Symbolic
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Three times a week around the lake, pass dozens of people. It is quite a beautiful place with wild Mallards, Canadian Geese, farm and diving ducks, three and four kinds of herons, big and small Egrets, sometimes Pelicans and Cormorants, beautiful undeveloped hills wooded areas and the moods of the lake. One notices, in passing a goodly number of people out taking their exercise, that most people don't seem to quite know where they are. They may as well be walking in a tunnel. They are so absorbed in their own thoughts, worries, concerns, day dreams and whatever, that they fail to notice the reality they are in, walking, some jogging, as duty, constitution, for health reasons, but rarely it would seem for the joy of being there.
Of course it is difficult not to be completely absorbed in one's thoughts. Association
for instance is automatic. A goal for some of humanity is the achievement of
Enlightenment,
wherein the thinking processes are quite subdued if not terminated, and where the practice employed is
meditation, which may involve in part the suspension of thinking. But these states are very difficult to achieve, so that perhaps the best the ordinary person can do is to periodically suspend thinking for a time, to at least notice one's surroundings. Actually it means to not even necessarily suspend thinking, but simply to become aware of one's surroundings, such that the thinking is in the background instead of the fore.
AWARENESS (1 OF 2)
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