Seen or Unseen the Scene is Beyond Science
One of the most interesting things about the great invisible world that lies within, home of gods, devas, dakinis, angels and the Light of Lights is that it is said to be infinite beyond comprehension. Unless, of course, one denies that any of that even exists. A truly interesting thing is that the world 'outside' is just as infinite, a fact to which we seldom pay any attention at all. Yet it is demonstrably so. The more our knowledge of the outer world expands, the more of the unknown it encounters at its leading edges, endlessly so. Unless, of course, one denies that all that infinite unknown even exists. If it's infinite going in and infinite going out, where does that leave us? Smack dab in the middle? How would we know?
Take everything seriously, sort of
Someone once asked Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the most sublime non-dualist Advaita sages to grace this three benzene ring circus of a planet, what life was about; why are we really here anyway? Nisargadatta replied, "It's all entertainment." (continue)
No-thing to get hung about...
That terrible nothingness that we fear lies in waiting after the death of the body, or lurks now in the pit of our stomach, or looms in future lonely prospects... all those voids are just scary objects. True no-thingness is here and now. It is where we are all looking FROM, the formless freedom that beholds being and non-being. In Gangaji's words, “The choiceless truth of who you are is revealed to be permanently here permeating everything. Not a thing and not separate from anything.” This makes no sense to a mind that insists on identifying itself with some objects -- a body, a clan, a nation, a set of habits -- while rejecting other objects as not-self. Such a mind clings to what passes and misses what is. Who among us does not know this mind only too well?
Relationships between relative truth and absolute truth are paradoxical indeed... (continue)
Take my thoughts, please...
We think we are the subject or witness of our experience without recognizing that thoughts can exist only as objects and that the witness plus all-things-witnessed are not two. We cannot know what is beyond the subject-object singularity, for we ARE what is beyond. None of this is abstract mumbo jumbo unless I start THINKING about it.
Take my thoughts, please... take 2
"Only the concepts of infinity and intemporality can suggest intellectually a notion of what we are as the source and origin of appearance or manifestation."
-- The Mountain Path, July 1965
Only YOU have the direct experience of being conscious of manifestation. When you look at your hand, ask if your hand is conscious of you. Ask if your thoughts are conscious of you. Other people may seem conscious, but only YOU have the immediate experience of being conscious. Ponder this deeply enough and the grasp on both subject and object spontaneously releases. In the words of Dzogchen teacher, Jackson Peterson, there is no one having the experience of subjective presence, there is the experience of subjective presence with no one having it. This may be hard to grasp because there's no one grasping it. The grasping, like the experience itself, occur as spontaneous expressions of this once only moment in which we arise.
-- The Mountain Path, July 1965
Only YOU have the direct experience of being conscious of manifestation. When you look at your hand, ask if your hand is conscious of you. Ask if your thoughts are conscious of you. Other people may seem conscious, but only YOU have the immediate experience of being conscious. Ponder this deeply enough and the grasp on both subject and object spontaneously releases. In the words of Dzogchen teacher, Jackson Peterson, there is no one having the experience of subjective presence, there is the experience of subjective presence with no one having it. This may be hard to grasp because there's no one grasping it. The grasping, like the experience itself, occur as spontaneous expressions of this once only moment in which we arise.
The human mind, as presently employed by the vast majority of us using it, does little more than fabricate stories and commentaries about tiny aspects of reality that it is capable of perceiving at any given time. Meanwhile, the infinite mandala of the present moment eternally unfolds fresh and new, virtually unnoticed by the analytic mind.
'The thinking mind is not in touch with the real. The Self is, but it doesn't think.' -- Aristotle.
Perhaps our thinking patterns, from cradle to grave, more resemble a predetermined roller coaster ride than the astonishing Being-Presence animating all life. But that's okay. Seems we all have to go through truckloads of desire and aversion based learning curves before we notice that we have the potential to make our shared experience here far more beautiful than what our current, dismal belief systems and blind greed force us to endure. Thank god we have children and pets to model that something far more beautiful.
