Dear Rupert,
It is like there is a ‘special thought’, a thought of a different order: ‘It is only a thought that imagines connection between thoughts’ or ‘The only connection between them, at the level of the images, is the thought that connects them’.
This thought must be very subtle, because the life of our ego is depending on this thought. It is like all the other thoughts are there just to escort this ‘main thought’. It is like if we can be aware of this ‘special thought’, all the rest collapse! Thank you Rupert, if you can put the light on this special thought.
Thank you to be so present in this clarity.
Jean-Claude
Dear Jean-Claude,
It is in fact the ‘ego’, that is, the thought that identifies consciousness with a separate, individual entity, that is the ‘special thought’.
With this special ‘I am inside the body’ thought, all perceptions (except perceptions of the body) are seemingly projected outside and become ‘the world’, that is, separate, outside and other. So this ‘I’ thought is the mother of the world. And all the other thoughts, as you say, about this ‘outside world’ simply escort the ‘I’ thought. In fact, ‘I’ (when taken to refer to the separate entity) and ‘the world’ mutually support and validate one another.
However, the ‘I’ thought is a special thought for another reason. Once it has been seen that the otherness, outside-ness and separateness of the world is an inevitable corollary to the thought that imagines what we are to be a separate and limited entity, we can also understand that the very same ‘I’ thought is the gate through which we (as this apparent entity) pass in the opposite direction, that is, towards the recovery of our true identity.
Once the ‘I’ thought has apparently divided the seamlessness of experience into two apparent entities, a perceiving subject and a perceived object, it is unavoidable and inevitable that we will consider ourself to be a separate and limited entity.
If, as this apparent entity, we take this ‘I’ thought and allow it to lead us to its referent, that is, to whatever it is that ‘I’ really refers to, this very ‘I’ that we consider ourself to be will gradually be divested of all its accumulated beliefs and feelings and stand revealed as pure consciousness itself.
We could say that the ‘I’ thought is the thought through which consciousness seems to become a limited and separate entity, and it is the very same ‘I’ thought which, proceeding back in the opposite direction from which it arose, reveals its true source and substance.
In other words, the ‘I’ thought is both the thought through which consciousness seems to lose its freedom and the thought through which it seems to regain it again.
With warmest wishes,
Rupert
