If you believe all that you are is a separate mind and body or even a mind and body and a soul living in a universe of separate things, get used to your suffering. As long as your perspective is that there are separate subjects and objects, attachment and desire will keep you searching for everything just outside of your reach and will always win out. Food, material things, dreams, goals, love, sex, everything and anything, if it isn't you, you've just got to have it. Attachment and desire are the logical result of separateness. We can temper it, try to meditate, rationalize, spiritualize, or discipline it out of our awareness but it is always there, the dark side of separateness.
Certainly you are a mind and a body, and even if you insist, a soul, but you are those and much, much more.
Duality and separate objects obscure our true nature. They narrow and limit what we really are. Our true nature, according to many of the mystics and sages, is most closely demonstrated as the state of our being when in deep dreamless sleep. Absurd you say. There is nothing in deep dreamless sleep. How can that be our true nature?
Deep dreamless sleep is the closest state to radical emptiness. Empty of mind objects and ego and sensory awareness. Remember that emptiness is not a condition or state or object or experience. It is the foundation of everything, what I called in an earlier posting, the reflective ability of the universe (using the mirror metaphor) or unmanifested subjectivity. And that is you, all objects arising in that subjectivity, subjects and objects are one, form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
So don't meditate or contemplate on objects or visions or peak experiences unless of course your goal is just to calm and quiet your mind. They are just mind objects, projections, experiences, even mirages, no matter how glorious or temporarily fulfilling, all impermanent, destined to fade in a matter of seconds or moments. Look instead at where and how they all arise. Eventually, every mystic and sage and guru and teacher will ask this of you. Have you ever done so? We all consider our selves to be the sensations and experiences and egos and minds that envelope us. But actually we are the foundation, the screen upon which all the qualia of life is projected. Beyond words and logic and description but closest to that condition of deep dreamless sleep where there is nothing but radical emptiness. What some mystics called the Self. When in deep sleep, you do not die and then are suddenly resurrected when you awaken. Instead, there is absolutely no awareness of thoughts, senses, memories, feelings, nothing. You awareness is instead a potential, unmanifested, waiting to happen. Like a screen, awaiting the projection of images and content. But instead, your mind, awaiting everything that is consciousness, guaranteed to follow when you awaken. You are the screen, not the countless movies projected on it. We call it the Self. We call it emptiness. That is what you are and have always been and always will be.
Please read the earlier postings. I wrote them as a foundation to these thoughts.