You cannot heal a single human being, (not) even with psychotherapy, if you do not first restore his relationship to Being. -- Martin Heidegger
(note: the brilliant philosophical writings of Acharya Peter Wilberg provide profound insights into Heidegger's thought . A priceless treasure of epochal Dharma writing can be found on Mr. Wilberg's Archive page: http://www.thenewyoga.org/e-books.htm
Consciousness and Awareness -- the Nisargadattian Difference
A friend sent this interesting TED talk: John Searle on Consciousness
www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness.html
Bobo's Neti Jerk Response:
Excellent, thank you! Seems like... while consciousness is absolutely necessary for ANYTHING to exist, it is intrinsically neutral, like electricity. It can be used for ANYTHING, good, bad or day time television. Nondual traditions assert that consciousness and the physical world are not two. They simultaneously co-create each other. Searle turns consciousness into another object by, for example, equating it with photosynthesis. His neuro-biological descriptions of consciousness are all fine but they leave unaddressed the profound distinction Nisargadatta makes between consciousness and awareness prior to consciousness. Says Nisarg, consciousness is knowing with, or by means of, objects. The 'con' in consciousness means 'with'. Consciousness and its objects ARE a singularity.
Prior awareness, on the other one hand clapping, is self supporting and requires no objects. Consciousness appears unto prior awareness and that awareness quite naturally and automatically identifies with the whole display of consciousness AND its objects. No one knows how or why this happens. What Searle says about 'one great conscious field that stretches forwards and backwards' is an intuition of what Nisarg called 'prior awareness.' It doesn't really stretch forward and backward. It is timelessly present and cannot be accounted for by duality bound thought and language. As the mathematician, Godel, and poet, Charles Olson, note, we cannot comprehend a system or ontic reality in which we are totally immersed. Whether we like it or not, as long as we are conscious-only, we are thus immersed and the truth of who we are eludes us. Vast trans-personal consciousness is available and is far more real and blissful than contracted ego consciousness, but even that expanded state, along with intellect itself, surrenders on the shores of Prior Awareness. Don't take my word for this. Read Nisargadatta. Read him deep and long with real passion and this outrageous paragraph will make sense.
Prior Awareness can never be seen as an object, precisely because it is that which is doing the looking. Certainly agree with Searle 'that our traditional vocabularies for discussing these things are obsolete.'
"Questioner: Why does consciousness come and go?
Nisargadatta: It doesn't. It appears to come and go."
It takes a lot of hard work to discover just how ignorant we are of the basics of being.
"'Being essentiates as appearing." -- Martin Heidegger
"That which exists through itself is called meaning." -- The Secret of the Golden Flower, trans. Richard Wilhelm
Taken together, the Nisargadatta, Heidegger and Wilhelm quotes comprise a koan for the western analytic mind, conditioned by centuries of haywire Cartesian epistemology to conceive itself as a subjective entity heroically struggling to unravel the secrets of an objective world out there somewhere, all the while completely ignoring the prior radiance that makes both subject and object possible.
Notes On Honey Making
.
Self-Inquiry is essential to health, happiness, peace of mind and... surprise, surprise - wild ass creativity! Meditation is NOT about detached navel gazing. It cannot be framed within any of the usual ambitious contexts that ego takes delight in setting up as 'spiritual path'. Meditation is far more profound, primal and simple. It is paying attention to attention, being aware of awareness and looking for that which is doing the looking. In all three cases, the object of attention, awareness or looking is unfindable, for it is not an object. It is, rather, your essential being. It is trite to label it as pure subjectivity, although, for lack of a better term, it has been so labeled by sages and philosophers for thousands of years.
Devoid of characteristics, awareness is nevertheless of inestimable value. Nothing can be said to exist without it, for without it there is no object awareness whatsoever. Yet, in itself it is featureless, indefinable, unfathomable and is the only part of us that is truly alive. It is also a field of infinite potentiality. As long as we are typing this in a human form and reading it in a human form, we are limited to experiencing it, our core awareness, at a kind of threshold between the unmanifest and the manifest. We call the unmanifest 'the void', one which Buddhism calls sunyata, the 'void of inexhaustible contents.' Everything springs from it, including our manifest selves.
Just exactly how and why everything springs from the unmanifest, moment to moment, we have not the slightest clue. We can only work downstream in the manifest realm, at best deciphering the patterns and purposes of appearances; at worst, royally screwing them up with our bumbling applications of free will and ignorance.
