To Do Something

“Sages call ‘sannyasa’ the renunciation of all actions done with desire. The wise declare that ‘tyaga’ is the renunciation of the fruits of activities.”

~ The Bhagavad Gita

We’ve all heard the old saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. This can most clearly be seen in the various idealistic crusades which humans have embarked upon over the ages (both personally and collectively), only to have them result in even greater and more complex troubles then those that they were intended to fix.

A fitting metaphor of what has been called “idiot compassion” is exemplified in the tale of the monkey who had the grand notion one day that he should “be of help”. Consequently, as he set about on his mission through the forest, he came upon a fish swimming in a pond. Pitying the creature, he lifted it out of the water and placed it in a nook between the branches of a nearby tree, in order to save it from drowning.

Even with the sophisticated technical diagnostic tools now at our disposal, we are still incapable of predicting the twists and turns that may result from our actions. The Buddha himself once noted that the effort to try and figure out the varied permutations of cause and effect could drive one insane. What’s clear is that this human life is characterized by a kind of paradox: we are here, we are alive in this world, and so we must act. However, our actions invariably result in entangling complications which create more and more strands in a karmic web that in turn binds us.

Moreover, this web-building has an exponential quality that can stymie even the best minds and hearts, since even the most altruistic preference leads to craving, which leads to suffering. Essentially, we are always acting from an ignorance based on attachment and identification, deriving conditional solutions which stem from provisional values and conditioned assumptions that have a habit of turning around and biting us.

This being the case, how can we make our way in the world without becoming trapped in a sticky web of our own action/reactions, of our own selective points of view that are drenched in accepting and rejecting, biased opinion, and limited vision? Upon inspection, it becomes evident that the only way to remain unbound by one’s actions is to perform them with real detachment, without fixating on the anticipated results, or fruits, of our activity, and especially without making it “personal”.

Developing non-attachment in all of our activities and duties does not mean non-action — standing aloof while the suffering world passes us by. Non-action itself has consequences. Nor does it imply renouncing our work and relations; on the contrary, it simply means acting without leaving a trace. This is the essence of “non-dwelling”. It is refraining from identification with a separate and independent self-idea, a do-er. There is only action acting, doing doing. The “I” is something extra we tend to add, a mental fabrication which typically only complicates experience.

Non-dwelling is the practice of leaving behind no trace of lingering thoughts, goals, desires, attraction or aversion. It is characterized by the relinquishment of any selfish motivation whatsoever in our activities. It transcends all grasping positions spawned by the belief in the “me and mine” story. It consists of simply acting directly with spontaneity and focus, unburdened by conceit, fantasy, hope, or fear, and without clinging to some personal stake in outcomes. As Shunryu Suzuki notes (in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind):

“In order to leave no traces, when you do something, you should just do it with your whole body and mind: you should be concentrated on what you do, You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. You will have something remaining which is not completely burned out.”

In other words, to be truly liberated from attachments and act fluidly, we must be willing and able to let go of everything – all of our most cherished positions, concepts, and self-ideas, and plunge fearlessly into the Unknown, where true freedom alone abides. By practicing non-dwelling, we can begin to detach and mindfully observe, rather than habitually and impulsively reacting to events and circumstances. By taking the witness position, we can start to see how we have been conditioned to act and react based on various temporary and compounded images that we have taken ourselves and the world to be, and which upon investigation are revealed to be untrue – totally fictional narratives.

Rather than trying to change the world, the practice of non-dwelling, non-attachment, and non-identification allows us to humbly be changed by our experience of it, to the point where we can joyfully recognize our proper function in the midst of life and relations. Rather than rendering us dry, contracted, and withdrawn, it removes all that chronically anchors us — all that constricts our ability to respond with both wisdom and compassion to whatever circumstances arise. No longer weighed down by past regrets or future expectations, we can be intensely present and available to “what is”, right here and now, and act accordingly, in harmony with the universal Tao.

 

See also:

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

http://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/desire-fixation-non-dwelling-and-the-heart/

http://travelsindreamland.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/pagan-babies/

First There Is a Mountain

“Before I had studied Ch’an [Zen] for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.”
~Qingyuan Weixin

The typical way almost every human being goes about life is by first latching onto some arbitrary concept about identity and the nature of our appearance here (whether derived from a conditioned interpretation on experience and perception, or from various second-hand sources, such as religious dogmas or social conventions). Then we construct a personal belief system out of it, in turn bolstering that belief structure with the stamp of emotional conviction. We proceed to base our ensuing behaviors and relationships on such notions, clinging to them as a raft in the sea of chaos that this world often seems to be.

