The Conscious Process

Love is love. There is only love, and whatever appears otherwise is none other than that which has yet to be recognized as love. Nothing can lead to love, since love is already the nature and condition of all arising. That which seems to obscure love is unreal. How can the unreal obscure the real? Even the idea of something unreal, over and against the real, is unreal. If that is understood, then this is not mere word play.

Only loving is real. Being is loving, to be is to love. All are innocent in love’s fair play. Every cause and effect is just one piece, one string, of loving. It may seem as if myriad events are happening, as if multiple worlds are being born, even as other worlds have already passed away, without even a wisp of a lingering memory of their existence. Really, nothing has happened, except the play of love itself, engaging itself in its own delight, with no trace of self or other in the infinitely blossoming flower of now, the unborn light, blazing through eternal night.

The free reception and transmission of love is the essence of our respiration, as is any resistance to love our compounded suffering. Wherever or whenever we are not in love, that is where and when we are still not seeing clearly. The ‘I’ which seeks to acquire and control love is the chief impediment to its actualization. Of all the unreal constructs, the ‘I’ is the trickster, be suspicious of its claims to reality or not. Love makes no claims. It is prior to any claims, prior to ‘I’, and yet it also manifests as ‘I’. In the presence of such ineffable love, the only thing to do, is to fall completely in love . . . with all of it!

We seem to see things now through a dim flicker of Love’s Delight, but that flicker builds, when we truly tend it. It can become an all-consuming flame, scouring every illusion of unlove from our hearts in the glad furnace of surrender to that ever-new Delight!

Once we were a small condensed particle, a pulsing cell within an enormity which was itself a mere fraction of something even more immense, something utterly unimaginable to the human sensibilities. What held us together, what lives us forever, was a mighty force of the spirit divine for which we’ve made up countless names, but here for the sake of plain speaking, we may simply call it “love”.

When that divinity (pure joy, irresistible shine) spontaneously achieved its maximum blissful intensity, the ensuing explosion flung us out into the vastness, forming great spinning galaxies from love’s own glorious excess. In the midst of this infinite celestial expansion, some of us merged and blended with each other, creating even more of us to illuminate the vastness of the velvet void with gleaming sparks of supernal radiance.

Why is it the that even as we appear in the midst of it, we invariably come to believe we are separate from the whole of it? Perhaps just to see what that sense of distance feels like, that imaginary contrast? When we close our eyes, it may even seem as if we are standing still, yet in the solar scheme of things we are moving at tremendous speed.

Each thought is like a stationary planet flashing by, barely noticed in the rearview mirror as we continue spiraling onward – one streaking beam of clear light effortlessly dissolving in luminous space. Without resort to any discernible reference point or focus of fixed identity, all our dreamy conceptions of being bound, trapped, or limited in any way are inevitably set free of themselves by self-obsolescence. Cling to nothing — that is wisdom. Cherish all, that is love.

Zooming down to the planetary playground, children chase and call each other in games of inspired fun, laughing freely, bursting with keen delight, completely unconcerned about how they even came to be. Maybe we too can try relinquishing our consuming demand for certainty and relax for a while in blessed non-locality. We need not waste another moment of this fleeting adventure and rare opportunity struggling in a chronic contraction of boredom, doubt, and discomfort, engaged in perpetual conflict with our own innate cluelessness. Instead, we can enjoy it as the gift it is, this life as it is, this presence which persists from heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to precious breath.

Even should we find the answer to every why and how, our souls may pine once more for that far country of not knowing. After all, is it not the lure of the Unknown which gives life its compelling attraction? Our curiosity brought us here to imbibe in this long-running Mystery, and so we return to form and its fictions again and again, until we’ve finally exhausted the storehouse of matter, energy, time, and space, and are ready for something completely different. Ready at last to come home.

Greed takes a good long look at itself. Made of mind, fed by mind, of no enduring substance other than an uninspected movement of desire which doesn’t know of anything beyond itself and so can’t stop, it suddenly sees itself in action, its own essential emptiness manifesting as the fruit of selfish thought, like a wild saxophone taking over the stage at the expense of every other thought which only longs to lose itself in the seductive music of virtual reality, to fall back into the gravity of its own imagined source and disappear. This is how it self-corrects. Recognition is liberation, just as liberation is delusion.

So too for hatred — in the mirror of itself it sees itself, its present hateful countenance. In the glare of its hatred it scares itself. It actually would like to just sit down with a fat glass of Bourbon and a Cubano, take the shoes off and enjoy the looming crash of breaking worlds it has set in motion, but hate gets no rest, there is always more to hate, more watered-down whiskey and cheap tobacco dives where the grumbling is thick and they keep the lights turned down low.

