the myth of me against the universe
Outward directed consciousness (i.e. the bedrock empirical observer of classical scientism) assumes it is the subjective knower of the field, usually without ever questioning its contingent status as what Wei Wu Wei calls "a quasi-subject". One simple way of revealing the pseudo-status of this subject is to assume that it is real and to look for it. Good luck finding it.
Subject and object are conceptual designations. They don’t actually exist separately the way we commonly think they do. With Physics telling us that the act of observation affects what is observed, boundary lines between subject and object are beginning to look like place holders only. This is difficult for us to conceptualize because conceptualizing is entirely the wrong way to go about seeing through the barriers conceptual thought erects to shore up determinations of proof. Such thought, by nature of the relational syntax and logic it employs, reifies dualistic distinctions that make provisional sense only in terms of the syllogistic operations it employs to parse this from that. Such thinking, taken to extremes, is what Heidegger called "the enemy of thought."
Freeing ourselves from abstract thought by employing abstract thought to do so, leaves us like a snake struggling to free itself from its own coils, thereby only tightening itself in them all the more.
As countless adepts of Buddhism, Zen, Dzogchen, Mahamudra and Advaita Vedanta have pointed out, awaking to the actuality of naked awareness begins with noticing the primacy of the non-conceptual.
Subject and object are conceptual designations. They don’t actually exist separately the way we commonly think they do. With Physics telling us that the act of observation affects what is observed, boundary lines between subject and object are beginning to look like place holders only. This is difficult for us to conceptualize because conceptualizing is entirely the wrong way to go about seeing through the barriers conceptual thought erects to shore up determinations of proof. Such thought, by nature of the relational syntax and logic it employs, reifies dualistic distinctions that make provisional sense only in terms of the syllogistic operations it employs to parse this from that. Such thinking, taken to extremes, is what Heidegger called "the enemy of thought."
Freeing ourselves from abstract thought by employing abstract thought to do so, leaves us like a snake struggling to free itself from its own coils, thereby only tightening itself in them all the more.
As countless adepts of Buddhism, Zen, Dzogchen, Mahamudra and Advaita Vedanta have pointed out, awaking to the actuality of naked awareness begins with noticing the primacy of the non-conceptual.
negative culpability
The single most unfortunate epistemological short coming of empiricism is that it takes its findings literally, making it, ultimately, another fundamentalism. As James Hillman so cogently observes, "The problem with literalism is that it takes itself to be the only valid point of view." This makes it impossible for literalism to see through itself; to see the inherently metaphorical nature of all forms of knowing. The dense, opaque zeit geist reified by literalist/empiricist fixations remains confounded by that darn void that forever mocks our attempts to nail down the literal truth of things.
Persona Non Gravitas
If, by Persona, we mean the social mask that we show to others while keeping our real self hidden, then Persona is a mask of a mask. In back of it, the personal self, i.e., the ego we commonly take to be our authentic self, comes quantum-entangled with sub-selves and complexes which are contingent psychic functions, seen, in the advent of genuine realization, to possess no independent self existence whatsoever, just like the ego.
The Self indicated by the term Self Realization is neither a Bigger Me nor a Celestial Super Dude/Dudette somewhere who separates sheep from goats and moves humankind toward a brutal, stupid climax called Armageddon. Neither is that Self a bland Universal Oneness into which we are all absorbed, lifted in rapture into eternal homogenization.
The Real Self, i.e., that by means of which you are reading these words, is unfathomable to the ego and infinitely more kind than the doctrinal ersatz on which we have been weaned. This much should be obvious after enduring centuries of organized religion making a mockery of love with fire and brimstone damnation dogma wielded in the name of crowd control.
Let us pause, take a deep breath and look clearly at how we have used concepts of God and Divine Right to justify the most horrid excesses of physical and psychological cruelty over many centuries; an insanity all the more reprehensible because it parades as sanctimony, purity and spiritual authority. These are its effective masks. We search in vain for the featureless eyes that glare through them.
Meanwhile, on the knoll where the smiling wanderer sits...