In reality, all manifestation is conceptual. The most popular concepts we tend to cling to are related to the existence of a personal self, other persons/selves, and some sort of Cosmic Self/God. One’s own personhood, that of other beings, and even that of God are seen as fixed and solid entities in and of themselves. Once convicted of these concepts, it is very rare to question or investigate them to find out if they are actually true. It is generally too disturbing to go against the flow of cultural and consensus belief systems, because to do so plunges one into doubt, uncertainty, and even potential ostracism from the local herd. The mountains must be mountains, and the rivers must be rivers.

For those who do make the effort to inspect these prevalent concepts that tend to rule and define the usual individual, they may come to recognize their inherent emptiness. That is, these so-called selves or Self are not the names we apply to them, but rather are mental fabrications, made up of other elements that are also empty of any inherent existence. As such, they are inevitably seen to be mere conditional and conditioned fantasies of interpretation on perception. The mountains are not really mountains, nor are the rivers actually rivers.

Even in such recognition, however, there still persists the tendency to linger in the realm of conceptuality by attaching to a subsequent belief in the non-existence of one’s own selfhood, other living beings/selves, or a Universal Supreme Being-type Self. For those who would realize true liberation, however, the only resort is to see through and surrender any and all positions, letting go of every conceptual obscuration that separates one from the reality of “what is”. Labels such as “self” or “non-self” are no longer really applicable. They are artificial superimpositions on our own true nature, and the true nature of all phenomena. That’s all part of the business of knowing, of certainty, and so the wise close down that shop in exchange for the limitless freedom, spontaneity, and spaciousness of the Unknown.

Having recognized the provisional nature of all concepts, we can play with them or discard them, as circumstances and conditions may warrant. The key is refraining from attachment, or fixation, on any idea or mental creation. In that way, everything can present itself as fresh and new, unencumbered by our projections and conditioned notions. Mountains are indeed mountains, and rivers are rivers.

“Every disciple who is seeking Liberation should discard, not only conceptions of one’s own selfhood, other selves, living beings and a Universal Selfhood, but should discard also, all ideas about such conceptions and all ideas about the non-existence of such conceptions.”

~Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra [The Diamond Sutra]

Recognizing What We Are Not

“People talk of rising from higher to still higher truths, and of discovering more and more truth. What they really discover are higher intellectual conceptions of truth. But these are only ideas in their minds. This is not the same as truth itself. The intellect offers a reality which can never be a felt reality but only an indirectly reflected or verbally described one and then only in negative terms.”

~Paul Brunton

Counter-intuitive to the consensus paths of self-realization, in the process of conscious recognition, the salient insight entails a thorough and ongoing acknowledgement of what we are not. 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 superimpose some kind of additional remedial program or self-improvement scheme designed to modify them. In a nutshell, we recognize that none of them amount to a “me”, are not my self, and are not what I am.

Starting from the recognition of prior indivisibility, there is no need for a perpetual war with oneself, nor for breaking oneself down into conflicting camps of light and dark that in turn need to be reconciled by a prolonged and superhuman effort, just so that we might finally become what we already are. In fact, the more energy that is expended to sculpt oneself into some spiritually-correct version of oneself, the further away one travels from their own true being.

On the contrary, the process of conscious recognition involves the art and practice of “non-doing”, which above all requires 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 resorting to the silent aware space at our core, where we can experience that fundamental insight into what we are not now, have never been, nor could ever be. We directly recognize the emptiness of all that we once took to be ourselves, and cease fixating on those obsolete stories. There is real wisdom in “just being”.

Just so, one cannot “make progress” towards real freedom and happiness, as if they were some triumphant reward awaiting us in the far distant somewhere. Alternatively, upon inspection, what we can recognize is the futility of all the mechanisms which we are chronically employing that merely serve to superimpose concepts of bondage and unhappiness on the natural state. Such a recognition proceeds by allowing one’s total attention to gradually become less rigid and more receptive to the realization that nothing needs to be attained, modified, redeemed, enlightened, or transformed, except one’s angle of vision. There is a great relief in that insight, birthing the capacity for natural spontaneity and relaxation.

Furthermore, given that one may die in the very next moment, where then is the time to plan and change anything, to achieve anything, to devise winning strategies and conquests? Their very impermanence is proof of the ultimate unreality of all phenomena, including the separate self sense. Whatever we attach and cling to invariably becomes the source of our distress. With the benefit of recognition, we can instead just sit for the joy of sitting, love for the joy of loving, dance for the joy of dancing, without fixating any identity therein.

