The Conscious Process

“Padmasambhava said: ‘Though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour.’ Don’t confuse one with the other. When training in the view, you can be as unbiased, as impartial, as vast, immense, and unlimited as the sky. Your behaviour, on the other hand, should be as careful as possible in discriminating what is beneficial or harmful, what is good or evil. One can combine the view and conduct, but don’t mix them or lose one in the other. That is very important.

‘View like the sky’ means that nothing is held onto in any way whatsoever. You are not stuck anywhere at all. In other words, there is no discrimination as to what to accept and what to reject; no line is drawn separating one thing from another. ‘Conduct as fine as barley flour’ means that there is good and evil, and one needs to differentiate between the two. Give up negative deeds; practice the Dharma. In your behaviour, in your conduct, it is necessary to accept and reject.”

~Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Padmasambhava, also known as the Second Buddha, was a sage who travelled from Pakistan to Tibet in the 8^th century CE, where he is said to have transmitted Vajrayana Buddhism, a collection of esoteric methods aimed at liberating the aspirant from ignorance and its associated afflictions. What today is commonly considered to be Tibetan Buddhism is, for the most part, Vajrayana Buddhism (although elements of Vajrayana are also practiced in China and Japan under different names). Among many of the legendary accomplishments of Padmasambhava, he is regarded as the author of the famous Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is actually translated as “The Great Book of Natural Liberation through Understanding in the Between”.

In any event, his transmitted teachings were very clear in pointing out the two salient and complementary aspects of spiritual practice that necessarily must go hand in hand if one’s efforts are to bear fruit – right view and right conduct. The successful integration of these two qualities is essential for the realization of a true spiritual maturity in which the aspirant is liberated from the poisons of ignorance, envy, greed, hatred, arrogance, and emotional contraction.

Essentially, right view develops from the direct and stable realization of one’s own true nature (and thus the true nature of all phenomena), whereas right conduct entails the embodiment of such a transformative realization in all of one’s life and relations. Certainly, that sounds forthright enough, but problems arise for practitioners when one is lost in or conflated with the other.

When the view is lost in the conduct, for example, one is prone to go about accepting and rejecting, affirming and denying, grasping and avoiding — always conceptualizing the path in terms of good and evil, virtue and sin, desirable and undesirable, rather than appreciating the fundamental substratum or background of all phenomena – the essential emptiness that transcends all dualistic notions.

The Dzogchen master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche described the view succinctly when he said:

“Leave alone whatever arise in the mind. Do not seek to change or alter anything. It is all perfect as it stands.”

Rather than resting in the summary recognition that everything is perfect just as it is, losing the view in the conduct renders one perpetually invested in efforts to change and manipulate phenomena and relations in order to attain some idealized condition or result. However, relying on right conduct alone, though admirable from a certain perspective, will never yield true liberation.

If uninformed by right view, we will instead be motivated by a presumed internal division, a conflict at the core of our psyche necessitating a relentless struggle between dark and light elements. As it so happens, neither aspect can be victorious, since they both depend on each other to exist in the first place. With the benefit of right view, however, both positions are seen through and transcended. After all, when we try to find this self that is believed to be in need of improvement and salvation, what we discover instead is merely a bundle of thoughts and memories, sensations and conditioning, all strung together on an imaginary clothesline called “I”.

Nevertheless, losing the conduct in the view is even more troublesome. The problem with that error crops up far too often in spiritual communities these days (and perhaps it always has, it’s just that today news travels faster). The all-too-common scandals involving sexual improprieties, financial shenanigans, and oppressive power trips on the part of teachers, swamis, lamas, roshis, priests, and pastors are prominent though unfortunate examples of losing the conduct in the view. Even though some of these persons in positions of responsibility and authority may have experienced a profound insight regarding the true nature of things, that insight has not yet been integrated to the extent that their character has been freed from the afflictive passions, and so harm can be and often is perpetrated on their disciples, students, and parishioners.

The late Adept Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche clarified the matter when he noted: “Your view can, and should be, as high as possible — there is no danger in this since enlightenment is the total realization of the absolute view. But at the same time your behavior should be as grounded as possible in an awareness of cause and effect. If you lose this basic attitude regarding actions, if you forget all common sense and use the loftiness of the view as an excuse for putting into action whatever comes into your mind, you are engaging in mundane activities contrary to the Dharma, just like ordinary worldly people.”

On a personal level, losing the conduct in the view means that one fails to discriminate in the objective world. Even though it is ultimately empty of any inherent solidity and duration, as long as we are in it, it is real enough, and our behavior matters. Every choice we make has consequences, felt not only in our emotional lives while involved in this current life adventure, but also in all future lives until all possible lessons have been learned and traumas resolved and healed.

By losing the conduct in the view, we might imagine that there is nothing to accept or reject – that whatever we do doesn’t really matter, and that there is no good and evil — it is all illusion, or alternately, it is all a divine manifestation of Source, so why bother addressing conventional issues and trying to do the “right thing”? As it so happens, that attitude is an even greater error in judgment and appreciation, primarily because of its effect on relations. For example, the great Tibetan adept Patrul Rinpoche remarked that, if one claims to have the view but doesn’t show loving kindness in their conduct, they should have their mouths stuffed with the excrement of a hundred villages.

The eminent sage Ramana Maharshi once asked:

“When we awaken from the dream, do we go searching for the characters in that dream, to awaken them?”

Such a comment, when taken out of the context of Ramana’s total teaching, could be presumed to indicate that awakening frees one from any further behavioral concerns. However, for those of us with less than complete transcendental knowledge of the way things really are, it’s easy to fall into a logical fallacy called “Category Error”. That is, we conflate the world of the absolute with the world of the relative, and because we fail to properly distinguish between these two, we often end up confusing ourselves and others.  This is why the great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna remarked:

“Those who do not understand the division of these two realities (Absolute and Relative) do not understand the profound true reality of the Buddha’s teaching. Without reliance on conventions, the ultimate cannot be taught. Without realization of the ultimate, Nirvana will not be attained.”

Certainly, there is an ultimate truth indicated by the simile “like a dream,” wherein there is nothing whatsoever which is real, or independently existent, and yet we believe that there is something which is real, based on our conditioned and conditional interpretation. Upon awakening, we realize that there was nothing at all, just dependently arising phenomena that temporarily create the appearance of stable objectivity.

