This is one of the most direct and concise guides to the process of insight you will find anywhere. The great master and sage Ramana Maharshi in Talks With Sri Ramana Maharshi said the following:
"...the disciple feels he is unable to realize the truth even after repeatedly hearing it. What is it due to? Impurities in his mind: ignorance, doubt, and wrong identity are the obstacles to be removed.
(a) To remove ignorance completely, he has to hear the truth repeatedly, until his knowledge of the subject matter becomes perfect;
(b) To remove doubts, he must reflect on what he has heard; ultimately his knowledge will be free from doubts of any kind;
(c) To remove the wrong identity of the Self with the non-self (such as the body, the mind, the senses, or the intellect) his mind must become one-pointed.
All these things accomplished, the obstacles are at an end and samadhi results, that is, Peace reigns."
It is the final step, wrong identity, that is the most difficult yet the most simple, that we simply choose not to be believe because of physicality, materiality, the senses, and thought and the conceptualizations and conditionings of a lifetime. Please see my prior posting a couple of weeks ago for more on this point.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
WHY IS THE QUEST FOR INSIGHT SO DIFFICULT?
It is not. We just make it that way. You simply do not accept the simplicity and directness of it. When the sages tell us "you are already enlightened" or "there is nothing to seek, you are already there" we do not believe them. We have been conditioned to think through our cultural, societal, family and religious influences that spiritual growth and insight must be mystical and magical and dramatically transforming laced with iconic and intense imagery. That is wrong. It is ordinary. In fact, it can be nothing else but ordinary. But as long as you seek the drama, you will miss what simply is.
So what is it? Just this moment, and every one thereafter. The fact that you are aware, that the images of life are projected and actually co-created on your awareness like images on a screen. The screen, your awareness, unchanging, with an infinite stream of images dancing in and out of that awareness. The universe, observing, experiencing itself. But remember, not your mind or body or brain or anything physical or chemical or energy flow. We are talking about Emptiness itself, not the images on the screen or its surface, but its ability to project, to reflect, to be seen, to be known. That is what you are.
Your awareness is so much more than your body and mind but you insist on forcing them together, reducing universal awareness to mere sensory processes and internal dialogue and physicality. You reject, even scorn that you are Emptiness itself, part of a universal whole, yet interestingly you may well believe in religion and mysticism and all the mythic and fantastic visions and imagery that come with it. Why do so many of us believe in angels and demons and god figures and mystical experiences but find it far fetched to believe the simple fact that your true nature and state is Emptiness itself and that your puny body and mind are really illusions, fleeting dream images, just tools and vehicles to enjoy the ride.
Please read my earlier postings where I discuss the ideas supporting this insight.
So what is it? Just this moment, and every one thereafter. The fact that you are aware, that the images of life are projected and actually co-created on your awareness like images on a screen. The screen, your awareness, unchanging, with an infinite stream of images dancing in and out of that awareness. The universe, observing, experiencing itself. But remember, not your mind or body or brain or anything physical or chemical or energy flow. We are talking about Emptiness itself, not the images on the screen or its surface, but its ability to project, to reflect, to be seen, to be known. That is what you are.
Your awareness is so much more than your body and mind but you insist on forcing them together, reducing universal awareness to mere sensory processes and internal dialogue and physicality. You reject, even scorn that you are Emptiness itself, part of a universal whole, yet interestingly you may well believe in religion and mysticism and all the mythic and fantastic visions and imagery that come with it. Why do so many of us believe in angels and demons and god figures and mystical experiences but find it far fetched to believe the simple fact that your true nature and state is Emptiness itself and that your puny body and mind are really illusions, fleeting dream images, just tools and vehicles to enjoy the ride.
Please read my earlier postings where I discuss the ideas supporting this insight.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
WHAT IS THE PROCESS OF INSIGHT?
This web site is dedicated to commentary in contemporary terms on the fundamental vocabulary and terminology of spiritual practice, the development of insight, and enlightenment. The previous postings address the major concepts of emptiness, non-duality, impermanence and no self as well as others.
It may be helpful to explain in practical terms what the process of insight is and how it may actually occur in many people. Without an understanding of the process, the terminology we address may seem abstract and artificial. The following is the summary of one approach.
STEP ONE: You live your life normally experiencing, responding to and influenced by feelings, sensory input, thoughts, fantasies, emotions and all the things you do, see and feel. You see everything as either out there or in here. You live all of this and occasionally reflect on it briefly but usually superficially while engaged in other activities or thoughts.