Transcendence of ego is not a personal achievement. It would oxymoronic if it were. Everything the ego effects in order to produce self-realization only serves to upgrade the ego's act. Letting Go really means Letting Go. The Self thus realized is tacitly recognized as having been one's core nature all along. Even calling it a 'Self' is inaccurate. It is beyond the reach of words. So, foolishly, in a lame attempt to craft words that can point in its general direction, let's call it: a non-conceptual and fully experienced naked awareness of the energetics of the actual; an awareness forever beyond experience while simultaneously being fully present in and as that which makes experience possible. The Buddhist Prajnaparamita Sutra says of this core awareness, "It utterly transcends all things while embracing each thing lovingly in its womb."
Let's try an analogy. Imagine being fully conscious of every one of the hundreds of billions of biochemical transformations going on every second in the cells of your body. And you're not even straining to pull that off. It's just happening. Well... it's just happening anyway. Most of the time, we're not even conscious of our own breathing. You know, the breathing that we do all night long automatically, even when we're fast asleep. How on earth, then, do we expect to comprehend the limitless that's, you know, going on all day and all night regardless of whether or not we're conscious of any of it.
It's astonishing how much we remain ignorant of while we cheerily go on writing the way I'm writing now, as though language could render itself transparent enough to afford even a faint glimpse of
w t Nisargadatta calls a "stateless state"; an indefinable clear light awareness, prior to space-time, prior even to consciousness. At first glance, it might seem like I'm describing a great big juicy nothingness. Yet, the truly vital thing to get is that without it -- without this indescribable, imageless, clear light awareness -- there is no consciousness of anything. ANYTHING!
Looking for this awareness is humorously impossible. It is closer than one's own breath. It is, always and forever, where one is looking FROM. It IS the looking activity and reality of same. Perhaps this is what R. Buckminster Fuller was hinting at when he wrote a book entitled, I Seem To Be A Verb.
This true Self, report some who have touched its seemless (sic) hem, knows neither hate nor love as we commonly suffer and enjoy them. There is no push-pull of attachment or aversion in it. In the circumstance of a profound awakening, Franklin Merrell-Wolff experienced it as what he terms "a High Indifference". Not that this exalted state doesn't care about our suffering, only that it invincibly presents the completion and perfection which reveal that it is we ourselves who generate our own suffering, completely without the involvement of any judgmental god or fiendish devil.
The Self indicated by the term Self Realization is neither a Bigger Me nor a Celestial Super Dude/Dudette somewhere who separates sheep from goats and moves humankind toward a brutal, stupid climax called Armageddon. Neither is that Self a bland Universal Oneness into which we are all absorbed, lifted in rapture into eternal homogenization.
The Real Self, i.e., that by means of which you are reading these words, is unfathomable to the ego and infinitely more kind than the doctrinal ersatz on which we have been weaned. This much should be obvious after enduring centuries of organized religion making a mockery of love with fire and brimstone damnation dogma wielded in the name of crowd control.
Let us pause, take a deep breath and look clearly at how we have used concepts of God and Divine Right to justify the most horrid excesses of physical and psychological cruelty over many centuries; an insanity all the more reprehensible because it parades as sanctimony, purity and spiritual authority. These are its effective masks. We search in vain for the featureless eyes that glare through them.
Meanwhile, on the knoll where the smiling wanderer sits...
Transcendence of ego is not a personal achievement. It would oxymoronic if it were. Everything the ego effects in order to produce self-realization only serves to upgrade the ego's act. Letting Go really means Letting Go. The Self thus realized is tacitly recognized as having been one's core nature all along. Even calling it a 'Self' is inaccurate. It is beyond the reach of words. So, foolishly, in a lame attempt to craft words that can point in its general direction, let's call it: a non-conceptual and fully experienced naked awareness of the energetics of the actual; an awareness forever beyond experience while simultaneously being fully present in and as that which makes experience possible. The Buddhist Prajnaparamita Sutra says of this core awareness, "It utterly transcends all things while embracing each thing lovingly in its womb."