It is on account of the power of this sleepy ignorance that, in the midst of all manner of phenomena which do not ultimately exist, we nonetheless perceive them to exist: the so-called “self”, “persons”, “ice cream”, “countries”, and so forth.

Mysteriously, the unchanging Absolute appears to manifest in the midst of the relative, as the quicksilver play of consciousness, as energies and forms and functions to infinity. In the midst of it all, what we can re-cognize is the self-evident fact that we ARE. We don’t really know what we are, but it is undeniable that we are.

This awareness of our beingness is the only thing that doesn’t change, though worlds after worlds arise, thrive, and pass away. Our bodies change, our self-concepts change, our beliefs change, and our relations change, but we do not change, or rather, awareness does not change. That unchanging awareness is just another name for what we fundamentally are, and it as this awareness itself that Source plays in the fields of creation.

The relative is recognized as the relative because it is impermanent. It consists of everything that changes, and that includes everything perceivable or conceivable. Just so, if the absolute did not want to express itself in this dreamy density of transience, then we would not be incarnating as these bodies, in the midst of the changing circumstances in which we find ourselves appearing. Indeed, we are the absolute, expressing itself as the relative. As Shitou Xiqian noted in his famous Chan poem “Sandokai”:

“Each thing has its own intrinsic value and is related to everything else in function and position. Ordinary life fits the absolute as a box and its lid. The absolute works together with the relative like two arrows meeting in mid-air.”

By reflecting on our original identity to the point of gnosis, or re-cognition, we can realize that we are indivisible from Source, the Absolute. Moreover, we have never been separated, despite the transient illusionary flow of relative phenomenal existence. However, awakening to the totality of who and what we are does not mean that we somehow disappear. Rather, we discover that we are both ourselves and everything, simultaneously. The relative and absolute intermingle and interpenetrate — you are you and you are not separate from anything.

A critical by-product of such gnosis is the realization that the function of the absolute in manifestation is unconditional loving. Why is there anything, rather than nothing? Love. Since love must love, all beings must be served and even saved, despite the fact that there has never been a single independently existing being in need of saving, including ourselves. This is a great and marvelous mystery, and a humorous one too, though confounding to the discursive mind that would like to have everything filed and figured out.

Buddha’s concept of saving beings was to cause them all to enter into Nirvana. If one was to become a Bodhisattva, dedicated to saving all beings, the aim was just this, to cross all sentient beings over to Nirvana. However, in the Diamond Sutra, Buddha demonstrated his sense of humor by paradoxically noting:

“All types of beings, whether egg-born, womb-born, moisture-born, or transformationally-born, whether possessed of form or formless, whether possessed of thought or free of thought, whether neither possessed of thought nor free of thought — I cause them all to enter the nirvana without residue and thus cross them over to extinction. As I cross over to extinction in this manner an incalculable, innumerable and unbounded number of beings, in truth there are no beings whatsoever who succeed in being crossed over into extinction. Why is this so? Subhuti, If a bodhisattva retains the mark of a self, the mark of a person, the mark of a being or the mark of one with a life span, he is just a non-bodhisattva.”

The point of all this is: when we see someone in need of being served, we must serve them, even though it is a dream, a mirage, a hallucination of the mind. After all, we are love, and love must love. Because Love is all that really matters, our behavior really matters, regardless of any brilliant insight we may have experienced in terms of emptiness and dependent origination. Thus the wise do all sorts of foolish things, like lecturing on nothingness to nobody, teaching emptiness to empty chairs, and performing countless compassionate good deeds, even though there is no such thing as good or bad, absolutely speaking.

There is only Source, without a second, and so who is there to benefit from good deeds? Still, love must love. As long as there is the illusion of separation, the function of love comes into play, even though it may not even look like love to the mind that still clings to the divisive notions of “me and mine”. Nisargadatta Maharaj summed it up perfectly when he said,

“When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. Between these two my life moves.”

This is no enigma to the Realized, but only to those of us who still see some difference between saved and unsaved, lost and found, plus and minus, sacred and profane. Paradoxically, that’s apparently the way the absolute would have it played, just so that It, Source, can discover Itself over and over again in the relative — in and through these humble and transparent forms of you and me and everyone.

“Without love, and will inspired by love, nothing can be done. Merely talking about Reality without doing anything about it is self-defeating. There must be love in the relation between the person who says “I am” and the observer of that “I am.” As long as the observer, the inner self, the ‘higher’ self, considers himself apart from the observed, the ‘lower’ self, despises it and condemns it, the situation is hopeless. It is only when the observer accepts the person as a projection or manifestation of himself, and, so to say, takes the self into the Self, the duality of ‘I’ and ‘this’ goes and in the identity of the outer and the inner the Supreme Reality manifests itself.

This union of the seer and the seen happens when the seer becomes conscious of himself as the seer; he is not merely interested in the seen, which he is anyhow, but also interested in being interested, giving attention to attention, aware of being aware. Affectionate awareness is the crucial factor that brings Reality into focus.”

~Nisargadatta Maharaj

http://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/patrul-rinpoche/two-truths-view-mahayana

“What is really your own, you are not conscious of. What you are conscious of is neither you nor yours. Yours is the power of perception, not what you perceive. It is a mistake to take the conscious to be the whole of man. Man is the unconscious, the conscious and the superconscious, but you are not the man. Yours is the cinema screen, the light as well as the seeing power, but the picture is not you.”

The common descriptions transmitted about Realization in many of the traditional spiritual paths and wisdom systems revolve around the affirmation of some essential, eternal, and transcendental Self behind all phenomena, hence the term “Self-Realization” or “God-Realization”. In that respect, the conscious process of recognition runs counter-intuitive to those traditional programs. In the conscious process of true inquiry, all identity descriptions and self or Self-images are seen through and recognized as mere conceptual designations. We realize that what we are cannot truly be described by human language except in terms of negation. As the Sage Nisargadatta notes succinctly, “You cannot know yourself through bliss alone, for bliss is your very nature. You must face the opposite, what you are not, to find enlightenment.”

