Watching the Mind: mystical reflection
Watching the Mind: mystical reflection
Beyond the inner dialogue, the polyphony within the thinking and feeling mind, there is a place that is at peace, from which what is going on can be observed, but only if it's pure observation without judgement.
Merely watching.
The temptation is to become involved in the internal conversations by reflecting on them, in which case the process becomes self-reflective: one conversation observing the others, using the same language as the others, but pretending to itself that it's different, that it's above what else is going on.
Not so.
The pure observation I am trying to describe is like a bridge between ordinary consciousness and transcendental consciousness. I'm describing the bridge itself, which exists in a barzakh[i], in neither world. As I remember, Henry Corbin[ii] described it as an isthmus: that will do, as an approximation, as an entity complete in itself, standing between.
[i] Barzakh (Arabic: برزخ) refers to a barrier or isthmus: something that separates two things while also joining them.
[ii] Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XCI, 1969). It was reissued as Alone with the Alone (1998).