STEP TWO: You begin to play much closer attention to all the things you do, see and feel. You begin to observe internally the fact that you are actually aware of all these things that make up your life. You begin to watch your experiences in detail. We call this mindfulness. The first step to insight. Watching each present moment of your life in increasing detail. In addition to this increased level of awareness, the practice of mindfulness calms the mind and usually leads to a feeling of greater balance. It is the first practice step of most spiritual approaches.
STEP THREE: After a period of mindfulness, your awareness shifts subtly from mindfulness, or paying much closer attention to your life, to a type of slight detachment to where you begin to observe or witness that these thoughts, emotions, feelings, and events you are paying closer attention to are actually arising instead of being lost in their content as you once were. In other words, if you are angry, you are not only mindful and much more aware of the feeling and experience of your anger, but you now also see it as a separate process you are experiencing. You are now subtly and simultaneously aware of not only the substance of everything you experience but also the fact that you are aware of it. You begin to witness the substance or content of your awareness and the fact that you are aware of it almost as as two separate events. You also begin to realize that your awareness is not a fixed continuing uniform entity but is instead made up of countless individual mind objects that are constantly rising and falling. One of the benefits of this is that you are less frequently lost in thoughts and emotions and are far more present. Distractions and internal drama consume you less frequently and for shorter durations.
STEP FOUR: You begin to expand your attention to the process of your awareness beyond witnessing merely its existence to actually inquiry and contemplation upon how it arises and what is its nature. You observe all its components and attending feelings and emotions and you dissect it. You have a strong realization that in between those constantly rising and falling mind objects is a deep and inexplicable sense of peace and openness. This as well as the earlier stage of Step Three above is called the beginning of the Witness. You are not only aware of the content and process of awareness as it is arising but you begin to become intensely curious upon how it does so. You begin to analyze, meditate and contemplate on the very process of your own awareness. In other words, the subject, you, becomes the object. You begin to truly feel the first steps of insight and a recognition that you are moving toward an understanding of your true nature instead of being lost in and limited to the thoughts, feelings and fantasies of your life before these insights. You feel your consciousness inexplicably expanding beyond thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensory input to include an as yet unknown but intuitively larger context that actually gives rise to awareness. You begin to feel occasional profound flashes of insight but they are short lived and even momentary and they usually quickly fade.
STEP FIVE: Much of what you now experience is done as the Witness and you have developed a more insightful and sophisticated perspective to witness your own process of awareness. Your understanding of the nature of your own being has substantially expanded and you are beginning to innately understand that you are much more than a separate mind and body. You have conceptually identified that larger context of awareness and sense of openness and peace experienced between your thoughts and at times in meditation as Emptiness. Most people are meditating heavily and working with a teacher or reading spiritual and practice texts intensely at this stage and grasping for a practical understanding of the commentaries and vocabulary. The enormity of the challenge begins to become clear. The message of the mystics and sages that all of this is in the realm of intuition and feeling and not logic and empirical investigation becomes abundantly clear as you frequently encounter logical dead ends and inconsistencies as you inquire and contemplate the texts and commentaries.
STEP SIX: You begin to wrestle with the concepts of non duality and emptiness. You are beginning to understand the writings portraying what you always thought as the real world as unreal and illusory. Your exclusive identification with all the subjects and objects of your life begin to break down and you begin instead to recognize and identify instead with the space or Emptiness in which they are all arising. You begin to almost passively witness everything that is arising and you actually rest in that awareness or Emptiness. You become acutely aware of the constant rising and falling of all phenomenon on the screen of your awareness.
STEP SEVEN: You realize that even your own sense of self, your mind and body arise in Emptiness as objects identical to everything else. Your ego and sense of self usually fight this realization, struggling to maintain the sense of separate self and raising doubt and skepticism upon the whole process of insight and awareness. You eventually work through these doubts and recognize that these too are simply mind objects rising and falling in Emptiness. Your sense of a separate unchanging self and all the drama, pain and suffering that comes with it is rapidly dissolving.
STEP EIGHT: Eventually, resting and observing in this Emptiness, the inexplicable occurs, the truth that cannot really be put into words. As Ken Wilber put it "the entire manifest world continues to arise just as it is, except that all subjects and objects have disappeared...every object is its own subject. Every event "sees itself" as it were, because I am now that event seeing itself...I am no longer on this side of my face looking at the world out there; I simply am the world...I am not in the universe. The universe is in my awareness." You are liberated in the non dual awareness which is called One Taste. The sense of peace and balance is simply indescribable.
