{"id":891,"date":"2009-12-01T00:24:06","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T05:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/?p=891"},"modified":"2014-12-14T21:26:43","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T02:26:43","slug":"the-mind-is-an-antenna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/01\/the-mind-is-an-antenna\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mind is an Antenna"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Crystalize,

Crystalize, 2000, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

A long time ago, someone taught me a simple way of meditation.\u00a0 I was told that thoughts would come, and I should let them go.\u00a0 You can’t stop the thoughts coming, but you can choose not to pick up on them or follow them, to just let them come and let them go.\u00a0 I was taught to focus on the breath coming in and out, to give the mind a simple physical point of attention so that thoughts would not become a central thread.<\/p>\n

Thoughts did come, of course.\u00a0 The experience was like sitting on a city park bench, listening to fragmentary snatches of conversation from the people passing by.\u00a0 Most of the thoughts were incomplete or nonsensical.\u00a0 Many were intriguing.\u00a0 If I had chosen to follow them, I could have spun threads of thinking, feeling, or narrative out of them.\u00a0 But I chose to let them go, so they remained disjointed fragments.<\/p>\n

I’ve had this experience many times since then.\u00a0 Over time, I have come to believe that the mind does not originate these thoughts, but that thoughts exist in some impersonal mind-field and the mind just perceives them.\u00a0 The mind is sensing thoughts, not generating them.\u00a0 Of course, the mind is not just a sensor, but also a processor, so if you latch onto a thought you can build it into a structure using all the cognitive tricks:\u00a0 emotion, metaphor, narrative, logic.\u00a0 But the seed-thoughts, I believe, come into the mind from outside.<\/p>\n

\"Projection,

Projection, 1998, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

Our sense of a coherent self arises from the flow of our sensations, thoughts, and memories.\u00a0 We identify with what we have experienced and what we think.\u00a0 But all of that is really external.\u00a0 Although it is our only way of perceiving ourselves, it is not ourselves.\u00a0 It is simply the medium through which we move, as water is the medium in which a fish swims.<\/p>\n

The world contains every possible kind of sensory input, every kind of experience, all the time.\u00a0 It is a liberation to realize that we have some control over what aspects of this omnisensorium we choose to give our attention to.\u00a0 When we pay attention to horror, the threading aspect of the mind will lead us to perceive more and more horror.\u00a0 Likewise if we choose to focus on beauty or joy or humor.\u00a0 In terms of thoughts, all kinds of thoughts are in the field at all times.<\/p>\n

Like radio waves, many streams of thought are passing through us simultaneously, most of them unperceived.\u00a0 If we don’t know how to tune our antenna, we are most likely to pick up the loudest signals, the million megawatt superstations.\u00a0 Unfortunately those signals are mostly vacuous drivel and unfocused emotional urges.\u00a0 Finding the golden strands in the stream of muck depends on learning to withdraw attention from the loudest and most sensational things so we can give our attention to quieter, subtler things.<\/p>\n

\"Ourania,

Ourania, 1997, by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

The drawings in this post are aquarelle crayon on paper, 18″ x 24″ (46 x 61 cm).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, someone taught me a simple way of meditation.\u00a0 I was told that thoughts would come, and I should let them go.\u00a0 You can’t stop the thoughts coming, but you can choose not to pick up on them or follow them, to just let them come and let them go.\u00a0 I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[227],"tags":[133,19,17,44,51],"class_list":["post-891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-and-philosophy","tag-art-modeling","tag-crayons","tag-figures","tag-nudes","tag-philosophy"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Mind is an Antenna - 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