Let's try an analogy. Imagine being fully conscious of every one of the hundreds of billions of biochemical transformations going on every second in the cells of your body. And you're not even straining to pull that off. It's just happening. Well... it's just happening anyway. Most of the time, we're not even conscious of our own breathing. You know, the breathing that we do all night long automatically, even when we're fast asleep. How on earth, then, do we expect to comprehend the limitless that's, you know, going on all day and all night regardless of whether or not we're conscious of any of it.
It's astonishing how much we remain ignorant of while we cheerily go on writing the way I'm writing now, as though language could render itself transparent enough to afford even a faint glimpse of
w t Nisargadatta calls a "stateless state"; an indefinable clear light awareness, prior to space-time, prior even to consciousness. At first glance, it might seem like I'm describing a great big juicy nothingness. Yet, the truly vital thing to get is that without it -- without this indescribable, imageless, clear light awareness -- there is no consciousness of anything. ANYTHING!
Looking for this awareness is humorously impossible. It is closer than one's own breath. It is, always and forever, where one is looking FROM. It IS the looking activity and reality of same. Perhaps this is what R. Buckminster Fuller was hinting at when he wrote a book entitled, I Seem To Be A Verb.
This true Self, report some who have touched its seemless (sic) hem, knows neither hate nor love as we commonly suffer and enjoy them. There is no push-pull of attachment or aversion in it. In the circumstance of a profound awakening, Franklin Merrell-Wolff experienced it as what he terms "a High Indifference". Not that this exalted state doesn't care about our suffering, only that it invincibly presents the completion and perfection which reveal that it is we ourselves who generate our own suffering, completely without the involvement of any judgmental god or fiendish devil.
Once upon a time out of time, goes a Sufi story, God suggested to Soul that She try out a new domain called human incarnation. Soul recoiled. No way She was going to hunker down in a tiny carbon based life form with Hayflick limit cells. Trying to get Souls into meat units was like trying to herd cats into the dog pound. But not for nothing was the Creator called Omniscient. Playing a card from high up Her unraveled sleeve, God presented Soul with something She had never heard before. It was called Music.
Stunned and undone by Music's harmonies, cadences, melodies; by the new worlds opening in every bar, Soul fell to her knees, speaking in tongues, finding at last the sonorous tonalities of Sanskrit that made all glossolalia sound like incoherent babble. Shabda Brahman Soul dubbed the audible life stream. Music so turned Soul inside out that with lowered head and manner meek and mild, She stepped before the Throne and said, "This shit burns down the house. From whence doth such glory arise?"
God pointed to a gaggle of players in a smoke filled Bronx bar, ripping the night with jazz blues too real to render in prose. "They make it," said God. "Human meat units. They create it with lungs, brains, hands and with personal stories that make you shake your head at the novelty and perversity." God was about to go on, rhapsodizing about the spontaneous, sometimes shocking revelations of Music, but there was no need. Soul was gone into the smoky blue light, sweat pouring, body trembling with each riff, recreating herself in righteous apple cart breakfast love epiphanies of trackless song.
Ganoosh notes:
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead it is written that if, after dropping the physical form, Soul does not recognize the empty Clear Light of Essential Awareness, She passes through a series of Bardos populated by vast, Deific Presences and, if She still does not recognize Her true nature, eventually She will find Herself attracted to a smoky blue light. This is the sign that the Soul is about to incarnate again into a human form. It’s the blues. It’s always the blues.
Stunned and undone by Music's harmonies, cadences, melodies; by the new worlds opening in every bar, Soul fell to her knees, speaking in tongues, finding at last the sonorous tonalities of Sanskrit that made all glossolalia sound like incoherent babble. Shabda Brahman Soul dubbed the audible life stream. Music so turned Soul inside out that with lowered head and manner meek and mild, She stepped before the Throne and said, "This shit burns down the house. From whence doth such glory arise?"
God pointed to a gaggle of players in a smoke filled Bronx bar, ripping the night with jazz blues too real to render in prose. "They make it," said God. "Human meat units. They create it with lungs, brains, hands and with personal stories that make you shake your head at the novelty and perversity." God was about to go on, rhapsodizing about the spontaneous, sometimes shocking revelations of Music, but there was no need. Soul was gone into the smoky blue light, sweat pouring, body trembling with each riff, recreating herself in righteous apple cart breakfast love epiphanies of trackless song.