The steps I have described above are highly condensed and are drawn from my own experiences, teachings, readings, contemplations, experiences described by others and other sources. The specifics of course vary greatly among practitioners. This is just one path. Obviously, much is omitted including the Buddhist practices of compassion and loving kindness, the paths of other schools of spirituality, as well as the many new insights being developed pursuant to integral theory and practice.
What remains so frustrating is that the ultimate insight developed above is profoundly simple yet ineffable. I believe the key is grasping Emptiness. It is so difficult because trying to explain it is probably logically impossible. In doing so, you are attempting to express in relative terms the non relative. That cannot be done. Plus, semantically, the actual term itself is not the best expression. Although I referenced this previously as being derived from the speculations of several famous physicists and philosophers, I also heard it expressed on a much more humble level by a practitioner who startled me with the clarity of her insight, especially after I had wrongly dismissed her. "Stop fighting it," she said. "It all becomes beautifully simple and all the contradictions go away if you see the universe more as a thought and not a thing. We call that thought process Emptiness."
Please read the earlier postings where I addressed emptiness, non duality, selflessness and other terms.
It may be helpful to explain in practical terms what the process of insight is and how it may actually occur in many people. Without an understanding of the process, the terminology we address may seem abstract and artificial. The following is the summary of one approach.
STEP ONE: You live your life normally experiencing, responding to and influenced by feelings, sensory input, thoughts, fantasies, emotions and all the things you do, see and feel. You see everything as either out there or in here. You live all of this and occasionally reflect on it briefly but usually superficially while engaged in other activities or thoughts.
STEP TWO: You begin to play much closer attention to all the things you do, see and feel. You begin to observe internally the fact that you are actually aware of all these things that make up your life. You begin to watch your experiences in detail. We call this mindfulness. The first step to insight. Watching each present moment of your life in increasing detail. In addition to this increased level of awareness, the practice of mindfulness calms the mind and usually leads to a feeling of greater balance. It is the first practice step of most spiritual approaches.
STEP THREE: After a period of mindfulness, your awareness shifts subtly from mindfulness, or paying much closer attention to your life, to a type of slight detachment to where you begin to observe or witness that these thoughts, emotions, feelings, and events you are paying closer attention to are actually arising instead of being lost in their content as you once were. In other words, if you are angry, you are not only mindful and much more aware of the feeling and experience of your anger, but you now also see it as a separate process you are experiencing. You are now subtly and simultaneously aware of not only the substance of everything you experience but also the fact that you are aware of it. You begin to witness the substance or content of your awareness and the fact that you are aware of it almost as as two separate events. You also begin to realize that your awareness is not a fixed continuing uniform entity but is instead made up of countless individual mind objects that are constantly rising and falling. One of the benefits of this is that you are less frequently lost in thoughts and emotions and are far more present. Distractions and internal drama consume you less frequently and for shorter durations.
STEP FOUR: You begin to expand your attention to the process of your awareness beyond witnessing merely its existence to actually inquiry and contemplation upon how it arises and what is its nature. You observe all its components and attending feelings and emotions and you dissect it. You have a strong realization that in between those constantly rising and falling mind objects is a deep and inexplicable sense of peace and openness. This as well as the earlier stage of Step Three above is called the beginning of the Witness. You are not only aware of the content and process of awareness as it is arising but you begin to become intensely curious upon how it does so. You begin to analyze, meditate and contemplate on the very process of your own awareness. In other words, the subject, you, becomes the object. You begin to truly feel the first steps of insight and a recognition that you are moving toward an understanding of your true nature instead of being lost in and limited to the thoughts, feelings and fantasies of your life before these insights. You feel your consciousness inexplicably expanding beyond thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensory input to include an as yet unknown but intuitively larger context that actually gives rise to awareness. You begin to feel occasional profound flashes of insight but they are short lived and even momentary and they usually quickly fade.