True creativity, Muse inspired sister of meditative non-distraction, is, in no small part, a function of our ability to be still enough and quiet enough at the threshold of the unmanifest to catch what springs therefrom and birth it into the world, distorting it as little as possible in the process. At our best we are, as Rilke called poets, "bees of the invisible."
Self-Inquiry is essential to health, happiness, peace of mind and... surprise, surprise - wild ass creativity! Meditation is NOT about detached navel gazing. It cannot be framed within any of the usual ambitious contexts that ego takes delight in setting up as 'spiritual path'. Meditation is far more profound, primal and simple. It is paying attention to attention, being aware of awareness and looking for that which is doing the looking. In all three cases, the object of attention, awareness or looking is unfindable, for it is not an object. It is, rather, your essential being. It is trite to label it as pure subjectivity, although, for lack of a better term, it has been so labeled by sages and philosophers for thousands of years.
Devoid of characteristics, awareness is nevertheless of inestimable value. Nothing can be said to exist without it, for without it there is no object awareness whatsoever. Yet, in itself it is featureless, indefinable, unfathomable and is the only part of us that is truly alive. It is also a field of infinite potentiality. As long as we are typing this in a human form and reading it in a human form, we are limited to experiencing it, our core awareness, at a kind of threshold between the unmanifest and the manifest. We call the unmanifest 'the void', one which Buddhism calls sunyata, the 'void of inexhaustible contents.' Everything springs from it, including our manifest selves.
Just exactly how and why everything springs from the unmanifest, moment to moment, we have not the slightest clue. We can only work downstream in the manifest realm, at best deciphering the patterns and purposes of appearances; at worst, royally screwing them up with our bumbling applications of free will and ignorance.
True creativity, Muse inspired sister of meditative non-distraction, is, in no small part, a function of our ability to be still enough and quiet enough at the threshold of the unmanifest to catch what springs therefrom and birth it into the world, distorting it as little as possible in the process. At our best we are, as Rilke called poets, "bees of the invisible."
Bobo:
I have met people in this world so loving and wonderful that, when
I die, I fear I will miss them more than I will miss myself.
Swami 80% Ananda:
You can never be other than yourself.
Bobo:
What about those wonderful, loving people?
Swami 80% Ananda:
You seem to have a very limited view of what is meant by Self.
I have met people in this world so loving and wonderful that, when
I die, I fear I will miss them more than I will miss myself.
Swami 80% Ananda:
You can never be other than yourself.
Bobo:
What about those wonderful, loving people?
Swami 80% Ananda:
You seem to have a very limited view of what is meant by Self.
the price of unlove
To far too great an extent, current societies are, to cite Aldous Huxley's descriptor, forms of "organized lovelessness." To be truly human, a society must consciously strive toward actions that enhance the common good and intentions that hold trust, honesty and altruism as foundational. Societies which do not value these virtues are little more than self-righteous hells levying cruel morality in the name of religions that preach love and practice punishment.
self-inquiry question du jour
'Where is my stash of self hate?'
Liberation from suffering appears to have much to do with appreciating What Is, without clinging to What Was or grasping at What Might Be. One of Eckhart Tolle's meditation instructions is, "Stop trying to get to the next moment." We're raised to be goal oriented. There's competition from the cradle on. Who's the best? Who gets a star beside their name? What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to get ahead? We set impossible standards for ourselves and trudge through life unconsciously loathing ourselves for our inability to attain those standards.
Of course, it's necessary to work in order to provide for life's necessities, but the relentless emphasis placed on succeeding at all costs, on making self right and others wrong, on keeping up with and surpassing the Jones's, permeates every aspect of our lives. We suffer an inner tension such that many of us can't enjoy even a few minutes of idle chit-chat without feeling we've got to be somewhere else; got to be doing something; to be getting somewhere. Our thought and feeling patterns can be so affected that when we attempt to sit in meditation and notice the essential emptiness of mind, it's virtually impossible. Our inner domain is a lit up switchboard of planning, scheming, second guessing, comparing, judging, devising, wanting, worrying, self-analysis and nagging self-doubt. The incredible thing is that we think all that shit's normal and never question it. We do question people who spend a lot of time meditating, dismissing them as navel gazers, escapists and worse.
