Metacognition

Is there any distinction (preemptive defense: pls shut up about distinctions) between seeing your Buddha nature and metacognition?

In other words, perceiving feeling as feeling, perception as perception, cognitive movements of mind as movements of mind, and the perception of the mental objects of perceiving all of the above as... something or other.

A child has poorly developed metacognition so children are generally swept along by their mental movements and don't even have any notion of seeing them as mental movements. Adults typically are naturally better at this, since school and social interactions teach them to monitor themselves this way.

Is there anything else but this to seeing your Buddha nature? Since enlightenment is sudden I suspect there must be something else to it, since the growth of metacognitive ability is very gradual. But what else is there to see except the movements of your mind?

There is talk of a formless, perfectly still, unchanging source of Mind, but all I have atm is a concept of something formless, still, and unchanging (along with a mental picture of a small black void that makes me lightheaded to try to look at and sometimes turns into all kinds of lights and colors, but this seems to be just an artifact of my imagination trying to visualize something with these features and identify my "self" with it, rather than anything related to something that could be described as formless, still, and unchanging).

Of course anything with these features will look exactly the same whether you call it a source of mind or a void or an invisible aether or anything you like. Perhaps seeing your Buddha nature is a perception of something formless, static, and unchanging like this rather than a perception of mental objects and movements?

What does r/zen think?

Submitted August 08, 2016 at 03:16AM by ravasheera http://ift.tt/2aEZVhJ