STEP FIVE: Much of what you now experience is done as the Witness and you have developed a more insightful and sophisticated perspective to witness your own process of awareness. Your understanding of the nature of your own being has substantially expanded and you are beginning to innately understand that you are much more than a separate mind and body. You have conceptually identified that larger context of awareness and sense of openness and peace experienced between your thoughts and at times in meditation as Emptiness. Most people are meditating heavily and working with a teacher or reading spiritual and practice texts intensely at this stage and grasping for a practical understanding of the commentaries and vocabulary. The enormity of the challenge begins to become clear. The message of the mystics and sages that all of this is in the realm of intuition and feeling and not logic and empirical investigation becomes abundantly clear as you frequently encounter logical dead ends and inconsistencies as you inquire and contemplate the texts and commentaries.
STEP SIX: You begin to wrestle with the concepts of non duality and emptiness. You are beginning to understand the writings portraying what you always thought as the real world as unreal and illusory. Your exclusive identification with all the subjects and objects of your life begin to break down and you begin instead to recognize and identify instead with the space or Emptiness in which they are all arising. You begin to almost passively witness everything that is arising and you actually rest in that awareness or Emptiness. You become acutely aware of the constant rising and falling of all phenomenon on the screen of your awareness.
STEP SEVEN: You realize that even your own sense of self, your mind and body arise in Emptiness as objects identical to everything else. Your ego and sense of self usually fight this realization, struggling to maintain the sense of separate self and raising doubt and skepticism upon the whole process of insight and awareness. You eventually work through these doubts and recognize that these too are simply mind objects rising and falling in Emptiness. Your sense of a separate unchanging self and all the drama, pain and suffering that comes with it is rapidly dissolving.
STEP EIGHT: Eventually, resting and observing in this Emptiness, the inexplicable occurs, the truth that cannot really be put into words. As Ken Wilber put it "the entire manifest world continues to arise just as it is, except that all subjects and objects have disappeared...every object is its own subject. Every event "sees itself" as it were, because I am now that event seeing itself...I am no longer on this side of my face looking at the world out there; I simply am the world...I am not in the universe. The universe is in my awareness." You are liberated in the non dual awareness which is called One Taste. The sense of peace and balance is simply indescribable.
The steps I have described above are highly condensed and are drawn from my own experiences, teachings, readings, contemplations, experiences described by others and other sources. The specifics of course vary greatly among practitioners. This is just one path. Obviously, much is omitted including the Buddhist practices of compassion and loving kindness, the paths of other schools of spirituality, as well as the many new insights being developed pursuant to integral theory and practice.
What remains so frustrating is that the ultimate insight developed above is profoundly simple yet ineffable. I believe the key is grasping Emptiness. It is so difficult because trying to explain it is probably logically impossible. In doing so, you are attempting to express in relative terms the non relative. That cannot be done. Plus, semantically, the actual term itself is not the best expression. Although I referenced this previously as being derived from the speculations of several famous physicists and philosophers, I also heard it expressed on a much more humble level by a practitioner who startled me with the clarity of her insight, especially after I had wrongly dismissed her. "Stop fighting it," she said. "It all becomes beautifully simple and all the contradictions go away if you see the universe more as a thought and not a thing. We call that thought process Emptiness."
Please read the earlier postings where I addressed emptiness, non duality, selflessness and other terms.
Monday, February 15, 2010
CAN THE BARRIERS TO INSIGHT BE EXPLAINED SIMPLY?
Yes they can but it is not easily understood. It is not logical. It has never been an issue of clarity of explanation or the skills of the speaker. The mystics and sages are not withholding anything from us. Even the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, renown for his gentle, non controversial and accommodating approach, referred to all of this as "the truth that cannot be described". This is very tough stuff because we are trying to use our minds to solve the very same problems the existing perspectives of our minds have created.
Let's try though. Short and sweet. This is, after all, one of the goals of Contemporary Enlightenment.
One of the great 20th century Buddhist teachers, when asked a similar question, supposedly laughed and said simply, "No self, no problem." And that was it. Get it or don't get it. I am sure he probably also promptly dismissed the questioner.
I like how the great sage Ramana Maharshi put it: "The wrong knowledge of 'I am the body and the mind' is the cause of all the mischief. This wrong knowledge must go. That is Realization." It is that simple but simple in this case certainly is not easy.
Why this answer? Because this wrong knowledge makes you think you are a separate self (no self), confronting a universe made up of infinite amounts of matter and energy (duality), shut off and even hostile to the real nature of things (emptiness). This knowledge obscures and blinds you to the true nature of being. Most of us cannot even conceive that we are more than a body and mind. Our dualistic mindset allows us to consider the religious, the spiritual, the metaphysical and even the supernatural beyond mind and body, but always separate from and acting upon mind and body. Dualistically. Never the same. Never one, not two.