Sooner or later, it may dawn on us how backwards we have the whole picture. Meditation is not escapism at all. It was only through meditation, through slowing down enough to become aware of the natural Ease of Being that I was finally able to see what an impediment my usual thinking mind had become -- an impediment to living harmoniously, free of conflict. In that moment, it was hard not to burst out laughing in the meditation hall as I suddenly remembered the words of a revered Indian spiritual teacher, "The world doesn't need saving by you. It needs saving from you."
Of course, it's necessary to work in order to provide for life's necessities, but the relentless emphasis placed on succeeding at all costs, on making self right and others wrong, on keeping up with and surpassing the Jones's, permeates every aspect of our lives. We suffer an inner tension such that many of us can't enjoy even a few minutes of idle chit-chat without feeling we've got to be somewhere else; got to be doing something; to be getting somewhere. Our thought and feeling patterns can be so affected that when we attempt to sit in meditation and notice the essential emptiness of mind, it's virtually impossible. Our inner domain is a lit up switchboard of planning, scheming, second guessing, comparing, judging, devising, wanting, worrying, self-analysis and nagging self-doubt. The incredible thing is that we think all that shit's normal and never question it. We do question people who spend a lot of time meditating, dismissing them as navel gazers, escapists and worse.
Sooner or later, it may dawn on us how backwards we have the whole picture. Meditation is not escapism at all. It was only through meditation, through slowing down enough to become aware of the natural Ease of Being that I was finally able to see what an impediment my usual thinking mind had become -- an impediment to living harmoniously, free of conflict. In that moment, it was hard not to burst out laughing in the meditation hall as I suddenly remembered the words of a revered Indian spiritual teacher, "The world doesn't need saving by you. It needs saving from you."
... and then you forgive yourself for the self-righteous prick judgment.
Positive Affirmations and Negative Chatter
An acquaintance once bought deeply into the idea that positive affirmations were the way to ensure better health, financial abundance and fulfilling relationships in her life. She read several books on the subject and wrote positive affirmations of all kinds which she posted on her fridge, her bathroom mirror and beside her bed. She repeated affirmations out loud and silently many times a day, every day. Over time, her health, her wealth and her relationships didn't improve. If anything, they seemed to worsen in slow, complex, relentless karmic ways. Eventually, she gave up on affirmations and appeared to hunker down for a life of fleeting pleasures and diminishing returns.
I don't for a moment think my friend is a rare exception. I've seen many people influenced by the positive affirmation approach, avidly devouring books like 'The Secret' and reading everything by Louise Hay, Shakti Gawain and other affirmation gurus. Few have achieved anything worth writing another affirmation book about. Of course, there are no hard and fast rules about this. Some people achieve results and that's great.
But, one does notice that a whole lot of people who work hard at positive affirmations never bother to inspect the negative messages, feelings, moods, intentions, habits etc. with which they sabotage themselves daily. This is where meditation, or simply taking a good non-judgmental look within, can come in so handy. We may not consciously DO negative self talk the way we undertake positive affirmations, but if we pay attention, many of us will certainly notice a lot of disempowering negative self-talk or negative felt-sense going on all by itself. Noticing it, becoming conscious of it, is absolutely the necessary first step in letting it go. Can't let it go if I don't even know I've got it. By far, the most debilitating negativities are those I never inspect, question or notice, i.e., feeling crappy and assuming that's how life is because that's how I feel every day; expecting the worst, because at least I'll have something to feel up about if the worst doesn't happen; suspecting that life is really hard and unfair and that doing affirmations is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The list of self-sabotaging, subconscious feeling-blocks is endless.
There are the affirmations we do and there are negations we embody. It's like driving a car with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. No wonder results are mixed at best. Best advice I ever got on all this was, "Don't go looking for the negative stuff with the intention of healing it so that your positive affirmations will work better. Such a strategy avoids relationship with what is. Rather, allow negative stuff to arise in your awareness on its own terms. Let it be present the way silence allows all sounds to occur without distortion. That which is accepted fully into the light of awareness self-liberates." For you fans of Buddha Dharma, Garchen Rimpoche once said, "That which is accepted in the light of awareness self-liberates into the Dharmakaya." In the same talk, he added, "Everything that happens is the movement of the Dharmakaya."
