an abstracting mind of the observer - every cycle is embedded in other cycles and is embedding other cycles.
- the existence of psychological phenomena _around_ cycles of actions, to name a view:
The action phases can be effected too, of course, but these are then 'implants', intentionally or not, and are not originated by the actor.
The post-post cycle void can easily be interpreted as 'unfinished' actions. However, can there be truly 'unfinished' actions at all ??
Is not every action cycle just that - an action cycle consisting of action cycles embedded in action cycles?
The forceful isolation of single action cycles can make sense in many cases: it is how mechanical machines appear to work, it is a Newtonian abstraction.
The metastructure of the abstraction of isolated action cycles ressembles closely another Newtonian abstraction: the attribution of a single cause to an effect (cp. "27. 'Manifestation in Dependence on Conditions' vs 'Cause and Effect' ")
Both abstractions work only for mechanical machines and then only when neglecting the material properties.
Limiting one's view to not differentiate at all perpetuates dullness, restricting one's view to abstractions of isolated components makes a person to a machine, to a robot that can be predicted and controlled.
What does that all have to do with awakening?
While a person looks at the components of processes in nature and its own mind, the Being recognizes that it remains unchanged while all this is going on.
This way it realizes its own improper identifications with the world around it.
If the person stops at a cognition at the verbal level, it cheats itself out of the _real_ process and has fallen prey to a prep trap or an indoctrination.
If the process is continued, the Being ultimately realizes that it is not even identical with the apparatus it uses to perceive any of the processes, such as ears, and eyes, mind and emotions.
The 'observation of action cycle components' is a theoretical 'single-process-solution' if such a thing would exist. In praxis, however, catalysator processes will be needed.
The process may seem finished when a layer of case has been processed. Because of the fractal and layered structure of case, the process will have to be done again once another layer has been set free, which is typically done by other processes.
The word 'nirvana' means 'no burning' - the compulsive processes that a Being continually engages in because it confuses itself with the processes in the world become 'extinguished' like a fire stops burning once the conditions for its existence have been removed.
In other words, when
the identifications of a person with this Universe are resolved on all
levels, the Being is free again.