The slightest intention to “work on oneself” so that tomorrow we may get better, more spiritual and holy, more personally fulfilled, will not fly. We may be dead before tomorrow! All we have is this moment. If we are drawn to certain “spiritual” practices such as meditation, for example, they are not taken up in order to become someone else, but instead appreciated as a natural enjoyment of the form we are occupying, not unlike going for a walk or drinking a glass of cool water. Sitting still is one of life’s great pleasures!

Our life situations are only what we project them to be. Each possesses its own beauty, particularly when we don’t expect or demand that it be anything other than what it is. In such recognition, we become eminently present and “ordinary”, without the heavy and unwieldy baggage of either regrets or idealistic aims and projections holding us back and weighing us down.

We just need to allow our true motivations – typically buried beneath heaps of rationalizations, second-hand beliefs, and habitual reactivity spawned by hope and fear — to reveal themselves. With recognition, we need no longer expect anything from living, and so simply live for the sake of life itself, doing whatever we do for the sake of doing it. That is enough, to just do it.

Recognition is nothing other than the arrow of this understanding finally penetrating our mental and emotional armor 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 are — how resistant and reluctant and fearful we are. Wanting to “see God” is but a fantasy in comparison.

Truth is not a “something” – an object to be known, felt or accumulated; it is the persistent experience of non-truth. Thus, it is a non-experience. One can only recognize that one lives in untruth, in a dreamy fantasy. Freedom is not some reward granted by the universe for the performance of the right rituals, following the right doctrines, or saying the right words and phrases. It is not an attainment — nobody “attains freedom”.

Such a fictional story — that one can become free, become happy, become something other than what they already are — only keeps us perpetually unhappy (though it certainly keeps the preachers in business). Without true recognition, we continue to maintain a conviction that we will acquire happiness once 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: http://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/the-discipline-of-silence/

A Painting

“The coming and going
of birth and death
is a painting.

Unsurpassed enlightenment
is a painting.

The entire phenomenal universe
and the empty sky are nothing
but a painting.”

~Dogen Zenji

Lying on the lawn in my backyard garden, I would spend hours as a child utterly losing myself in the endlessness of blue, watching the white clouds drifting and changing into shapes both familiar and strange, and letting my consciousness expand out to merge with the totality of the Mystery.

From time to time I would be moved to ponder the nature of the appearance of the world of things, including my own appearance. Inevitably, however, I would always get to a point beyond which my mind could not go, and so I would sink back into the comfort and relative safety of mindless abandonment in the beauty and silence of the infinite display above and all around me.

Since I had no way to account for my own awareness of being-ness, I realized intuitively that it could come and go. After all, I was apparently here now, but could just as easily not be. In that sense, my life and consciousness seemed totally arbitrary, and hence there was no real security in any object of attention, whether it be a self, a person, a cloud, or a thought.

This recognition immediately disabused me of any notion of permanence, and though I had not yet witnessed the death of a loved one, I knew that nothing that I loved or cherished or even didn’t like would survive the play of time. It all could go away, just as it did when I drifted off to sleep, and like a vanishing ripple on a pond, it would be as if it all never happened – this ripple of my life, of this world, of consciousness itself.

At the young age of 8 I had a defining experience of total dissolution – all of my existential supports just dropped away in a sudden moment, flinging me into the vast unknown, and leaving me bewildered and mute. It was this experience – the culmination and exclamation point to my backyard lawn inquiry — that profoundly changed my relationship to the world, as well as my sense of self. I could never look at things the same way again, from the viewpoint of a “person”.

Although nominally raised as a Catholic, I did not turn to the religious dogmas in order to make some peace with my experience. All the pious platitudes spouted by the nuns and priests seemed shallow and irrelevant, and certainly unable to touch the depths of what I was feeling and recognizing.

Somehow, I knew that any answers would have to come from within myself, and yet I also realized that my own mind had no way to account for that which preceded it – for whatever it was that pertained prior to the arrival of my own consciousness. Calling it “God” was utterly beside the point, since it could not be grasped by any modification of attention or perception.

Furthermore, who or what was “myself”? Whatever self-image that tried to coalesce as an identity was sooner or later replaced by another, and so there was nothing that I could really grasp that was “me” or “mine”. Settling on or fixating on any particular self-sense was strictly related to immediate circumstance, but had no staying power. Only awareness itself persisted, but what is the source of awareness?

Being de facto inconceivable, any effort to comprehend it all by using the mind was clearly futile, and so this left me with a momentary sense of meaninglessness. Even that sense, however, was soon recognized to be a temporary and non-binding superimposition on the Mystery, and so I was left with no foothold to gain some philosophical traction or security. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to dwell.