In the silent equanimity resulting from such insight, we can observe our conditioned programs, our delusions, our human limitations and foibles, failings, and apparent faults, and yet not be compelled to frantically seek out and commit to some kind of remedial curriculum or self-improvement scheme designed to modify them. In a nutshell, we simply recognize that none of them amount to a “me”, are not my self, and are not what I am. In fact all we can really say is, “I am not this, I am not that.”

With the liberating benefit of such direct recognition (and not just intellectual agreement), the power of the binding, afflictive poisons such as greed, envy, hatred, pride, and ignorance is undermined. They no longer have a target, a landing place. No longer is there grounds and rationale for a perpetual war with oneself. No longer is there a call to divide oneself into conflicting camps of light and dark that in turn need to be reconciled by some prolonged and superhuman effort, just so that we might finally become what we already are. In fact, the more attention and energy that is expended in efforts to sculpt ourselves into some spiritually-correct version of ourselves, the further away we travel from our own true nature and being.

On the contrary, the process of conscious recognition involves the art and practice of “non-doing”, founded upon a genuine humility and surrender. It is important that this be clearly understood, because most of us tend to indulge some inflated or idealistic notion of what we are or want to be, complete with all sorts of provisional betterment projects and ascension goals, rather than simply relaxing and coming to rest in the timeless aware spaciousness of our true nature, the limitless unknown.

On a cautionary note, many seekers may tend, especially in the beginning of the conscious process, to engage analytical inquiry techniques such as “Neti, Neti” (Not this, Not this) purely at the level of the intellect, and that is to be expected. However, there is danger in lingering in the conceptual domain and concluding that the job is done, once there is some verbal conviction. This is why we might encounter certain people who can “talk the talk”, but are still afflicted by the passions and behaviors characteristic of the self-possessed.

Unless the inquiry penetrates deeper than the realm of mental formations and cuts off the root of all identification and self-positions, it will not ultimately be very transformative, and can even pose as an additional hindrance by fattening the “spiritual ego”. Indeed, clinging to an intellectual understanding of the emptiness of the self-complex can actually interfere with or impede its direct recognition (or clear seeing), which is something of an altogether different nature.

In any case, by directly recognizing the emptiness of all that we once took to be ourselves (both negative and positive), we can cease fixating on those obsolete stories. There is real wisdom in just being, although such wisdom is difficult for the usual seeker to allow in. As mentioned earlier, it is counter-intuitive to the spiritual self-improvement program, which is designed solely to create a more agreeable story. As it so happens, no story is true, because all stories are based on the false assumption of the existence of a separate and enduring person, a “me”. Every story, every appearance, is of the same nature as a daydream. What knows the daydream? That which knows the day dream is not the daydream.

Upon sincere and persistent inspection, we can recognize the utter impermanence of all our stories, all daydreams. With that realization, we will come to understand the futility of the various salvation schemes which we have been chronically employing. We observe in the process how such strategies have systematically superimposed notional programs of bondage and unhappiness on our natural, prior state of freedom. Such a liberating recognition blossoms by allowing one’s total energy and attention to relax from its fixations and compulsiveness, becoming less rigid and more receptive to the fact that nothing needs to be attained, modified, enhanced, redeemed, enlightened, or improved.

It has only been our angle of vision that required some adjustment. We have been so entranced by the illusion of a solid and independent self-sense that we have been unable to appreciate the spaciousness in which it and everything appears and disappears. However, when we return attention to that which is always already aware, the self-fixation naturally drops away.

There is a great relief in that revolutionary shift of perspective, allowing for the emergence of our natural spontaneity and playfulness. Moreover, as we relinquish the struggle to define ourselves as “this or that”, we are not only returned to our native innocence, but we also experience the arising of real compassion for others — those who may still be under the influence of the stressful conditioning programs that keep them enlisted in the divisive inner warfare.

Whatever we attach and cling to invariably becomes the source of our distress. Consequently, by seeing through and letting go at the root of such distress – the obsession with and absorption in the fiction of “me and mine” — we can instead relax and enjoy life for its own sake. The implanted motive to work on myself in order to get better, more luminous and holy, more profound and attractive, will cease motivating us.

After all, we may be dead before tomorrow! All we have is this moment now. If we are drawn, for example, to certain spiritual practices such as meditation, they need not be taken up in order to become someone else – some idealized version or religious fantasy of ourselves. Rather, they can instead just be appreciated as a natural enjoyment of the physical form which we are occupying, not unlike going for a walk or drinking a glass of cool water. Sitting still and not knowing, not dwelling on or grasping at the parade of passing thoughts, is one of life’s great pleasures, especially for those who are no longer subservient to artificial agendas!

With the loosening of the grip of fixed patterns of identity, we can gratefully come to recognize each experience in life as a gift, regardless of the form it arrives in. Each possesses its own beauty, particularly when we don’t expect or demand that it be anything other than what it is. Rather than assuming a victim mentality when things seem disagreeable, we can as co-creators inquire into our own responsibility. In such recognition, we become eminently present and “ordinary”, without the heavy and unwieldy baggage of either sorrowful regrets or idealistic projections holding us back and weighing us down.

Having allowed our true nature (which has been heretofore obscured beneath heaps of rationalizations, second-hand beliefs, and habitual reactivity spawned by hope and fear) to reveal itself, energy and attention are freed up to the point where we can simply live for the sake of life itself, doing whatever we do, purely for the sake of doing it. As it turns out, that is enough — to just do it, just live it.

Moreover, there is a curious but common assumption that, without holding on to a self-idea, one would be rendered dysfunctional or even incapacitated in the objective sphere, when in fact, it is actually the superimposition of the self-idea that more often than not complicates activity and impedes unfettered functioning.

The Thai Forest master Ajahn Chah put it perfectly when he said: “Once you understand non-self, then the burden of life is gone. You’ll be at peace with the world. When we see beyond self, we no longer cling to happiness and we can truly be happy. Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are – no holding on, no attachment, free.”

Recognition is nothing other than the arrow of this understanding finally penetrating our mental and emotional armor, finding its mark at the heart, and really sinking in. It is not seeing a grand supernatural vision or bathing in special, blissful states; it is opening our eyes to how callous and arrogant and even silly we can be, how resistant and reluctant and fearful, and how (by trying to be knowers) we have gotten in our own way. As the mystic Angelus Silesius humorously noted: “God, whose love and joy are present everywhere, can’t come and visit you unless you aren’t there.”

