Six of One, and Zero of the Other

My experience has been that the mental verbalization of thoughts actually creates a small amount of stress within the head. This stress interferes with the direct perception of reality. Like a closed fist, things have a difficult time flowing through a tense head. For instance, the stress will cause the ear passages to be less responsive to the incoming sounds, so hearing is not as acute or deep as it could naturally be. You may be unable to hear the great abiding peace of stillness that is continually present in the world around you.

This stress does not automatically stop the moment that you stop making the mental noise if you have been spending most of your time in stress. The head is too stressed up to immediately calm down. But with repeated practice of calmness, the stress grows less and less, and so when you do stop the mental noise it will tend to stay calm more easily, and you begin to perceive reality more directly.

The ongoing mental dialog is like hypnotic suggestions, mesmerizing you to believe they are true, that there is a physical being: I. You may end up paying more attention to the dialog than to the reality before your senses. It is not as though this were a superstructure laid on top of reality, but more like a noisy television playing in the same room as your reality, distracting you from paying attention to the actual place. (And of course we all want to be the star of our own show, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth watching. Oh well.)

Attitudes and beliefs are stresses held in the whole body. When these are let go of, the body is awakened to a natural grace and poise. A very peaceful continence will be yours.

I am familiar with the Joko Beck quote. She does not think that anyone can attain 100% and move onto stage six. She goes on to say that she thinks that it is an idealized state, and that the ancients did not reach stage six – it’s just our mythology that says they did.

Well, I want to say that you can go on to stage six. That after discontinuing the internal dialog enough (or whatever your practice is), that having the interference turned off will become your normal state. And after that, you will have a very difficult time starting up the interference again. The ancients did achieve the next stage and did abide there completely 100%, it is not a myth.