Ganoosh notes:
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead it is written that if, after dropping the physical form, Soul does not recognize the empty Clear Light of Essential Awareness, She passes through a series of Bardos populated by vast, Deific Presences and, if She still does not recognize Her true nature, eventually She will find Herself attracted to a smoky blue light. This is the sign that the Soul is about to incarnate again into a human form. It’s the blues. It’s always the blues.
Goody Blue Shoes
Pundit: Why is it so difficult to awaken?
Nisargadatta: You are afraid of impersonal being.
Years ago I viewed a painting in a small Paris gallery that depicted a female Saint on the Cross. Everything about it was a typical somber crucifixion image except that on her feet, the woman wore sky blue high heel shoes that took over the whole picture the instant you saw them.
Here's a saint in the throes of death and transfiguration, and her whimsical blue shoes hold her to her earthly form in a way that makes Nisargadatta's above reply heart breakingly poignant.
Bless us all. Everything matters so much.
So Blake can write:"A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage."
Because impersonal Being is 'wholly and indiscriminately present in each'; in robin red breasts; in white chickens and red wheel barrows glistening with rain water; in sky blue shoes... one has to trouble deaf heaven with this bootless cry from Mr. Blake...
"Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: the Son, oh how unlike the Father! First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it."
In case it appears I'm getting all evangelical here, I hasten to add that Blake is very clear that " ... all deites reside in the human breast." What is still wide open for debate is... in what, exactly, does the human breast reside?
'Thanks to my mind's RAM, I can still reconstruct a facsimile of me when I wake up in the morning.'
-- Rory 'Geekman' Van der Planetz
What is the essential difference between deep sleep and a system reboot? If you are completely unconscious, who or what looks after storing, sorting, regulating, retrieving and processing countless billions of neuro-chemical connections that ensure you are the same person when you wake up each morning? If your answer is that it is the body which does all this, then is not the body far more complex, mysterious and brilliant than any Old Man God ever projected into dull, harp filled heavens? Weirder still, in light of the above, does it not seem that the body itself has a profound vested interest in preserving the ego? How did it 'learn' this?
PS - The Hindu God, Ram, is not an Old Man in the Sky. Ram is that aspect of Awareness which might be called its pervasiveness. Awareness is everywhere because it transcends space time. At our highest and clearest, we might apperceive its presence, but not as an object. In Nisargadatta's words, you cannot see it, you are it. It, on the other hand, is so pure "it can see light." Imagine that.
When the Christian God announces 'I AM THAT I AM' and when Christ says 'Before Abraham was, I am.' they speak as Awareness, not as a jealous Old Testament Smiter of women and children and his doomed-to-die-son who actually seems like a really nice guy.
We keep anthropomorphizing our gods, making them, at worst, projections of our phony holy selves. We then endlessly complain about the fact that we never see them. It's probably a blessing that such dubiously conceived 'gods' don't show up.
There is a baby in the projected Deity bathwater that can be found only by looking within.
Hatching from the Cosmic Blue Egg
One genuine imaginative insight is more meaningfully true than a mountain of facts that serve limited and forgettable ends. For an example of the former, see Andy Weir's wonderful 'story'... The Egg
THE NEXT COPERNICAN REVOLUTION WILL BE A HUMDINGER
Current science tells us that there is a gap of around one three hundredth of a second that passes between an event occurring in the 'outside world' and the registering of the perception of that event in the brain. As one science writer put it, "It's like we're all watching a movie that is one three hundredth of a second in the past." It's already happening before we're aware of it. What if we have it backwards? What if the gap is, rather, a measure of the time it takes for mind to project the hologram of outside? There is no independently existing objective world 'out there', but rather a brilliantly complex hologram projected by mind processes far exceeding the capacities of our 'one thought at a time' conscious egos. -- inspired by Dzogchen teachings of Jackson Peterson