Conventionally, we can know a lot about ourselves. After all, we’ve been working on that story all of our lives, featuring “me” as the central character. Nevertheless, the only valid self-knowledge for us in this realm is the recognition of what we are not, starting with the body-mind organism, and including everything we think and believe to be real. What we truly are can never be an object of perception, since whatever is perceived cannot itself perceive. As Nisargadatta clearly noted: “You cannot be witnessed by you; only what is other than you can be witnessed by you.”

Furthermore, even the discoveries in modern science are pointing out that nothing is what it appears to be. The eminent physicist Niels Bohr (echoing the Buddhist Law of Dependent Origination) noted: “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” Indeed, as far back as the second century, the renowned Buddhist adept and scholar Nagarjuna (often designated as “the second Buddha”), taught that everything that exists does so dependently, and everything that is dependently existent necessarily lacks independent objective existence, or in other words, is empty of any real or inherent existence.

Interestingly, developments in modern neurology employing MRI brain scans have revealed that the “me-sense” is a neurological figment that occurs when nine different areas of the brain are active at the same time.  There is no actual personal “self” ever, just a neurological sensation of a “me”.

In any case, truth itself can never be an object of consciousness, since consciousness itself is transitory. Hence, it must be prior to consciousness, and thus ungraspable by the conceptual apparatus. One can only recognize that one lives in untruth, in a dreamy fantasy. U. G. Krishnamurti deftly summarized: “The body does not exist except as a thought. There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is ‘me’. Anything you experience based on thought is illusion.”

Likewise, liberation is not some reward granted by the universe for following the right doctrines, or aligning with superior religious sects or philosophies. It is not an attainment — nobody “attains freedom”. Such a make-believe story — that one can become something other than what they already are — only reinforces our perpetual sense of dissatisfaction (though it certainly keeps the preachers in business).

Indeed, the one who would be free is the one who has been obscuring real freedom, and it is that one who disappears in the light of true recognition. Otherwise, we will continue to cherish the belief that we can somehow acquire lasting happiness, if only we become more like this or less like that, while stubbornly insisting to ourselves that we exist as separate and enduring persons. We don’t.

“Thus, any body whatsoever . . . any feeling whatsoever . . . any perception whatsoever . . . any mental processes whatsoever . . . any consciousness whatsoever — past, future, or present; internal or external; blatant or subtle; common or sublime; far or near, is to be seen as it actually is with right discernment as: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’ Seeing thus, one grows disenchanted with the body, disenchanted with feeling, disenchanted with perception, disenchanted with mental processes, and disenchanted with consciousness. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is released.”

~Anattalakkhana Sutta

See also: https://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/i-am-sort-of/

“Ignorance can be compared to a dark room in which you sleep. No matter how long the room has been dark, an hour or a million years, the moment the lamp of awareness is lit the entire room becomes luminous. You are that luminosity. You are that clear light.”

~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Imagine what a “game-changer” it would be to suddenly realize that nothing we can see, feel, think, or know is actually real. From the revelatory angle of vision coincident with awake awareness, there’s neither birth nor death, appearance nor disappearance, creation nor destruction, bondage nor liberation, you or I. Those are all conceptual designations, empty of any inherent and independent existence other than that which mind bestows upon them. The wisest sages know that there’s neither unity nor plurality – the world is neither one nor many. Existence itself more like a virtual reality game, and we have taken our places here in these game bodies to test ourselves, to see what we are really made of deep down at the core, and to enjoy the infinite Mystery in all of its permutations.

Hearing that, some might imagine that there is something to “get”, some special state or permanent position to possess and make one’s own. However, wisdom reveals that we are not here to acquire some enlightenment that is not already true of us, progressing through various stages until we arrive at some exalted destination. We ourselves are the destination — we go nowhere. There’s never been a human being in need of salvation, redemption, protection, or freedom. Such concepts are merely props and stage sets for the game, the play of consciousness, the dream we call “our life”.

In fact, the external world has no existence independent of the consciousness which perceives it. This is not only the testimony of sages and mystics, but is now a cornerstone of quantum physics. Mere perception and practical utility cannot prove the reality of the world, for even in dreams there is perception and practical utility – water in a dream can quench the dream thirst as much as real water can quench real thirst. The waking state is on par with the dream state, and both are real within their own order — that’s important to recognize. But from the ultimate standpoint, both are unreal.

Reality is beyond human conception. It transcends the trinity of the knower, known and knowledge. Timeless and motionless, it’s “where” all the categories of the intellect are merged. All phenomena, subjective as well as objective, are by their nature serene from the beginning, unborn and merged in Source. They are nothing other than imaginative expressions of Source itself, figments of Source — an infinitely stable, self-luminous, conscious force perpetually and joyously manifesting its own awareness in the forms of everything and everyone.

The presumption of Duality is the product of the intellect, but when the intellect is transcended and all conditional mental and emotional fabrications are seen through and discarded, the trick of duality disappears. What’s left is pure aware spaciousness, devoid of all thought determinations and imagination. It is the serene eternal Light behind the mind. It is incomprehensible bliss, which transcends happiness and misery.

The Absolute is indescribable, unborn, changeless and non-dual. Although many names are devised by human wisdom systems to describe it, fundamentally, it’s You! As Kalu Rinpoche so clearly put it, “We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”

That being the case, how is it that we still seem to persist in ignorance of such a critical truth, and how can we awaken from such a trance? Well, we can begin by recognizing that the only thing we are ever trying to assert, protect, and defend is some conditional and conditioned image we have of ourselves – an ongoing story of a separate and independent “me” that serves as the perceptual matrix for our attitudes and experience.

Just so, rather than attempting to reify, justify, or eliminate that one, we can instead simply examine our assumption that such a one actually exists. In fact, maybe we have dreamed the whole story up in the first place, causing ourselves untold confusion and stress in the process! In that light, awakening is simply letting go of what we never actually had. Going even further, we realize that nobody actually lets go of anything. The illusion of a separate and independent self simply drops away in the light of Recognition. It happens, and yet only to the extent that anything happens in a dream or movie. In reality, there has never been anything other than the “True Self”, playing hide and seek with Itself.