So what really are the sages saying when they say no self and no mind and body? We believe we are a body and a mind dwelling in an external, material universe filled with other bodies and minds and an infinite number of other material objects that are permanent and real. However, this permanent and real external universe is an illusion. What we see as real and permanent and external and material are appearances only projected by our senses, like images projected on a screen. What is real is the screen itself. The screen is there whether there are images projected or not. The screen is our true being...it is awareness...emptiness itself. The projection is our mind and all the sensory objects created by it. The screen is unchanging and real regardless of the images projected upon it. The projections are impermanent and in constant flux...appearances only...mind objects. When you forget this and delude yourself into thinking you are only a mind and body and the material world is real and permanent, you have narrowed and limited your awareness and very being itself similar to a viewer of a film so lost in the projected images that he believes himself only to be a participant in the film and has forgotten the world at large. These thoughts are difficult and seem profoundly counter intuitive. But as the earlier postings explain, everything that happens happens in your awareness and most of what you experience are representations only created and projected by your senses. Further, as the scientists begrudgingly admit, the so called real and fixed material world is anything but that
and is made up of primarily space and rapidly moving particles bearing no resemblance to what we actually experience. As one great physicist put it, the closer you look, the less the universe looks like a thing and the more it seems like a thought. We have simply confused appearances for the real and looked for permanency where there is none and forgotten that the dance of the universe is projected on the screen of our awareness. So what is the solution? Be the screen of your being, not the ever changing projections. Try and challenge yourself to live your life from that perspective in everything you do. Look for it in every moment of your awareness, even in deep sleep when all objects have subsided. Remind yourself of it constantly. Make it your mantra and an object of contemplation. And after you have done that, really done that, I promise you, no matter how strange it may sound right now, that you will begin to intuit that they and you (the projections, the screen, the mind objects and your awareness) are all really one and your perspective will expand immeasurably...form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
This website is dedicated to trying to apply in contemporary terms the concepts of impermanence, no self, non duality, and emptiness. Read the earlier postings, then the quotes of the masters and other reflections above and let it sink in. Remember, these are the truths that cannot really be described. It is instead intuitive and wordless.
Let's try though. Short and sweet. This is, after all, one of the goals of Contemporary Enlightenment.
One of the great 20th century Buddhist teachers, when asked a similar question, supposedly laughed and said simply, "No self, no problem." And that was it. Get it or don't get it. I am sure he probably also promptly dismissed the questioner.
I like how the great sage Ramana Maharshi put it: "The wrong knowledge of 'I am the body and the mind' is the cause of all the mischief. This wrong knowledge must go. That is Realization." It is that simple but simple in this case certainly is not easy.
Why this answer? Because this wrong knowledge makes you think you are a separate self (no self), confronting a universe made up of infinite amounts of matter and energy (duality), shut off and even hostile to the real nature of things (emptiness). This knowledge obscures and blinds you to the true nature of being. Most of us cannot even conceive that we are more than a body and mind. Our dualistic mindset allows us to consider the religious, the spiritual, the metaphysical and even the supernatural beyond mind and body, but always separate from and acting upon mind and body. Dualistically. Never the same. Never one, not two.
So what really are the sages saying when they say no self and no mind and body? We believe we are a body and a mind dwelling in an external, material universe filled with other bodies and minds and an infinite number of other material objects that are permanent and real. However, this permanent and real external universe is an illusion. What we see as real and permanent and external and material are appearances only projected by our senses, like images projected on a screen. What is real is the screen itself. The screen is there whether there are images projected or not. The screen is our true being...it is awareness...emptiness itself. The projection is our mind and all the sensory objects created by it. The screen is unchanging and real regardless of the images projected upon it. The projections are impermanent and in constant flux...appearances only...mind objects. When you forget this and delude yourself into thinking you are only a mind and body and the material world is real and permanent, you have narrowed and limited your awareness and very being itself similar to a viewer of a film so lost in the projected images that he believes himself only to be a participant in the film and has forgotten the world at large. These thoughts are difficult and seem profoundly counter intuitive. But as the earlier postings explain, everything that happens happens in your awareness and most of what you experience are representations only created and projected by your senses. Further, as the scientists begrudgingly admit, the so called real and fixed material world is anything but that
and is made up of primarily space and rapidly moving particles bearing no resemblance to what we actually experience. As one great physicist put it, the closer you look, the less the universe looks like a thing and the more it seems like a thought. We have simply confused appearances for the real and looked for permanency where there is none and forgotten that the dance of the universe is projected on the screen of our awareness. So what is the solution? Be the screen of your being, not the ever changing projections. Try and challenge yourself to live your life from that perspective in everything you do. Look for it in every moment of your awareness, even in deep sleep when all objects have subsided. Remind yourself of it constantly. Make it your mantra and an object of contemplation. And after you have done that, really done that, I promise you, no matter how strange it may sound right now, that you will begin to intuit that they and you (the projections, the screen, the mind objects and your awareness) are all really one and your perspective will expand immeasurably...form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
This website is dedicated to trying to apply in contemporary terms the concepts of impermanence, no self, non duality, and emptiness. Read the earlier postings, then the quotes of the masters and other reflections above and let it sink in. Remember, these are the truths that cannot really be described. It is instead intuitive and wordless.
