Maker of Images

11-10-17 Maker of Images

I was awake most of the night.  At least awake enough to remember my musings and check the clock.

I recall that there was a long analysis into - what is the conditioned person? What does it look like, where is it, does it exist in any material way?

This came from a recognition that my “father” (who died several years ago) existed only as a mental form, an image, and that there is a tendency to keep the mental form, which can only exist in my mind – alive, solid and multi-dimensional.

At one point I said to myself “It is good that Dad was proud of Anna’s accomplishments”.  It was then that I realized – it was as if he was still alive somewhere and was being completed in form and satisfaction by her actions and values.  And what was this mental form that I called my father and that I imagined him to be? Did it exist and where was it? Now, of course, since he has died it has no physical form or reality and if it has a mental form it must be my image, one that I have constructed and am loyal to and willing to perpetuate.

It’s the same if someone is alive or dead, here or not here physically. They exist within the mind of the person as a particular mental form, a collection of memories, and as a projection of tendencies. This is what they have done, acted like, looked like and therefore I expect they will behave and hold values in a manner that corresponds and has continuity with my construction of their past behavior.

My image of who they were or are, may be very different from their own, and their own image of themselves may also be incomplete as someone else could or does see them. (This also suggests that what is taking account is a subunit of the whole, as it does not know the whole and can only see partially.)

One could say that the mental construction of a person is a conglomeration of parts, memories that make up a character in time (this is who they were at this moment and the next moment and through this event or reaction to events). Because we can’t really see all that we know of them, we make a symbol of them - their name, their physical appearance, a feeling we may have of them and that substitutes as a place marker in the game of The Players in My Life.  We think of these players when we are trying to define ourselves and what we want for ourselves and from others. They become objects in our mental environment. They can hold positions of security, values, memories of experiences, love, hate, antagonism, rejection. Our conditioned mental form, the contents of our consciousness, must include these players.  Not the “real” players, just the images of them.

In most ways, we never fully know them as we may not fully know ourselves. (And who, what is doing the knowing, taking the account, creating the mental form?)

So in seeing this, the whole mental construction of other and myself starts to dissolve, but of course not entirely as we don’t want to dissolve, don’t want to disappear, don’t want to be irrelevant. The currency of the past weighs heavily and we believe in its value.  To dissolve means to see the world with no role to play, with no ability to affect others. Not only have we not been important, but the totality will carry on without us. (Except not through these eyes and with this particular bias of a conditioned person.  That’s huge for us as an individual person, a human being that is creating reality.)

What does this all mean? We are beings capable of image making.  Our understanding of our participation, of our existence, of our fragmentation, of our extraction as a fragment taken out of the totality is based on our ability to make images out of what is not an image. The flow and relationship of Life is not an image and we as vital participants (a fragment again) are not images.  I don’t know what we are.  To define is to go back to image, to fragment.  So I can’t define except to say that this ability to fragment and to construct mental images creates our perceived reality.

(Image: Persona)