There too in some seedy old shack is found ignorance. Ignorance can’t recognize itself, for if it did it would be transmuted into wisdom, and that would strain the credulity of greed and hatred, so it simply goes along to get along, ignorantly, until wonder of wonders it spawns that magical child, delusion, though it knows nothing of it. It revels in the singular pseudo-bliss of itself, even while its offspring populate the dream with creative characters who bear a striking resemblance to ourselves.

Because delusion is dream-like in its arising, enduring, and eventual vanishing, it cannot be said to have any fundamental reality. In that sense, it is a paradoxical mystery that courses beyond the comprehension of any intelligence which is subsequently formed by the coincidence of swooshing cerebral fluids, sparking neurons, and ripening causes and conditions to approximate some imaginary phenomenal center that serves as a subject entangled with numberless whirling objects, all dancing without purpose in the immensity of an infinite impersonal void.

Never can it be said that it is mine, that it is my self, that it is what I am, because what I am is the basic aware space in and as which everything seems to appear and disappear, though in reality nothing happens, begins, or ceases — neither greed, hatred, nor ignorance. This can be easily verified by refraining from identifying with any appearance, perception, feeling, memory, sensation, or mental fabrication, until nothing more can be realized or forgotten, and only then “what is” reveals itself, as it is — pure delusion.

Because it is pure by nature, delusion itself is spontaneously self-illuminating. Whatever the experience — happy or sad, vivid or dull — it is the precise form of our own awareness, exactly as it is being experienced, and thus it is perfect, just as it is, in the very form that it is. It is only our resistance to “what is” that creates the desperation of spiritual or material paths, schemes, and methods, which in turn only prolong the chronic neurosis of unhappiness, replete with greed, hatred, and ignorance.

Consider this: radiant light or murky darkness make no difference to the transparent sky of a vast and empty hologram. There is no higher or lower, better or worse. Neither praise nor blame apply, nor does the human persona’s judgment of right and wrong, good or bad. All delusion is equal in value, having no inherent value itself.

When seeing has no seer, hearing no hearer, and perceiving no perceiver, then awareness cannot be saddled with any identity, history, karma, personality, or even any fixed locality. Where is the sky? Who is the sky? When was the sky? Because nothing under the sky stays the same, the nature of all phenomena can be regarded as “impermanent”. Because there is nothing that can actually be grasped and designated “the sky”, the infinite space in which all appears, thrives for a while, and vanishes is itself no different than any other prop in a fictitious story told by nobody.

Silence pervades the three times and ten directions. “Vast emptiness” is only a provisional term intended to stop the tears of child-like dream characters. In reality, there is no such thing. There could never be. There is no vastness, no emptiness, no word. All of that is exquisite delusion. Even “exquisite” can be discarded, for if there is nothing, to what can it be compared? Unperceivable and inconceivable — that is what we are, yet we are greedy, hateful, and ignorant too. To imagine otherwise is delusional. Stay silent.

Silence is the Mother Principle, except that silence is not the absence of any sound. That sort of silence is only a relative condition, dependent on conditional factors, but true silence is not a state or result of any combination of causes, nor can it be an object to itself. Whatever can be devised by the marvelous functioning of the divine creative intelligence does not apply to that prior silence which is elsewhere called (by the deluded) the Absolute, the Supreme, the fundamental Basis.

Out of this no-thing — perfect silence — the whole grand totality of universal manifestation flashes noisily into being, expands to fill the entire cosmos with its cacophony, and simultaneously dissolves, without the slightest glitch or hesitation, and without the most minute particle or trace of a substantial self, except what can be superimposed on a non-event by the functioning of pure delusion. Therefore, delusion is the source of all identification, all mental formations, all emotional reactivity, all mirror poses and self-images, and any apparent perception of duality or non-duality. Truly, there is no way around delusion, for to seek such a way is the play of delusion itself. Stay silent.

When the mind moves, delusion is its function, its signal and its signature. Nothing that can be conceived, observed, known, or imagined is real. To subsequently establish or cherish some story about any of it is delusional, and so these very words are the adornments of delusion too. The ultimate expression of delusion is the claim, “I am this”, or “I am that”. From there, greed, hatred, and ignorance ripple out through the frequencies and are only resolved by collapsing back into the welcoming womb of delusion, then rising again and again in this perpetual festival of illusion as our playful dream creations which we conceptually designate as the self, the world, the everything. So be it.

