if you dropped the concept of all the things you liked and disliked? just a thought, or is it an action?
brother neil
Interesting, brother.
I think, each action is preceded by a thought. Secondly, you can’t just “drop” your likes and dislikes. We accumulate them over lifetime(s?) and store in the memory. They define our personality; make us pre-disposed to things compelling a reflex response, not always a reasoned one. The pre-dispositions also make our perception selective. We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see. That further reinforces the likes & dislikes.
Philosophically, likes and dislikes are our response to the proverbial ‘pairs of opposites’ that our limited understanding breed. So, I think dropping them is a gradual spiritual process. As our awareness expands and becomes sensitive to the subtle, the motives behind likes and dislikes start disappearing. Ultimately, they are dropped only when there remains no reason inherent in our living to do so.
Returning to your question, my guess is that it is neither thought nor an action, but a cleansing process.
i will go further suhas
sometimes people ask me what I like to do. I could tell them I love to surf, but i do not always love to surf, i could tell them to look at the smile on a childs face, but i do not always love to do that, I could tell them I like to go for a swim or listen to a favorite musician, but I do not always like to do that. How do you tell people,“i like what I like when I like it”
the other day i saw a man who sold coconut milk, everytime I saw him I smiled. me and a friend were walking back to the hotel and he was taking the same path for about a kilometer, every turn I looked up and he was there, with this weird but nice smile on his face.
sometimes its as if I get lost in someones eyes, and you see a conversation happening, yet there is no effort, you see a smile and smile back or give a smile, but no thinking. sometimes Its like just watching it happen with no effort or thought
Behind the object-level likes and dislikes, there are always several layers of subtle operatives. In the first case, your "saying’ that you like something, but not actually liking it shows that perhaps your need to be politically correct or to please the listener or to hide the real likes-dislikes, were predominant “likes” that could override. My experience is that on the spiritual path we develop a sensitivity to these subtle pre-dispositions. By erasing them we can easily erase the object-level ones.
The second incident is quite different, I think. Unlike our physical bodies, our astral and causal selves are much more connected with the similar selves of the others. Its my experience that the subtle selves are not bottled inside the physical bodies; they don’t need to. Being subtle, they are inside as well as extend outside freely, of course within their range. Secondly, the subtle bodies exist much beyond the physical life and hence, sometimes we get easily connected with the strangers, though in the physical surroundings we have nothing to do with them. Lastly, I believe karma, a huge equation of cause and effect has to run its course and perhaps yourself and the coconut milk-vendor had an old debt to each other, which got settled. Because that was beyond your comprehension, there was no thought or effort on your part. That’s my humble guess.