aliases: theocentric
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. You have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.
Open awareness and focused awareness are often treated as opposites, but that’s really only true from the perspective of focused awareness. If you primarily live in a mindset of narrow focus (Systematic mode), that mode doesn’t really know how to open to and include open awareness.
However, if you find your way into open awareness as primary, that kind of spacious mindset *does* know how to include narrow focus within itself — after all, any focused, concentrated thing has to be a concentration *of some larger thing.* (Think of orange juice concentrate for example: you have to have the comparatively “vast, spacious” orange juice first before you’re able to concentrate it.)
So while some of these instructions may seem a bit paradoxical at first (”Maintain a narrow merging with the journeying object… but also keep vast spacious awareness? How??, those are opposites!”), they do get easier to feel into and recognize once you spend more time in open awareness.
So when stuck or in doubt: practice open awareness for awhile.