Part 1

There are many invisible beings who gather around us to enjoy our performance as a human in the running production called “Life On Earth”. Perhaps some of them tried their hand at it a time or two and so can well appreciate the level of challenge involved in just getting out of bed in the morning and moving about, doing this or that, attending to whatever business happens to come our way.

Our lives are made up of lots of little things that cumulatively amount to an artistic rendering of the play of light on water. Every little gleam or glitter can bring a smile of wonder, but what really pleases the spirit friends in the audience is any act of kindness. We typically judge ourselves too harshly, so being kind to oneself is already a great accomplishment! Our kindness to others is just an extension of that original kindness.

Eventually, we may come to realize that there is no difference, that the sense of separation between self and other is just a trick of perception, but in the meantime, we can notice how any act of kindness makes us happy, no matter how seemingly trivial. It just feels right, and that tells us something important about this life, and why we came here.

One of the easiest ways we can choose to be kind to ourselves is by occasionally slowing down a bit and taking few good deep breaths. Sure, that recommendation has become almost a cliche, but we usually get so caught up in things that we forget to just breathe. We are often surprised by how much tension we’ve stored up in our bodies when we finally take the opportunity to relax and breathe deeply.

When we feel the stress drain out of our system with each full exhalation, we can understand the basis for all the yogas and meditation techniques, because the breath and the thought stream are so connected. Since it is thought which spawns the chronic contraction we feel in our bodies, learning how to relax our minds is essential to our well being. Refusing to dwell on our passing thoughts is a primary meditation, and can be a true kindness we bestow on ourselves and each other.

Even when all the external sources of stress are removed, we can notice that consciousness itself is stressful, and so relaxing from the energetic compulsion to entertain and identify with its arising display in the form of thought, memory, perception, or sensation can bring us to a place of deep rest. From this spacious depth, kindness can manifest naturally and spontaneously, without any artificial effort or idealistic motive. That’s also when love becomes unconditional, because it is no longer an attempt to achieve the bliss state, but rather arises as a manifestation of it. That is true kindness indeed!

12/15/16

Kindness

Part 2

If we realized, all the way to our molecular or cellular basis, the interdependence of all existence, kindness would be our natural function, and peace our natural disposition. We only need remind each other to be kind when there is the uninspected assumption (seemingly confirmed by experience and the teachings of this world) that we are separate and independent material beings, time-bound, and vying with each other, often violently, for mundane resources, in the midst of measureless meaningless suffering and ultimately chaos.

Here, almost everyone imagines that some sort of independence or distance from the whole of life is their actual condition, simply by virtue of being marginally self-aware. The ensuing sense of lack or loss of felt connection with our divine source is even at the root of a musical art form called “The Blues”, when expressing that ache of loneliness.

Consciousness assumes form, but then believes it is that form exclusively, adrift in the midst of competing non-selves. This case of mistaken identity makes for the kinds of dramas we witness and participate in as co-creators of this reality system. The persistent illusion of separation is part of the woven fabric of this dream world within which we immerse ourselves as soon as our dream feet touch down on planet earth.

Starting right from that holy moment, we can practice kindness and transmit peace — everyone we meet, regardless of form or frequency, is simply ourself, in different costumes. This is an essential truth about consciousness: it is indivisible. This need not be a secret.

Looking into our own DNA . . . once unlocked, all the secrets are revealed, but there is a deeper secret still, deeper than blood, more fundamental than the life force, though the life force lives all things. Some say it is an open secret. Even if we know the names, that is not the secret itself. It is closer, closer than the next thought. This is how the secret reveals itself. Intimately.

1/24/23

Pic by Angela Treat Lyon

The wise report: first we awaken in the midst of the dream, then we awaken from the dream itself. One way to understand such transformational mechanics is: first we realize that we are not the character we have presumed ourself to be, the human persona fashioned from thoughts and memories, emotions and sensations. Rather, that character is a role we have been playing, like a “Method” actor.

Nevertheless, the play goes on. Eventually, we may come to realize that the play itself is more like a convincing illusion, an absorbing theatrical production. As such, it represents an impermanent and non-binding modification of consciousness, which has no substantial reality beyond the narrative we have been granting it, based on our ever-changing angle of vision and the conditioning which co-creates it.

Of course, as long as that is a mere intellectual recognition, the dream still has power over us, even though we might imagine otherwise. The contraction persists — the knot at the heart, the excuses, resentments, the rationalizations, judgments, the self-deception.

However, when we really see how things are, as they are, then we realize directly that the whole production (including our role) is a virtual and transient reality, our own dreamy projection and display — utterly empty of any inherent and enduring substance.

