Awakening in the middle of the night, not sure what I was feeling disturbed about, I began to read for a paper I am writing in RL, a paper on ‘ enslaved states of mind.’ Reading about Abraham Lincoln’s likely personal views toward the soon-to-be-freed slaves just before his Emancipation Proclamation during the midst of the American Civil War in the early 1860s, I found that my previous idealizations of Lincoln were loosening; like leaves of a tightly bound book being loosened there was room to breathe among the various pages as possibilites about the man rather than my up-to-now tightly bound idealization, which in itself is a kind of prejudice or conviction. Via the image of leaves in a book loosening I could more fully grasp the value of the PaB work which indeed is loosening previously held assumptions. And then to become aware that these tightly held assumptions/convictions/prejudices in themselves are enslaved states of mind, I felt I had the outline of my paper rather fully in mind. An example of a kind of waking dream, I thought, stirred by being disturbed, occuring during wakefulness, but invoked by the PaB experience and practice.
May 5, 2008 at 10:51 pm
And there you finish with the crucial and apposite word: practice.
But I love this imagery of “leaves of a tightly bound book being loosened there was room to breathe among the various pages”. I had the vision of partially dry and brittle leaves of a tree previously pressed together and encasing the book like a cover, and them loosing as the breeze passed between them and they rattled together…
Perhaps they really are that kind of leaf, once vital and useful but now drying and soon-to-be dust. Fetters falling…