Quick and oversimplified reference:
The Dharmakaya is what we in the west might call pure spirit, utterly beyond description. 'The deep truth is imageless,' wrote Shelley. It is unmanifest, free of characteristics and distinctions, a.k.a. the Buddha's Truth Body. Unborn, unmanifest, beyond being and non-being, I mean really, what are you going to say about this that would make any sense at all to our object-shackled minds? It seems kind of goofy for us to question the existence of pure openness and freedom when so much of what we create, endure and impose on one another is rife with confusion, delusion and distraction.
Moving into the realm of subtle manifestation, we enter the Sambhogakaya, a.k.a. the Reward Body. This is much akin to what Roberts Avens, Henri Corbin, James Hillman and others term the 'imaginal realm', neither solid physical nor unmanifest spirit, but partaking of both. The inspired (in-spirited) faculty that the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, dubbed 'primary imagination' is akin to the glorious, creative, emanative function that actualizes the Sambhogakaya.
Then, there's the good old familiar turf of apparent density, dream thwarting opacity and barge loads of limitation, the Nirmanakaya. In this realm or 'body' we work out challenging transformations into more awakened states of consciousness or piss the time away with gossip, intoxicants and poker tournaments. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, enlightened ones, manifest even in this dense realm to teach and liberate others, such is their boundless compassion.
love among the paperbacks
If you were way up there on the evolutionary bell curve and a manager of a local galaxy said you could choose between being a Master of Reality or a Lover of Reality, which would you choose? It's an important question because they're not the same thing. One day in Banyen Books, one of the world's outstanding reservoirs of Dharma in print, a friend who worked there confronted me between the Advaita and Vajrayana sections. Peering through wire rims that reflected too much full spectrum fluorescent light, he asked sharply, "You ever read any of the poetry these great sages and enlightened swamis have written?"
"Yeah," I replied.
"What'd you think of it?"
"Well," I offered, "It ain't Dylan Thomas."
"Exactly,' he said, wanting to pound his fist on a desk that wasn't there. Then he added, "If enlightenment is so great, why isn't it smart?"
He ruined my spiritual book shopping that day and he worked in the place for petesake. Three weeks later I returned to find him with a colorful hardbound Krishna Consciousness tome tucked under his arm. He saw me notice it, grinned sheepishly and said, "Sometimes you just need another hit of that good old Bhakti."
Yeah. If smartness is so great, how come it rings so hollow without love and devotion?
"Yeah," I replied.
"What'd you think of it?"
"Well," I offered, "It ain't Dylan Thomas."
"Exactly,' he said, wanting to pound his fist on a desk that wasn't there. Then he added, "If enlightenment is so great, why isn't it smart?"
He ruined my spiritual book shopping that day and he worked in the place for petesake. Three weeks later I returned to find him with a colorful hardbound Krishna Consciousness tome tucked under his arm. He saw me notice it, grinned sheepishly and said, "Sometimes you just need another hit of that good old Bhakti."
Yeah. If smartness is so great, how come it rings so hollow without love and devotion?
Many entries on this site unfold in ways that are anything but linear. This is deliberate, based, in part, on the modus operatic (sic) of early Persian Tales of 1001 Nights. The imaginal realm is post-logical and delights in provoking with inspiration the plodding Mr.Whiffle of discursive reason and sensible inference. Logic is not abandoned, but holonomically enfolded. "To merit the madness of love, one must abound in reason." -- Sufi saying.
The first question is for those who believe in a personal Deity
the second for those who don't.
Both questions assume the reader forever
non-separate from the Golden Eternity
see: Jack Kerouac, 'The Scripture of the Golden Eternity'
Create my own reality? I don't even create the rate at which my liver burns glucose
I can't help but notice that when intimations of real deal ego surrender begin to occur, my ego proves extraordinarily adept at turning surrenda into agenda. This happens with regard to anything and everything that threatens the ego's hegemony. I have to ask, how can my ego be so damn good at surviving and so clueless about transcending itself?