Upon thorough inspection, we can begin to notice that there is something so simple about our own nature that it is routinely by-passed and even stubbornly avoided. It is an affront to the physical persona which fixates on the sense of its own individualized existence as a defense against the death timed into it. It is an affront to the emotional persona which seeks through feeling to grasp that in which feeling arises. It is an affront to the intellectual persona which relies on comparative mind for distraction and knowing as a defense against the unknown and unknowable. It is an affront to the spiritual persona which clings to “higher” states dependent on manipulative strategies fabricated to escape from that root contraction of embodiment clenching at the heart.

Omnipresent Spirit manifests an infinite display of personas, also known as the infinite masks of God, based on an immense curiosity to experience every possible projection of Itself. What is called “the soul” is a temporary embodiment of consciousness that Spirit wears in order to experience different vibrational frequencies. However, when the soul identifies exclusively with any of these arbitrary masks and forgets its immortal source, it becomes “confused” and starts looking for itself. To “return home”, it imagines all sorts of ways and means, from “love me” dreams, to yogic schemes at ashram scenes, or maybe just addictive sessions with Mr. Jim Beam.

The chronic belief that we have to jump through various socially or religiously prescribed hoops to arrive at what we actually Are is one of the confused mind’s classic ways of obstructing, or postponing, its own dethronement. There is the suspicion that, if the truth of our own original nature and identity as Spirit is allowed in, then there will be something that will not survive, and that is correct. What does not survive is the exclusivity of the independent self-sense — the complex structure of the separate and alienated ego/mind, assembled over many years and perpetually reinforced by conditioning-in-the-moment, and all based upon an innocent notion of mistaken identity.

We have come to assume that we are a separate and enduring “somebody”, divided from life and love, and in the hellish position of having to manipulate circumstance in order to carve out some little piece of fleeting happiness, when in fact we are Happiness Itself. Despairing of this, we imagine, we hope, that there must be some heaven elsewhere to which we might be transported from this “vale of tears”, once we have served our sentence of embodiment in the prison of wounded flesh and compounded suffering.

Religious “authorities”, who themselves secretly doubt the revelation of Loving Truth upon which their traditions are based, maintain their power and influence by blithely leading little children out of the wonder of their own pristine innocence and into the snake pit of guilt and shame with the indoctrination of the Lie — the lie that we are separated from the Great One, that we are tainted and diseased by sin or karma, and that their church, method, yoga, dharma, prayer, or practice is the cure.

When we begin to awaken from this nightmare, by the graceful power of divine Remembrance and Recognition, we can discover something very liberating: there is no cure, because this terrible malady and affliction is nothing but an imaginary disease. It does not exist! The truth is, we swim, unfettered, in a vast ocean of Spirit. Indeed, Spirit is our own true identity, functioning in time and space as Love Supreme. Everyone “knows” this in their own heart, everyone intuits the YES of all-embracing Divinity.

All we need do is Be it, rather than indulging in fantasy stories and pretending to be anything other than our own original nature. Nisargadatta Maharaj put it perfectly when he said: “You are the Supreme Reality beyond the world and its creator, beyond consciousness and its witness, beyond all assertions and denials. Remember it, think of it, act on it. Abandon all sense of separation, see yourself in all and act accordingly.”

Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is suffering and stress, boredom, doubt, and discomfort, spawning the motive and motion to alleviate it. Everything is seeking. Life and death are mere blips on the screen of seeking. Seeking is all about the sense we have of being a separate and vulnerable individual, and this sense manifests as the feelings of desire, conflict, and resistance, the endless loop of attraction and aversion, hope and fear, which dominates consciousness and reinforces the sense of self, the perpetual story of “me”.

The first step to breaking that cycle is learning to live in genuine humility, since without humility, all one’s efforts are worthless. The internal conflict, based on the struggle to have things be other than they are, melts away when acceptance and surrender become genuine. Somehow, the heart must be turned to the intuition of what waits, softly breathing, at the deepest core of its own yearning, pierced by the recognition of and utter submission to that which is prior to the fabricated sense of self and all its conflicted modifications.

In such surrender, the struggle of life force and consciousness is given up, laid down, like flowers at the feet of the Beloved. This is the true end of the “personal” life, and it is indeed not unlike a death. The artfulness of it resides in the obliteration of our egoic willfulness, which leads in turn to the restoration of the primal innocence, our true face before life and death commence their dance. This original face is radiant with loving compassion for all that appears, changes, and vanishes. How then can we not love life, with all its tender weaknesses?

At last comes a difficult chasm to cross: the breakthrough recognition that all of it — the whole story of “me and mine” — is simply a beaming projection of one’s own mind. To then turn around and plunge directly into the source of that mind — that’s what takes tremendous courage. It is most rare, most excellent.

It’s a huge leap — to relinquish the pretense of being a knower, to let go of that motive to maintain the defining thread of independence (even if that story is conceptually recognized as an illusion of control). Such a gesture is the essence of a living poetry, the sublime art of life. It awaits all of us, should we be willing to let go of the whole carefully-constructed narrative of “me and mine”, and lose ourselves to find our Self.

“[You must] discard all your experiences, your knowledge, and all the things and ideas that you think are the most reliable, most magnificent, and most real, even including your hope [to get free]. It is as if you were entering a sacred building. Before you do so, the guard tells you that you must not carry any weapon, that you must take off all your clothes, and that not only must you be completely naked you also have to leave your body and soul behind. Then you can enter.”

~ Sheng-yen

“Self-arising wisdom is the base. The five negative emotions are manifested energy. Seeing emotions as mistaken is an error. Letting them be in their nature is the method to find the non-dual state of Liberation. Overcoming hope and fear is the result.”

~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Emotions are downloaded “software” programs that enable us to more fully enjoy the richness and complexity of the human incarnational experience. There is nothing wrong with them, and they certainly do not need to be eliminated. Far from representing some kind of enlightenment, a human life without emotional energy would be an impoverished one. The only problem (entanglement) with emotions comes when we cling to some and avoid others. That alternating cycle of craving and aversion establishes the sense of a separate and enduring self — a “me” — who wants this but shuns that.

