by Tang Huyen

"This transfer of focus and change of values form the underlying logic to all mysticism, as known to me."

The deluded mind is self-centred and self-interested. It wants to gratify itself and preserve itself, and in such endeavour it tends to be narrow, myopic, and repetitive in its vision and operation. The more the mind tends toward awakening, the less it cares about its own particularities and properties — what belongs to it — and the more it opens up to what is outside of them and other than them. The surprising thing is that as it cares less and less about its own particularities and properties, it attains more and more to calm, peace, harmony, serenity, grace, all unasked. Somehow, paying attention to its own interests and particularities hampers such values, and abandoning its own interests and particularities fosters them. In its raw processing power, it is always limited, whether deluded or awakened, but the more it tends to awakening, the less the raw processing power is involved, and the more it gains access to the forenamed values, which by the way are felt values and not thought-up values.

Such focus on details drags the mind down to details and makes it lose sight of the whole, but as it tends to awakening, it lets go of the details and returns more and more to the whole. This return to the whole is hypostatised in Hinduism as the return to Oneness — however it needs not be so; it is merely the abandoning of the focus on the details and the corresponding enlargement of attention to the whole, which is the felt whole, as experienced, and not the thought-up whole. This shift of focus is accompanied for free by the shift to the forenamed values, as some kind of reward intended by Mother Nature.

This transfer of focus and change of values form the underlying logic to all mysticism, as known to me.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 18 October 2008, in the "A squeaky wheel gets the oil" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

This is one of TH's most economical synopses of what mysticism actually is: not metaphysics, not doctrine, not the assertion of cosmic Oneness, but a structural shift in where the mind places its attention. The deluded mind focuses on its own particularities; the awakening mind loosens this focus and opens outward. The payoff — calm, peace, serenity, grace — arrives not as earned rewards but as unasked gifts, "accompanied for free." TH is careful to distinguish this from the Hinduist interpretation: the return to wholeness is a change in attentional structure, not a literal merger into Brahman or Oneness. The final sentence — "this transfer of focus and change of values form the underlying logic to all mysticism, as known to me" — is characteristic in its quiet confidence: TH does not claim universality by authority but by coverage ("as known to me"), leaving room for what he has not encountered.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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