Perhaps self-contradiction is the ego's secret strategy for maintaining its semblance of selfhood. For example, I come across an ego dissolving transmission by Wm. Blake that goes, "The authors are in Eternity. I take dictation." I heartily agree and then happily infer that I am some pretty special dude to be aware of this author-dictation situation, so that even if I'm only taking dictation, I'm still far ahead of all those poor slobs writing from their paltry egos.
I can accept that genuine creativity requires surrender to faculties that ego may not reach nor apprehend, yet remain filled with anticipation of all the great things that lie ahead, creatively speaking, for me, the no holds barred, Sincere Surrender Guy, still grasping at his reflection in the pond.
I am perfectly willing to open myself to inspiration, but god help inspiration if it reveals to me that I am a mediocre uncreative slob whose time would be better spent helping out at a local soup kitchen.
'Spiritual life doesn't begin until you stop taking things personally.' -- E.J. Gold
I was in the room when Mr. Gold spoke that line. Me. Personally. Over here.
octopus's guardian
At first, it seems paradoxical or counter-intuitive: The more one tunes in to one's felt I AM Presence, the more real the invisible becomes and the more ephemeral and transient does the physical realm appear. One may begin to notice, as a western Sufi teacher put it, that everything which appears to the physical eye is but the tip of an iceberg. 99% of the reality of each visible object has to be seen in ways other than via our pupil mediated 'physical' perceptions.
What we don't see with our corporeal eye, we tend to imagine. While it is so, especially in the developed world, that we put all our future building eggs in the serious science basket, it's also true that, in terms of sheer volume of activity, we are far more preoccupied with imagination, fantasy, day dreaming, drama, melodrama, adventure, thrill seeking and rampant sex to such an extraordinary degree that if downloaded web porn were visible in space, our entire planet would appearing coated in a swarm of titillation 24-7.
At the other end of our imaginal spectrum, the refined 'spiritual' one, we find a vast, complex array of richly imaginative heavens, hells, purgatories, limbos, bardos, nether worlds, astral, causal and supra-causal planes, all seemingly beyond what 'sense may reach and apprehend.'
But that's where we live, in a maelstrom of science, superstition, surrealism, spirituality and sexual fantasy. Seems we wouldn't have it any other way, no matter how vociferously we insist that we want truth and freedom.
What we don't see with our corporeal eye, we tend to imagine. While it is so, especially in the developed world, that we put all our future building eggs in the serious science basket, it's also true that, in terms of sheer volume of activity, we are far more preoccupied with imagination, fantasy, day dreaming, drama, melodrama, adventure, thrill seeking and rampant sex to such an extraordinary degree that if downloaded web porn were visible in space, our entire planet would appearing coated in a swarm of titillation 24-7.
At the other end of our imaginal spectrum, the refined 'spiritual' one, we find a vast, complex array of richly imaginative heavens, hells, purgatories, limbos, bardos, nether worlds, astral, causal and supra-causal planes, all seemingly beyond what 'sense may reach and apprehend.'
But that's where we live, in a maelstrom of science, superstition, surrealism, spirituality and sexual fantasy. Seems we wouldn't have it any other way, no matter how vociferously we insist that we want truth and freedom.
Really or Truly?
Brash thesis, boldly asserted: Heaven is not real. It is true. None of what we see is true. It is only real. Perfection is the necessary opposite of the manifest condition entirely. If manifestation occurs only as a tension of opposites, that condition itself likely has an opposite, which would be Nirvana, the non-dual. And that, says the Buddha, is our home or natural 'place' of Being, which is why spiritual adepts and sages, over the course of many centuries, pretty much all report that awakening is accompanied by a powerful sense of recognizing what was always already the case anyway. It never feels like a personal achievement.
There is no need for heaven, no need for hell, no need to get away from what arises, no need to get to the next moment, no need to do anything about one's contracted, expanded or surrendered self-hood when desire subsides in the fullness of open heart - open mind. Not that I'm a gold plated example of such equanimity. I mean, let's be honest.