Monday, December 28, 2009
WHAT ARE WE REALLY?
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.
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.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
HOW CAN I POSSIBLY BE ONE WITH ALL OBECTS OF MY AWARENESS?
Such a question sounds absurd, like new age nonsense. You probably believe any answer will be metaphorical, poetic, metaphysical or worse, spirit babble, with no relation to the real, material word.
Let's take an example. If you printed this posting we would say to you that the paper you are reading and your awareness are one, not two. How can that be you ask. It is material. It has color, size, weight, texture etc. You the subject are aware of it, the object, through your senses. It is clearly separate from you. Right?
But what is separate? Its appearance and color? Vision is strictly a feature of your mind and brain. There is no color, no appearance anywhere in the universe without eyes and a mind. What about its texture? Tactile feeling is also strictly a feature of your mind and brain. Its measurements and dimensions? Obviously mental concepts and representations. Everything that you experience and know about that piece of paper and in fact any object is occurring solely in your awareness.
What you experience does not exist "out there". Any object, or more accurately, all the qualities that make it what you know, exist "in here", in the awareness of all life, and those qualities are your awareness. How can that be you ask? Has anything, absolutely anything, that you have known or experienced, occurred outside of your awareness? No, nothing, absolutely nothing. Every feature and quality that makes that sheet of paper what it is to you is a feature of your mind, generated by your mind, in your awareness. You are your awareness. All life, is its awareness. All of the features of that paper are generated by your mind and exist within your awareness.
So what is left when you take these features away, with no minds and no awareness of them? Do objects even exist? Of course, but not as we have known them and almost certainly beyond our understanding.
But that is crazy you say. Do we mean that a rock deep inside the Earth's crust or a galaxy on the edge of the universe that is not being perceived does not really exist? No, of course not. What I am saying is that they exist but without all the features, all the qualia, the appearance, feel, sound etc. that makes them what they are to us. Our awareness, the awareness of all life, assigns all of that, IS all of that. What they are without our awareness, is beyond our awareness, likely beyond our understanding. The sages use terms like unmanifested, interminable flux, unknowable subjectivity, unfixed potentiality. What we define as material, those very attributes are the expression of our awareness. Scientists and physicists, who try to examine empirically and independently, are discovering that what we call material breaks down the further down they look so that on a quantum or sub atomic level, there really is nothing fixed or definable there at all...just waves and potentialities and probabilities and the stuff of theoretical physics, again beyond our understanding.
So hopefully you will begin to intuit that all those seemingly independent features of materiality that you insist are separate from you are really your awareness at work and what is "really there" is more like a set of relationships and potentialities confounding the most advanced scientific thinkers. And perhaps you will begin to see that rather than a passive player in the universal scheme of things, your awareness, in fact the awareness of all beings, is an integral component and is the subjectivity that defines and colors all that there is.