Identification with this imaginary creation, complete with a narrative storyline about surviving and thriving in challenging world of other selves, invariably turns out to be a major source of suffering, which is why some spiritual teachers traditionally describe emotions in negative terms. For example, a respected Tibetan Buddhist, Dzongsar Khyentse, is quoted as saying: “All emotions are painful. This is something that only Buddhists would talk about. Many religions worship things like love with celebration and songs. Buddhists think, ‘This is all suffering.’”

In any case, emotions themselves are not the problem. We are not victims of emotions. When they arise as they will, we do not need to grant them any enduring reality, but simply recognize them for what they are — temporary modifications of consciousness, with no inherent substantiality. They are part of the play of life, to which they add spice and interest, but emotions are not us, they are not who we are, and they do not constitute a justification for establishing any solid and unassailable personal identity based on their arrival and elaboration. Nor do they require any measure of reactivity, which invariably serves to merely complicate and confuse. Rather, emotions can simply be acknowledged as fundamental aspects of the human experience, without the addition of subjective praise or blame.

The same goes for thought, perception, sensation, and even consciousness. We can see them for what they are, watch them rise and dissolve like waves on the ocean, and let them be just that, without trying to manipulate, add to, or subtract anything from them. In that way, they can be appreciated as gifts that life presents to us. They need not be clung to or avoided, but simply experienced. We are curious by nature, and so seek out the infinite variety of experiences the cosmos has to offer, for the purposes of self-discovery and enjoyment. Grasping at nothing and yet turning nothing away is ancient wisdom, but ever-fresh and potent.

One of the reasons that we as immortal spirit are attracted to this momentary human circumstance is to experience the richness and innocent rawness of emotions. Those who proclaim that our task is to suppress, renounce, or flee from them have got it backwards. Rather than promoting and prolonging an internal conflict — a war with ourselves that cannot be won — we can instead allow them to reveal their self-liberating potential.

For example, if we are to embark upon the conscious process of transmuting fear into love in our life and relations, we must really get to know ourselves by paying careful attention to our present condition. We can’t release impediments that we are unaware of, so we need to first get intimately familiar with our emotional fluctuations, see how they arise, how they change in response to conditions, and how they tend to rule us, without our conscious intent. This is what real spiritual practice entails, as opposed to sitting around trying to be peaceful and blissful while by-passing the emotional aspect of one’s being (as some might imagine).

As Nisargadatta Maharaj wisely suggests: “Think clearly and deeply, go into the entire structure of your desires and their ramifications. They are a most important part of your mental and emotional make-up and powerfully affect your actions. Remember, you cannot abandon what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.”

Just so, emotions themselves can be transmuted into living wisdom if recognized as transitory and non-binding energetic movements inherent in the human experience. In such recognition, our attention can be restored to the unchanging background against which the fleeting movement of thoughts, emotions, and personal stories appear and disappear – our prior, natural state, Awareness itself.

Alternately, emotions can become sources of trauma and suffering, if clung to and used as plot devices for the “me-story”, or not fully experienced and released, but instead ignored and repressed. In that regard, Don Juan Matus (in Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan) shared a telling observation when he noted: “The remnants of pain left behind by every strong emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”

When we become emotionally invested in our self-images, the whole world can seem to represent a potential threat of emotional harm. Based on this dualistic view, we perceive the need to defend ourselves from possible danger by forging a kind of armor which we then wear into “battle”. Ironically, the more we fortify this armor in reaction to assumed emotional threats, the further we stray from our own inherent happiness. Rather than relaxing and resting in the care-free enjoyment of life and relationships, we must busy ourselves with strategies of ceaseless emotional warfare, marked by the struggle to protect and preserve the fictional person we have assembled out of bits of thoughts, emotions, and memories. What a nightmare, and yet it happens to be the usual conflicted condition with which most of us go through life.

One of the most powerful generators of emotional dysfunction is our habitual failure to maturely adapt to the sexual impulse. Sexual impulses arise naturally as part of a healthy human animal’s biological program. In other words, the impulse itself is what it is, but invariably we add something extra to it, superimposing emotionally reactive qualities on to that which is merely an innocent part of the human functioning. Indeed, upon inspection, we can see that a form of chronic emotional-sexual contraction is at the root of much of our personal and collective dis-ease, and as such is a big contributor to the presumption that we are the body.

Based on the mere presence of a sexual impulse, we mistakenly construe the sense of a concrete (and demanding) self through a process of ensuing identification with and consequent attachment to the body, thereby initiating and perpetuating the mechanics of suffering. In other words, by imagining that we are the body, we commit ourselves to the body’s fate – impermanence.

Now, whether or not one actually follows through on the sexual impulse from this point matters little, since a fictional but very realistic sense of self has already been assembled around the impulse. An internal division has been set in motion, a vicious cycle of desire and frustration that comes with the self-sense package, which then ripples on, even to the point of infecting the totality of our emotional life.

A powerful antidote to the contracting entanglement of that cycle is the practice of non-dwelling within the context of true meditation, which involves neither embracing the impulse nor turning it away. In fact, it entails doing exactly nothing about it — just letting it arise and dissolve as it naturally will, without using it as a platform to identify with the body and therefore establish a self-matrix, a “me-story”. It can be inspected, seen through, and released without creating the dramatic conditions which lead to the assumption of an independent and enduring self. Attention is simply returned again and again to the prior spaciousness of awake awareness itself.

Since what is not used or fueled becomes obsolete, so too do the afflictive poisons that characterize the usual human being’s emotional state, through the power of non-dwelling. Once freed up from the deluding influences of greed, envy, hatred, pride, and ignorance of one’s true nature and condition, the energy and attention that constitute the emotional and mental processes are naturally transmuted, becoming more and more characterized by spontaneity, wisdom, clarity, and above all, compassion.

Having recognized the ephemeral nature of all experience — whether it be in the form of emotion, thought, perception, sensation, or consciousness — we can relax. When we relax, we are freed of all associated binding emotional reactivity, such as fear, stress, annoyance, and moodiness. Having been thus liberated, we can say, “Released!”, and move on to enjoy the next scene in the panoramic movie entitled “The Play of Consciousness”.

