Media Insights

It raises the question of who am “I” and what is the “I” when you’re talking about this did we exist before we were born?  Did we exist as an entity, as a three brain creature in some other state?  Again, trying to be as pragmatic and as practical as we can, we can’t say very much about the physical world having any application to that state.  Before we were conceived we start saying well, we start from the adult status with my three trillion selves or so and I kind of make that smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and I get down to a multi-cell embryo at a mulberry stage of 30 or 32 cells and then I’m all the way down to one cell and then I’m down to a sperm and an egg and then where do I go from there? 

How do I approach that question?  And this brings us then to this question of we’ve been trying to consider the last several days, the question of attention and what is it or what are its qualities and attributes?  And then we can go to the literature and see what other people have said about attention and we can begin to learn something about the uniqueness and the shared qualities of attention and the powers of attention that are beyond image.  And maybe I discover that it seems that attention is the most creative or procreative power that I can come up with.  Nothing else can match it in its creativity.  So if I am going to create a soul, maybe this has a great deal to do with my attention and its powers and attributes and then how I make use of that.  And that raises the question of can I make use of it?  Is attention I see in my daily life that my attention flips all over the place. It’s pulled here and it’s pulled there and then it’s occupied with this and then associatively it usually gets baulked and it’s off in all these different directions.  So it is this very, very powerful force or whatever.  It’s also very subject to all kinds of things that can influence words.  So what is too directed?  What is pointed and use-ive relative to the creation of the soul, if such things exist?  So this then raises the question of what is behind the attention?  If the attention is a power and it is appropriated power, fine, but how do I know how to appropriate with it?  It’s kind of like how is it controlled?  How is it directed?  And this raises these interesting questions again that have been addressed by the traditions in so many different interesting ways and that has to do essentially with the will.  How do we understand the will?  What do we understand by the will because if we are going to create something and we’ve come to the conclusion that in order to truly create something that we have to be able to empower the attention because that’s the only instrument that will do this?  Then we are really left with this from the mental question of what is my will?  What is the will?  And now the question that we began with, I am not who I think I am becomes a question of what is my will?  What is my attention?  And these, in the subjective world of self-examination, are much more interesting questions than all the external manifestations of the print that are out there that tell me what the soul is and where it came from and so forth and so on because for the most part I cannot validate any of those.  I cannot test any of those.  I cannot say well maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not.  But even our modern time, because of modern communications and modern printing and modern sharing and the whole that’s out there, I don’t have one perspective in the line of my life.  I have not been raised as a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew in a given cultural setting.  I’ve got a thousand cultural settings around me.  We all do.  So who are you going to buy?  What are you going to buy?  And I think this attitude or this question, what are we going to buy into, is a very, very important one.  If I see so clearly around this question of the soul that my Jewish background or my Christian background says this or that, well if I see that none of that is really me, after all when I was born my parents modeled that for me, they put all of that into me, the Priest did or the Rabbi or whatever.  I didn’t put it there.  So at the age of 5 or 6 when I asked mom and dad who are we, well you’re a Jew or you’re a Christian or you’re a Baptist or you’re this or that.  And the question that does come up at that age in many of us, are they elevated to be that?  No.  What does that mean to be a Baptist or a Christian?  Well that’s our culture, that’s our lineage and so forth.  What does that mean?  Why should lineage, being born of this and this and this make me this?  That doesn’t seem to add up.  Many people have raised those questions but if you’re totally immersed in that and there is nothing else then you’re not going to find your way out of that very easily.  But in today’s world it isn’t like that.  We are surrounded by these different points of view and we have to pose the issue, either that or retreat.  Not inquire at all and say well this is what I am damn it and this is what I’m going to stay.  We stand in our world of conviction and nothing happens.  Then the question of the soul is already answered.  Whatever the tradition says it is, that’s what it is and so your question has no meaning to me because I already know what it is.  So for me it comes down to this interesting question that I cannot follow any path that is out there that has been scored out in granite from the past.  If I do that then I am simply a slave to whatever that is that is before you.  It is not mine.  What can be mine can only be through my own effort and if I begin to inquire into that I come up with, again as I said, I come up with the question of creating something and then seeing that it is only the power of attention that is free enough to be able to create something from myself because everything else I can’t create with.  I can’t do anything in the molecular world.  Put a bunch of molecules in front of me and I can wish all I want and there’s not a darn thing that’s going to happen in that world.  I’m not going to make plastic.  I’m not going to make radios or televisions or jet planes.  I can’t create or make any of those.  What is the instrument of creation that I do have some power over that is not bounded by the material world because the question of the soul is one essentially of what is beyond the material world?  So from my perspective, and it’s not just my perspective but it’s one I’ve been helped immensely toward, is that that has to require controlling or determining or willing the attention.

Well the question there, when you ask the question you say “we” and it raises the question of who am “I” and what is the “I” when you’re talking about this did we exist before we were born?  Did we exist as an entity, as a three brain creature in some other state?  Again, trying to be as pragmatic and as practical as we can, we can’t say very much about the physical world having any application to that state.  Before we were conceived we start saying well, we start from the adult status with my three trillion selves or so and I kind of make that smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and I get down to a multi-cell embryo at a mulberry stage of 30 or 32 cells and then I’m all the way down to one cell and then I’m down to a sperm and an egg and then where do I go from there?  Well clearly I’m leaving the world of the cellular molecular, at least I’ve been getting at the lower, lower, lower, lower limits so however we ask, however we can ask the question of where were we or were we before we were born?  It cannot be in the context of physical something or other.  Is it something that could have memory?  Well again we each kind of have to explore this for ourselves.  How could I have memory if I have no brains?  If I don’t have a limbic system that grew this tail could I remember something and my conclusion is no, I don’t see any, there’s not a requirement for me to pose that there are attributes from previous lives that become embodied in this embodied state that somehow or other are there.  The best that they could possibly be would be as image.  They could participate in this world of the non-material but they would have to be images in order to be numbers, in order to have prior existence or whatever.  So for myself I can’t go there because I can’t make sense out of it.