That’s not the end of the matter however, because we are still making a distinction between the real and the unreal, and moreover, our heart has not yet broken open. When we realize the emptiness of both self and phenomena, of any identity or position, the ancient conflict within our being subsides.

But when our heart breaks open in a love unfathomable, and our feeling being expands to include the totality, humbly embracing all of life’s poignancy, terror, and wonder — so impossibly beautiful, fragile, and even devastating in its mysterious appearance and disappearance — we may finally begin to get a sense about the purpose of this birth.

All manifest and un-manifest universes glow like little lit lanterns strung across the firmament of night, itself a figment of the light, and beyond that, more light into light, no longer an earnest rehearsal for light, but light itself, which is love, and more than time or space can hold, our own innocence and natural truth. Even in this dim harsh density, it shines forth as the immortal font of wisdom, radiance, and bliss — our fundamental condition and divine inheritance.

Why then, how then, can we ever feel alone? We feel alone because our native connection to the divine light has become obscured by the pressing business of living in this objective world, contracting our vibration down into the seeming solidity of psycho-physical boundaries. We can’t find our way home. In the very midst of this calamity, however, there is something interesting we can notice. Appreciation is possible, and genuine appreciation leads to gratitude.

After the tightness of physical embodiment, we can appreciate so much more vividly the open spaciousness of our immortal freedom. In this humble circumstance of materiality, we can come to appreciate who we really are, by directly experiencing what we are not. We are here to learn to appreciate love by experiencing non-love. We learn to appreciate our connection to the divine, the source of light and love itself, by experiencing the illusion of separation.

The only truly sane thing to do with this life then is to expand our perception of our prior connection to the luminous divine, until all obscurations are seen through and discarded, and what remains is this immediate Presence, this eternal love. We can little by little or all at once, relax into that and be taken, taken by that which lives us, loves us, now and forever, Amen.

I open my laptop browser and the world comes rushing at me with the raw force of consciousness. Just so, by refraining from hierarchical thinking, I need not attempt to sort the seemingly more significant offerings from the apparently lesser ones. They all are equally empty parade participants in the transient electronic flotillas rumbling silently before me down the neural boulevards.

Instead, I proceed to open a blank page in my magic thought recorder and resume compounding the general collective confusion by adding my own 2 cents in the form of superfluous sentences and paragraphs. There may be something agreeable or not about the ensuing words and the thoughts which spawn them, but it is nothing more than what the mind might make of itself while ensconced in the denser frequencies of the existence spectrum.

Beyond all that, and even prior to it, there is feeling. It is not a mere sensation program, although it includes every flavor of sensation. It is not based on the conditional interpretation of and response to arising mental stimuli, although nothing is excluded, even second thoughts.

Consider emotion. There is motion in the word emotion, which is movement, which is action. We are not here to simply be, we are also here to act. In the realm of being, love is being. In the realm of action, love is action. How we love is reflected in how we act, not so much in how we think or imagine, despite our finely worded explications in defense of a fictional person.

The body-mind-self and the passing display of theatrical bewilderments are props we actors juggle in the action movie called “life”. So many humans are eager to abandon their bodies, forgetting that we spend most of eternity without one. It is rare to get any human body, and rarer still to appreciate the opportunity it offers. We actors have our roles to play, but many get stage fright, hesitate, and only complicate.

We may be able to talk a good game, but action is the proof. The world’s at stake. Our acts of love, our love in action, make the body the mediator between heaven and earth, a clear crystal prism for feeling to infinity. Alternately, our refusal to act, our avoidance of action, only dims that light which we need more than ever to see.

Q: What do you mean by emotional assent? Am I not to act against my desires?

M: You will not act against your desires. Clarity is not enough. Energy comes from love — you must love to act — whatever the shape and object of your love. (I Am That, Nisargadatta)

For some time now, throughout the Western Dharmic channels, there’s been frequent talk about “awakening”, as if that represents some critical experience, and in a way it certainly does. Imagine the alternative of spending one’s whole time in dreamland, never realizing one is fast asleep! Imagine a whole planet of such sleep-walkers! For proof that ignorance is not bliss, we need only look at the current state of Earth. Nevertheless, amid all the claims about illumination, not much is heard about staying awake, because it is actually still quite rare to thoroughly disentangle from the matrix and stabilize in the “open eyes” state.

Moreover, those who are actually awake don’t think of themselves as awake. They don’t think of themselves as anything in particular, nothing special. They have ceased experiencing themselves as separate entities from the whole. The wave is not other than the ocean. They don’t go on about “their” experiences. Notions of “me & mine” no longer apply. Truly, they never do, except as a reflection of ignorance.