Still resisting? You are not alone. Most scientists without hesitation state that "out there" is a fixed, definable, objective reality and "in here" are the facilities that faithfully reproduce it through the senses and conceptual thought. In other words, our minds, our awareness mirrors the real world and somehow projects it internally. The task of the scientist is to be certain that the inner projection comports with that outer reality. But how in the world is that done, especially when all of the data and all the scientific analysis and explanation accompanying that outer reality is itself an internal representation, once again our awareness at work. Remember when I said above that nothing, absolutely nothing that you have ever or will ever experience is outside your awareness? So how does the scientist supposedly calibrate the "real world" with our awareness of it when the only tool he or she has and has ever had is awareness itself? There is no answer to this question because the problem is not the answer. It is the question. The question is founded on erroneous assumptions. You cannot calibrate the so called real world and our awareness because they are not two, but one. The qualia of the universe, everything that we can know and understand about it IS our awareness. It is created by our senses and our minds upon the foundation of our awareness. It is duality, dualistic thinking that separates them and creates this illusory problem.
Is it perhaps a little easier now to understand that what we know and can possibly know of the universe and every object in it, and every fact and feature of those objects, is, in fact, our awareness? So that sheet of paper with these words upon it really is identical to what you are. That awareness and the universe are not two but one. That the qualia of the universe is not fixed, but is the subject of awareness, not the object. And you are that subject, that awareness.
Please take a look at the August '09 posting "Reality Is Not Fixed" where we looked at this same insight but from a slightly different and "universal" perspective.
Let's take an example. If you printed this posting we would say to you that the paper you are reading and your awareness are one, not two. How can that be you ask. It is material. It has color, size, weight, texture etc. You the subject are aware of it, the object, through your senses. It is clearly separate from you. Right?
But what is separate? Its appearance and color? Vision is strictly a feature of your mind and brain. There is no color, no appearance anywhere in the universe without eyes and a mind. What about its texture? Tactile feeling is also strictly a feature of your mind and brain. Its measurements and dimensions? Obviously mental concepts and representations. Everything that you experience and know about that piece of paper and in fact any object is occurring solely in your awareness.
What you experience does not exist "out there". Any object, or more accurately, all the qualities that make it what you know, exist "in here", in the awareness of all life, and those qualities are your awareness. How can that be you ask? Has anything, absolutely anything, that you have known or experienced, occurred outside of your awareness? No, nothing, absolutely nothing. Every feature and quality that makes that sheet of paper what it is to you is a feature of your mind, generated by your mind, in your awareness. You are your awareness. All life, is its awareness. All of the features of that paper are generated by your mind and exist within your awareness.
So what is left when you take these features away, with no minds and no awareness of them? Do objects even exist? Of course, but not as we have known them and almost certainly beyond our understanding.
But that is crazy you say. Do we mean that a rock deep inside the Earth's crust or a galaxy on the edge of the universe that is not being perceived does not really exist? No, of course not. What I am saying is that they exist but without all the features, all the qualia, the appearance, feel, sound etc. that makes them what they are to us. Our awareness, the awareness of all life, assigns all of that, IS all of that. What they are without our awareness, is beyond our awareness, likely beyond our understanding. The sages use terms like unmanifested, interminable flux, unknowable subjectivity, unfixed potentiality. What we define as material, those very attributes are the expression of our awareness. Scientists and physicists, who try to examine empirically and independently, are discovering that what we call material breaks down the further down they look so that on a quantum or sub atomic level, there really is nothing fixed or definable there at all...just waves and potentialities and probabilities and the stuff of theoretical physics, again beyond our understanding.
So hopefully you will begin to intuit that all those seemingly independent features of materiality that you insist are separate from you are really your awareness at work and what is "really there" is more like a set of relationships and potentialities confounding the most advanced scientific thinkers. And perhaps you will begin to see that rather than a passive player in the universal scheme of things, your awareness, in fact the awareness of all beings, is an integral component and is the subjectivity that defines and colors all that there is.
Still resisting? You are not alone. Most scientists without hesitation state that "out there" is a fixed, definable, objective reality and "in here" are the facilities that faithfully reproduce it through the senses and conceptual thought. In other words, our minds, our awareness mirrors the real world and somehow projects it internally. The task of the scientist is to be certain that the inner projection comports with that outer reality. But how in the world is that done, especially when all of the data and all the scientific analysis and explanation accompanying that outer reality is itself an internal representation, once again our awareness at work. Remember when I said above that nothing, absolutely nothing that you have ever or will ever experience is outside your awareness? So how does the scientist supposedly calibrate the "real world" with our awareness of it when the only tool he or she has and has ever had is awareness itself? There is no answer to this question because the problem is not the answer. It is the question. The question is founded on erroneous assumptions. You cannot calibrate the so called real world and our awareness because they are not two, but one. The qualia of the universe, everything that we can know and understand about it IS our awareness. It is created by our senses and our minds upon the foundation of our awareness. It is duality, dualistic thinking that separates them and creates this illusory problem.
