Everyone is familiar with the complaint “sometimes I can’t get my mind to shut up.” Much of the time, you are being pestered by a subtle mechanism that's running all by itself. That’s a valuable thing to notice. A mind that babbles all by itself. If you watch your mind regularly (called meditation in some circles), you’ll be amazed. Complete logical sentences can appear and flow through all by themselves. Some people even have the advantage of hearing voices in their head; voices that present all kinds of thoughts unto them. I call that an advantage, even though it can be torment, because it clearly demonstrates the reality of what one Buddhist writer calls “thoughts without a thinker.”
Anything that you identify with will eventually dominate you.
- Jack Schwarz.
You especially don't have to identify with your thoughts such that when you’re having them, you assume they are YOU. If you believe that any object is you, including your own thoughts and feelings, you can easily overlook a most important thing about yourself - that you are the one unto whom all thoughts, feelings and objects occur. They are not who-you-are. Nothing that appears is ever who you are. The ‘who’, so to speak, is the transcendent perceiving function, identifiable as nothing, arising as anything, impossible to describe.
Some Buddhist adepts refer to it as unmediated raw sensation, much wiser, much more congruent with reality and truth than the machinations of logic and reason. This 'raw' awareness is neither subject nor object exclusively, for subject and object spontaneously arise as a co-creating unity in relation to it. Always. The one who notices this is the true YOU whom genuine sages persist in addressing in their liberating discourses. The well known M.C. Escher drawing of two human hands in the act of drawing each other is a marvelous suggestive rendering of this co-creating unity (appearing dualistically, of course) that YOU behold.
No, NOT on the paper. The two hands on the paper are objects.
Discover for yourself that the one who notices both
is not findable because it is who you are.
Self realization has nothing to do with finding something called a Self.
When you find that you cannot find the very 'thing' that
gives meaning to both subject and object, subject and object
become relativized, what the Buddha called 'empty.' Another
way of saying this is that things (from rocks to thoughts)
can appear only because they have no independent existence.
In the wondrously contrived subject-object theatre things
originate in dependence upon other things that
assist them in showing up the way they do.
It's like background having to be there in order for foreground
to make sense and vice versa... or objects having to be there in
order for the subjective to make sense and vice versa.
You and I as non-separate from the awareness in which this
dependent origination spontaneously occurs are free of all of it.
We just don't know it because
we take the subject-object interplay to be real
while basically ignoring the awareness that makes
the experience of that interplay possible.
As a conscious pseudo-subject, I am beginning to
seriously suspect that not one single
thing that I think of will ever be even remotely related
to what is always here. Hannah Arendt, paraphrasing Aristotle,
writes, "The thinking mind is not in touch with the real.
The Self is but it doesn't think."
Discover for yourself that the one who notices both
is not findable because it is who you are.
Self realization has nothing to do with finding something called a Self.
When you find that you cannot find the very 'thing' that
gives meaning to both subject and object, subject and object
become relativized, what the Buddha called 'empty.' Another
way of saying this is that things (from rocks to thoughts)
can appear only because they have no independent existence.
In the wondrously contrived subject-object theatre things
originate in dependence upon other things that
assist them in showing up the way they do.
It's like background having to be there in order for foreground
to make sense and vice versa... or objects having to be there in
order for the subjective to make sense and vice versa.
You and I as non-separate from the awareness in which this
dependent origination spontaneously occurs are free of all of it.
We just don't know it because
we take the subject-object interplay to be real
while basically ignoring the awareness that makes
the experience of that interplay possible.
As a conscious pseudo-subject, I am beginning to
seriously suspect that not one single
thing that I think of will ever be even remotely related
to what is always here. Hannah Arendt, paraphrasing Aristotle,
writes, "The thinking mind is not in touch with the real.
The Self is but it doesn't think."
Using language to express the inexpressible is like using a feather duster to open a coconut. This could take some time.
As the Spanish theologian/scholar, Miguel de Unamuno, pointed out, in expressing the inexpressible we are thwarted somewhat by the very structure of the relational syntax our language forces upon us. The instant we say this IS that, A is B, etc. we are manufacturing artifacts of the real, positing static relationships (A=B) in what is never static, the ongoing flux of absolutely everything. And that (A) is how it (B) is! (Sigh)