My wife is such a benign being that when someone rudely cuts in front of her while driving, she slows down to make sure they can cut in safely. I'm not kidding. When I'm driving, I don't quite react like that. When I've lost my temper at someone barging in without signaling, she has asked, with genuine concern, "How can you know so much about higher consciousness and still blow up like that?"
...pointing out what is real in my case, and, blush, true as well... Sometimes, I weasel out by quoting Blake, "He who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviour's kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there."
She bought me a bicycle.
There is no need for heaven, no need for hell, no need to get away from what arises, no need to get to the next moment, no need to do anything about one's contracted, expanded or surrendered self-hood when desire subsides in the fullness of open heart - open mind. Not that I'm a gold plated example of such equanimity. I mean, let's be honest.
My wife is such a benign being that when someone rudely cuts in front of her while driving, she slows down to make sure they can cut in safely. I'm not kidding. When I'm driving, I don't quite react like that. When I've lost my temper at someone barging in without signaling, she has asked, with genuine concern, "How can you know so much about higher consciousness and still blow up like that?"
...pointing out what is real in my case, and, blush, true as well... Sometimes, I weasel out by quoting Blake, "He who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviour's kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there."
She bought me a bicycle.
Parsimony, Sage, Rosary and Time
Sages don't love anyone. Literary critic par excellence, Northrop Frye, noted of William Blake that his relationship with God was very much like the relationship one has with the physical body when it's perfectly healthy. You don't even know it's there.
A sage's relationship with the universe is similarly perfectly healthy. No unwellness shows up in the form of another either to love or hate. The oneness of realization is not a special condition of realizing my wonderful oneness over here as opposed to your deluded alienation over there. It is, rather, the realization of non-separation, in which there is no room for the opposites of love - hate to stake out any meaningful territory.
Saints don't forgive those who have wronged them. All wronging is tacitly recognized as already okay. Praise and blame, to the awakened one, are like two sides of a reversible jacket. When the jacket is worn with full awareness, the opposing colors cancel each other out and only the clear light remains; a light too clear to reflect more than 'as if' in any mirror.
A sage's relationship with the universe is similarly perfectly healthy. No unwellness shows up in the form of another either to love or hate. The oneness of realization is not a special condition of realizing my wonderful oneness over here as opposed to your deluded alienation over there. It is, rather, the realization of non-separation, in which there is no room for the opposites of love - hate to stake out any meaningful territory.
Saints don't forgive those who have wronged them. All wronging is tacitly recognized as already okay. Praise and blame, to the awakened one, are like two sides of a reversible jacket. When the jacket is worn with full awareness, the opposing colors cancel each other out and only the clear light remains; a light too clear to reflect more than 'as if' in any mirror.
the seduction of the object world is that knowledge applied to it seems to produce results that justify a cocky attitude
I love guys like me who think they know what enlightenment is about. Like the circus clown in Wei Wu Wei's wonderful story on the Rare Citings page of this website, I slip and slide away from awakening by assuming that it's about me and that I can know it. Knowledge of what anything is all about is quite impossible. Knowledge is inherently dualistic. The mathematician, G.S. Brown, expressed it something like this, "The paradox of knowing anything is that I must first separate myself from it in order to know it as an object of knowledge, which forever obviates the possibility of knowing it completely."
More importantly yet, Truth is not something that one ever owns. Krishnamurti put it poetically with his famous, "Truth is a pathless land." Everything expresses the truth, demonstrates it, shows it forth, if we have eyes to see and hearts open enough to be struck speechless by a blade of grass, a stranger's smile, a yellow flower in the teacher's hand. Not that any of those things is equal to the real, to the truth that passes understanding, because they all are and they're never going to let you down by showing you the same truth twice. "All truth restated," said Krishnamurti, "is a lie."
More importantly yet, Truth is not something that one ever owns. Krishnamurti put it poetically with his famous, "Truth is a pathless land." Everything expresses the truth, demonstrates it, shows it forth, if we have eyes to see and hearts open enough to be struck speechless by a blade of grass, a stranger's smile, a yellow flower in the teacher's hand. Not that any of those things is equal to the real, to the truth that passes understanding, because they all are and they're never going to let you down by showing you the same truth twice. "All truth restated," said Krishnamurti, "is a lie."