Is it perhaps a little easier now to understand that what we know and can possibly know of the universe and every object in it, and every fact and feature of those objects, is, in fact, our awareness? So that sheet of paper with these words upon it really is identical to what you are. That awareness and the universe are not two but one. That the qualia of the universe is not fixed, but is the subject of awareness, not the object. And you are that subject, that awareness.
Please take a look at the August '09 posting "Reality Is Not Fixed" where we looked at this same insight but from a slightly different and "universal" perspective.
Monday, September 28, 2009
WHAT IS IT TO BE ENLIGHTENED?
The answer to this question is the stuff of books, treatises, poetry, religion, spirituality, psychology, science, neuro science , and insight, with little or no agreement between them. Almost, perhaps, like the question what is love. No real consensus on the definition of the term, but we know it, allegedly, when we see it.
If you have read the prior postings where we tried to define and update some of the core terms found in any discussions of insight, transpersonal growth and enlightenment, I believe a brief and usable definition emerges. It is by no means complete. For that, one should consult the brilliant and comprehensive works of Ken Wilber and his colleagues who remain alone on the cutting edge of such issues with their works on integral theory and practice.
For now, a more personal definition will suffice. Spiritual enlightenment is realized when you awaken and know without question, without doubt, that you are not the vulnerable mind and body and separate self existing on sensory input, thoughts, emotions, and fantasies, but you and your awareness are instead one with all manifestation and the very fabric of the universe. And that insight becomes the foundation of your existence permeating all that you do. Matter, energy, and awareness are one, not three. Non-duality, no self, and emptiness realized and lived, every moment of your life. And suffering, finally, lessens because you finally recognize that the real you dwells, not on a local level of mind and body where you can be devastated by the careless words of a lover or flattened by the winds of a tornado, but on an absolute, universal level of awareness. Nothing can threaten what you really are when there is nothing outside of you. For more of this, please read Ken Wilber's The Simple Feeling of Being (as well as everything else he has ever written and will hopefully continue to write) from which much of this definition was derived and shamelessly paraphrased.
If you read the prior postings, this definition may speak to you. If you have not, it may sound like more indulgent, metaphysical, new age dharma babble. Just remember however, some of the greatest most profound minds and spiritual traditions that have ever existed have used similar terms and shared similar insights, almost always independently and across the ages. Unless there is some grand conspiracy to delude you and other seekers like you, you might just want to pay attention to what they are saying and have continued to say across the millenia.
The next posting will focus on one of the most formidable barriers to these insights and that is physicality, materialism, and your own body/mind.
If you have read the prior postings where we tried to define and update some of the core terms found in any discussions of insight, transpersonal growth and enlightenment, I believe a brief and usable definition emerges. It is by no means complete. For that, one should consult the brilliant and comprehensive works of Ken Wilber and his colleagues who remain alone on the cutting edge of such issues with their works on integral theory and practice.
For now, a more personal definition will suffice. Spiritual enlightenment is realized when you awaken and know without question, without doubt, that you are not the vulnerable mind and body and separate self existing on sensory input, thoughts, emotions, and fantasies, but you and your awareness are instead one with all manifestation and the very fabric of the universe. And that insight becomes the foundation of your existence permeating all that you do. Matter, energy, and awareness are one, not three. Non-duality, no self, and emptiness realized and lived, every moment of your life. And suffering, finally, lessens because you finally recognize that the real you dwells, not on a local level of mind and body where you can be devastated by the careless words of a lover or flattened by the winds of a tornado, but on an absolute, universal level of awareness. Nothing can threaten what you really are when there is nothing outside of you. For more of this, please read Ken Wilber's The Simple Feeling of Being (as well as everything else he has ever written and will hopefully continue to write) from which much of this definition was derived and shamelessly paraphrased.
If you read the prior postings, this definition may speak to you. If you have not, it may sound like more indulgent, metaphysical, new age dharma babble. Just remember however, some of the greatest most profound minds and spiritual traditions that have ever existed have used similar terms and shared similar insights, almost always independently and across the ages. Unless there is some grand conspiracy to delude you and other seekers like you, you might just want to pay attention to what they are saying and have continued to say across the millenia.
The next posting will focus on one of the most formidable barriers to these insights and that is physicality, materialism, and your own body/mind.
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