“The method is directing attention upon attention or awareness. When any arising is experienced, especially thoughts, moods, emotions, or feeling of personal self identity, one simply notices one’s present naked awareness. By directing the attention back to awareness, the arising dissolves back into its origin and its essential nature, awareness. In doing this, the arising releases its formative energy in its dissolution as a surge of further clarity of Clear Light, the power and potency of awareness that energized the arising in the first place. Hence one’s Rigpa presence (Knowing Awareness) is enhanced in the collapse of the formative arising. Hence the Dzogchen comment that “The stronger the afflictive emotion upon dissolution, the stronger the enhancement to the clarity of presence.”

~ Longchenpa

see also:

https://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/the-practice-of-non-dwelling/

True Meditation: Recognizing Basic Sanity

“To know that you do not know, that is true knowledge.”

~Sri Nisargadatta

If you want to enter knowledge of the Tao,

The entrance is called “Not Knowing”.

~Chuang Tzu

Mind cannot be used to grasp mind. The more we try to grasp mind, the more we realize that we are only grasping air. Actually, if we search for the mind, we will not find any such entity. All we will find are thoughts, and even if we try and fixate on a thought, it will be like trying to hold on to smoke. In fact, if we were not so attached to the concept of linear time and could achieve a birth-to-death overview, we would recognize that our attempts to hold on to any aspect of life — relations, possessions, dreams, ideals and beliefs, and even our self-images — are just as much of a futile endeavor as attempting to grab empty space.

Based upon various conditioning factors, we tend by habit to identify with thought energy. In the process, we develop the conviction that what we think is what we are. In this way, consciousness itself can seem like a limitation, contracting down into various afflicted self-images, such as “I am not worthy, I am too fat, I am not smart enough, or rich enough, or spiritual enough”, or the opposite, such as “I am better than my peers, I am prettier than the others, I am more enlightened”, and so on ad infinitum. All such manufactured images are based on thought energy with which we identify, and which become our prison cages as we do so.

However, if we take a step back and just let thoughts come and go without attaching any personal significance to them, it becomes apparent that we are not the thoughts, but the witness of thoughts. We are not the passing traffic, but the space in which the traffic flows. This primordial space need not become anything other than itself, but simply abide as itself, regardless of the passing parade. Nor need we – we are complete just as we are, and need not be dependent on any temporary neural stream of thought energy to contract our infinite being and squeeze it into the cramped fictional narratives of “me and mine”.

Once we have been able to relax our attention to the point where we are no longer impulsively being drawn into our thought-stories, but stabilize instead in the position of pure witnessing, we can inquire even further. For instance, if we turn our attention around and try to cling to or grasp this witness, we discover that we can’t do that either, any more than we can grasp any other dreamy fabrication of consciousness. The witness cannot grasp the witness, just as the eye cannot see itself. In this direct recognition, the witness (which is still a form of mental construct) falls away too. It represents a slight grasping at an identity, a subtle obstruction. In reality, there is no separate “awareness” that is witnessing experiences.

What remains when all grasping falls away is pure aware spaciousness, the motionless timeless background. It is our true nature — prior to, during, and after thoughts, memories, sensations, perceptions, and all transient self-images arise and dissolve. It is here where we can come to rest, in this ineffable stillness. The only “inner voice” now is silence. In silence, there is no need for some conceptual understanding. Indeed, when only awareness remains, who is there left to understand? Hence, the great Korean Zen master Chinul wrote: “Simply knowing that there is nothing you need to understand is in fact seeing the [true] nature.”

Just so, trying to “figure it all out” by using the analytical intellect may earn one a philosophy credential, but that is nothing like directly seeing one’s true nature. The best service that the intellect can render is to point to who and what we are, but we must leave all notional constructs behind if we are yearning for direct recognition/realization, in the same way we can appreciate and utilize a bread recipe, but we would never confuse the recipe for the bread itself. Facts and information will never amount to true intuitive wisdom, but merely create more hamster wheels.

This why the Zen sages, among other Realizers, recommend practicing with “don’t know mind”. Of course, this does not mean that one somehow refuses to discriminate in the objective world, indulging in blatant ignorance and confusion. The intellectual faculty is an amazing tool, and completely necessary for ordinary navigation in this psycho-physical realm, but the proper utilization of “don’t know mind” reaches beyond the domain of the story-making mind. In that sense, it is not anti-conceptual but trans-conceptual.

Practicing with “don’t know mind” simply entails the recognition that no conceptual understanding, regardless of how seemingly profound, amounts to truth. Indeed, in the spiritual process of awakening, the presumption of knowledge is more often a hindrance, a superimposed fantasy of interpretation on perception and experience, and ultimately constitutes just more excess baggage one needs to discard, if they are serious about waking up. This is also why the Advaita sage Nisargadatta says:

“Everybody is trying to understand the meaning of all this. You are not understanding because you have all the swaddling clothes of “I-am-this-or-that.” Remove them. The ultimate point of view is that there is nothing to understand, so when we try to understand, we are only indulging in the acrobatics of mind.”

Nevertheless, it is not enough to merely glimpse one’s true nature. The sincere aspirant must return again and again to the depths of direct insight and recognition until the effort itself becomes spontaneous. In the process, the transformed intellect can now serve in assisting us to integrate what we have learned, to the point where we are able to fully embody the awakened vision in all the ways we live and relate.

What we may discover in this process is that it is one thing to see our true nature, but another thing altogether when it comes to applying that recognition to all the afflictive states we have become habituated to (and not just from this life, but lives reaching back beyond memory, that nevertheless still impact and even afflict us with unresolved conflicts). Buried emotional traumas and old psychological wounds need to be brought into the light of the conscious process of recognition, where they can be dissolved by the grace of our awakened regard.

Beyond this process of insight into our true nature and progressive application in every nook and cranny of our lives, is there more to be discovered? Again, Sri Nisargadatta gives us a pointed clue when he notes:

“Whatever spiritual things you aspire to know are all happening in this objective world, in the illusion; all your activities, material and spiritual, are in this illusion; all your activities. All this is happening in the objective world, all is dishonesty, there is no truth is this fraud.”