Ignorance consists of forming and maintaining views, positions, beliefs, judgments, and self-images based on insufficient information. The fact is, we don’t know who or what we really are. The resulting confusion yields a state of mistaken identity, in which consciousness imagines itself as this single time-bound carbon unit exclusively, and thus ignorance is reinforced in the delusion.

That is why the wise in such matters suggest, as an initial preparatory step, bringing one’s whole attention to this immediate moment, and cease living in the past or future. Although this in itself is nearly impossible for most humans, due to runaway thought-streams and engrained habit patterns, Help is always available, especially if we are sincerely dissatisfied enough with living from anything less than the truth.

When fully immersed in and as this immediate moment: is it perfect or imperfect, happy or sad, desirable or undesirable, except as a conditioned subjective fantasy of interpretation on perception? All applied qualifications are mind-made, and constitute a superimposition on experience (also mind-made).

Perhaps we want things-as-they-are to be other than what they are. Then we create concepts like perfection or perfection’s lack, moving us another step away from the immediate moment, and into imaginative abstraction. Reversing that process is what some call practice, and indeed it does require effort because we have been conditioned to be judges, and breaking that habit is difficult, especially given the saturation of information within the current collective consciousness.

As humans, we are not qualified to make judgments about each other, since we do not have sufficient information. We only “see through a glass darkly.” Here in dreamland, the illusion is formidable. Our will and efforts alone can only take us so far, and can even turn into further obstacles themselves. In the midst of our ignorance, only love lights the way onward. In the midst of our failures, love triumphs anew. Ignorance ends when there is nothing that remains of us but love.

1. Be kind to everyone and everything — your mirrors.

2. Be responsible for proper care and bodily maintenance.

3. Skip entanglements with human belief systems and views.

4. Serve the planet and all of its inhabitants by non-harming.

5. Be a blessing for whomever you encounter, not a nuisance.

6. Keep a clear open connection with your own loving Source.

7. Discover what you love, whatever calls you, and do that.

8. Form relationships with energies that magnify the light.

9. Practice being before all thinking, the silent witness.

10. Let humble gratitude inform all waking moments.

11. Forgive every one and every thing every time.

12. Cling to nothing, non-dwelling is peace.

We’ve all heard about the benefits of “being here now”, but why does it seem so difficult for attention to simply remain present? We can pledge allegiance to the concept all day, but the actual experience is fleeting at best. If we turn attention around, we notice that we are typically somewhere in the past or future. To truly appreciate the immediate presence of our own truth requires that we relinquish the self-fascination, along with its ongoing narrative. There is no self in the now. The self idea comes later, when we have distanced ourselves from the present in order to conceptualize about it, and one of the concepts we employ is the sense of “me”. “Me” is a kind of useful creation that helps in the navigation of this 3-D realm, but not at all who or what we are.

Consider for instance the character we assume in a virtual reality video game. We are clearly not that fictional creation, but we play the role for the game’s duration. Some also compare that sense to a dream, in which the mind plays various roles while we sleep, but which all vanish when we awaken. However, there are no daydreams in the now. The self-obsession is a kind of daydream, in that it has no substantial foundation in reality. Rather, it’s a compounded jumble of thoughts, emotions, memory associations, beliefs and reflected images, interpretations on perceptions conditioned by innumerable factors leading back to the Big Bang and even further back.

There is no beginning actually, but the human mind makes a habit of identifying with the self-contraction from an early age, and that generally remains the case throughout one’s life, even if one reads a lot of wise sutras and holy texts. Unless we are somehow sobered up by a direct recognition of our actual condition, which is pretty rare, we typically remain in a stagnant trance of identification with those contracted self-images. Even more rare is to thoroughly disentangle from the long-running persona program to the point of mature stabilization in selfless love.

This is why the skillful teachings on “short moments, many times”, are expedient. Even when we awaken to the nature of consciousness to some extent, it takes effort to allow it to inform our very cells. However, this is not about some mental regimen, practice, or strategy. It is a matter of letting go at the heart, because it is the heart’s deepest desire, and we can no longer resist its call. Nobody plans to fall that much in love that they lose themselves in such a love. It may sound romantic even, but it is death. That is why we want to keep the story going, because we are afraid of death. What we discover, however, is that we don’t lose the story, it just expands beyond our comprehension. The story is not our concern. It only comes true when we unequivocally embody this immediate presence, unfettered awareness, selfless love.