 THOUGHTS AS SCAFFOLDING: When I was living in the retreat centre in North Wales there was a large house about a mile away which had scaffolding holding up its "west wing" as it was leaning badly. The scaffolding as I remember had been there for many years and had done its job of holding it altogether. Recently in meditation the image of that building and scaffolding popped into my mind and I knew instantly the meaning of this. Thoughts are like scaffolding, they hold things together. Sadly for us this is not a pleasant experience. When I say thoughts I am talking about the believed but unconscious thoughts that stampede through our heads all day long. These thoughts keep repeating the same stories and we keep believing those same stories - they keep things pretty much the same just like scaffolding. What they keep in place is our view of the world which includes ourselves. They keep in place our self image, which without all these believed thoughts would just dwindle away to dust - but leaving us a whole lot more peaceful. Or more accurately our self image would be much more fluid and flexible, not tight and rigid. When we are held together by thought scaffolding we meet the world with pre-conceived ideas of how to act and be. These are based on past experience and normally include fear and anxiety. For example, some of us when the phone rings get anxious. For others it may be when they meet new people and they get shy or nervous. We all experience the consequences of thought scaffolding in slightly different ways - which are yours? So mindfulness can be seen as taking away the scaffolding. Just as a scaffolder takes his time unscrewing the bots that hold it all together so the meditator takes his/her time becoming free of believed thoughts. It takes time to free ourselves from these blighters because we feel without these "image creating" thoughts we would fall to pieces. Through mindfulness meditation we can learn to trust in something that is "behind" and "beyond" this level of experience and unless we do learn this we will always be held together by thought scaffolding. What that something "beyond" thought is cannot really be described - just experienced. But the best term I know is intuitive awareness. |
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