Perhaps intuited in glimpses along the way, coming to terms with the illusionary nature of all phenomena can still prove to be a challenge. Once again, ordinary knowledge can usually only muddle things, adding more complication and contradiction. The western teacher Adyashanti put it succinctly when he said, “All true knowing arises out of the unknown and is an expression of the unknown.” Certainly, we have learned by now that resort to logic and human reason will not really serve us well in this passage. Only by once again letting go and falling into the unknown can we paradoxically find our footing on this journey. Here, mystics such as St. John of the Cross suggest: “Beyond human knowledge and understanding, in order to come to union with the wisdom of God, the soul has to proceed rather by unknowing than by knowing.”

Rather than being some kind of negative experience (as the intellect might perceive it), living in the unknown can provide us with an extraordinary source of freedom and happiness. To really see things as they are, to recognize phenomena as empty of all solidity and yet luminous in its fragile beauty, is actually enormously blissful and satisfying. Really, to play in the dream, having recognized it as a dream, is true enjoyment! The magnificent medieval ecstatic Blessed Angela of Foligno expressed it perfectly when she wrote: “The joy of the saints is a joy of incomprehension; they understand that they cannot understand.”

True freedom from limitation only manifests when one is able to thoroughly inspect, see through, and discard the programmed descriptions or stories about reality that constitute the known, and not just for a moment’s respite, but continuously. This involves a letting go of all clinging to provisional meanings (that are typically second hand anyway), all fixation on conceptual identities that we take to be who and what we are, all solidified positions, and all conditioned filters on experience that keep us misdirected and entranced. If not, then our life will merely amount to a manifestation of what the mind thinks it knows – a circular game of self-confirmation, grasping at the false security of the known, the accepted, the expected, and always avoiding the unknown, the only “place” where real freedom has the spaciousness to awaken and thrive.

By stabilizing in such a liberating attitude, our entire life and being, with all its relationships and perceptions, is literally re-wired to accommodate more and more light. The potential, our potential, is limitless. This light energy is the natural inheritance we all share, but habitually tend to suppress, in favor of reliance on the duller consensus vision of the pack, which will always attribute the most import and value to the safety and security of the known. What most frightens us, it seems, is the unknown, and yet we are also a curious animal, and so there will always be those among us willing to take that step out of the crowd and head off into the rare atmosphere, on pilgrimage to parts unknown. As it so happens, those may very well be the regions that reveal our true nature and condition, in all of its incomprehensible majesty.

 Dizang asked, “Where do you go?”

Fayan replied, “I’m on a pilgrimage.”

Dizang said, “What is the point of your pilgrimage?”

Fayan said, “Don’t know.”

Dizang said, “Not knowing is the most intimate.”

~Record of Fayan Wenyi

“However, the path itself must eventually be abandoned, just as you abandon a boat when you reach the other shore. You must disembark once you have arrived. At the point of total realization, you must abandon Buddhism. The spiritual path is a temporary solution, a placebo to be used until emptiness is understood.”

We each possess our very own custom-built raft. It’s that special vehicle we hope and believe will carry us across the ocean of our life to the “other shore”, a grace-filled place which we imagine will be different than where we are now — happier, more elegant, enlightened, and desirable, and certainly comfortably free from the pests, impediments, and tribulations which seem to constitute so much of our current circumstance.

Some rafts are material – an attractive and well-nourished physical form, a hefty bank account, the mini-mansion in the right neighborhood and a summer home out at the shore, several well-appointed automobiles, an exotic travelogue, a big screen tv in every room with 1000 satellite channels, an enviable collection of enviable collectibles, and plenty of bling to flash around and confirm that one’s raft is all about travelling in style.

Other rafts are relational – that promising new date or mate, those intimate friends with their own stylish rafts, or the cozy familial arrangement which promises to satisfy that ancient genetic mandate.

Some are political – the call of the herd, the song of the tribe, the nationalistic anthem, and jihad on all infidel rafts (be they Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Capitalists, Socialists, Greenies, Monarchists, Theocrats, or some modified version of any of the above rafting positions).

Other rafts are religious/spiritual – the deified redeemer raft, that promising new guru, pastor, master, or prophet, the potent meditation technique everyone’s talking about, the authoritative doctrinal belief, special mantra, perfect posture, secret initiation, hoped-for vision, kundalini shakitpat, or unexcelled Dharma teaching guaranteed to provide us with a stairway to Nirvana in one lifetime.

Regardless of their particular idiosyncratic quality, all of our rafts have one thing in common: they are assembled of the same materials and ingredients – hope and fear. Hope and fear are both mental projections about what’s to come, and being dependent on future outcomes (and past regrets), both preclude being present right here and now. Both hope and fear represent an avoidance of uncertainty, and yet the Unknown is actually our true home, if we really are serious about freedom.

Liberating ourselves from distracting concerns about success or failure, we become available, and much better able to focus our attention and intention on the present moment with clarity and freshness. Abandoning the false urgency that’s spawned by hope and fear, we can relax and enjoy the rare virtue of patience – at peace with our circumstance, and capable of true listening, listening to ourselves, our relations, and to the whole universe, just as it is.

Does this mean we should discard any raft, any means, regardless of how expedient, that could serve us along the way? Certainly not – any vehicle which we might make temporary use of merely needs to be seen for what it is, with right discernment. Recognizing it in this manner, and also keeping in mind that we are not the raft, we can freely employ it as immediate circumstances may require, but we don’t need to tote it around on our back for the rest of our lives. Once it has served its purpose, it can be discarded, in the same way we would discard a thorn which we have used to remove another thorn.

A problem arises, however, when we are unwilling to let go of the raft, even if it is no longer serving us. We tend to cling to obsolete views, preconceptions, and beliefs about ourselves and the way life should be, because they give us a feeling of safety and security. By fixating on old patterns, schemes, and escape plans, we invariably stagnate. Only by our seeing through and letting go of all habitual reactivity and conditional strategies, does the Real have a chance to emerge from the background and reveal itself to us.

Nor is “It” on the other shore, awaiting us in some idealized future. This is the other shore, there is no other shore than this. This is the place right here and now where all of our rafts have delivered us, and so this is where the treasure awaits, this where we can awaken, and this is where we can let go and relax into the native happiness and radiant shine of our own true nature – hands free to give and heart wide open to receive.

“Don’t prolong the past,

don’t invite the future,

don’t be deceived by appearances,

just dwell in present awareness.”

~Patrul Rinpoche