Moreover, the concerns of my peers held little interest, consisting mainly of exploiting the possibilities of gross energies for the purposes of self-confirmation, petty gain, and mere entertainment. Observing the lives of my parents and other significant adults, I saw little difference, except in scale. Unwitting players being spun around on a great wheel beyond their knowledge or consent, they seemed not unlike a herd of sheep being led from birth through an often stressful life and then on to a waiting death, without ever seriously comprehending their purpose or true nature.

Paradoxically, a spontaneous feeling of real affection for everyone and everything was discovered pulsing behind the intellect’s impossible search for meaning. This sense of affection had no need for some mental justification and required no rationale. It simply presented itself in my feeling being as a natural characteristic to being alive – this sincerely loving regard, without clinging or attachment, to the appearance of anything and everything. Whatever is, whatever I happen to encounter, is loveable and even beautiful in and of itself, especially considering its poignant brevity and dream-like quality.

However, the pragmatic evidence of experience in the world of relationships also taught me over time that such emotional vulnerability which love and affection elicit could prove dangerous. Humans are complex critters, and are imbued with certain conflicting traits, such as ignorance, violence, and self-interest. These afflictive traits make navigating through their midst somewhat perilous, and so I was forced to learn to discriminate in the objective world, at least until I could find the circumstances in which my accumulated armor could be discarded and I could stand naked and free to be myself, whatever that might be revealed to be in the company of Love.

For decades, I diligently studied the various wisdom traditions, strategies, and doctrines that have been promulgated by the spiritual heroes of humanity, and although I found much that seemed agreeable, in the end, I came to see them all as paintings – subjective fantasies of interpretation that merely served as artful descriptions of that which is ultimately indescribable.

Thus, I arrived at the summary realization that the only recourse, finally, is silence – silence, and unconditionally loving beyond all reason, limitation, or consensus constraint. In such silence, all thought, feeling, perception, inclination, attachment, and position are surrendered, released. In such unconditional love, all are unified in the recognition of their inherent indivisibility, and appreciated as nothing less than manifestations of a divinity beyond words or stories.

May all beings enjoy their own natural freedom and happiness!

See also: http://travelsindreamland.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/pretending/

I Am (sort of)

“If you think, ‘I breathe’, the ‘I’ is extra. There is no you to say ‘I’. What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no ‘I’, no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.”

–Shunryu Suzuki

The “I” of the past is merely memory, a fabricated illusion of personal continuity. The “I” of the present is impossible to grasp, though the attempt to do so can be quite illuminating. The “I” that will be is a mental projection, spawned from hope and fear.

There is no “I” but the one right here, but since “right here” happens to be no place in particular, this “I” cannot be said to be particularly anywhere. Truly, there is no “right here” — “right here” being nothing but a transient location in the imaginary geography of interpretive perception.

In this direct recognition, the “I” does indeed “cast off the illusion of I”, yet remains as “I”, all the same. As Ramana Maharshi notes, this apparent paradox is not a contradiction to the Realized, and so seekers strive for the ideal of “Realization”. Ironically, this glorious effort at some special attainment just happens to be the real contradiction — there being no one, no “person”, who is actually realized. What an interesting predicament for all the would-be Buddhas and spiritual super heroes – the no-thing melts into the Nothing!

Indeed, wanting to achieve “Realization” is rather like wanting to be present at one’s own funeral, given that true realization marks the end of the “person” — the true death that sages and mystics throughout the ages refer to in their testimonies of treading the “spiritual path”. Nevertheless, how can something that never had any true existence, die? That is a big part of the humorousness of the whole game – the search — and why we tend to laugh out loud when the obvious becomes . . . well, obvious!

From the very no-beginning, there was nothing that needed to be eliminated. That whole strategy is part of the misdirection that the pseudo-spiritual preachers and religious con men have burdened us with through the ages. The only thing that needs to be transformed is our mental rigidity based on fixed beliefs, and our emotional contraction at the heart.

In point of fact, without the self-sense, we would not even be able to function in this world, much less truly awaken to our original nature and condition. However, we need not take this working concept of “I” as our actual forwarding address. That’s the mistake most everyone makes, and why we are always stumbling around so befuddled, like sleep-walkers reaching out for some satisfaction that is forever eluding us in our restless dreaming.

As Nisargadatta Maharaj notes: “Understand this state of affairs; the concept ‘I Am’ comes spontaneously and goes spontaneously. Amazingly, when it appears, it is accepted as real. All subsequent misconceptions arise from that feeling of reality in the ‘I Amness’. Why am I totally free? Because I have understood the unreality of that ‘I Am’.”

We can instead recognize this “I” — the so-called “ego” — more as a nifty navigational tool that enables us to discriminate here in the objective realm in which we live and relate. For example, it helps us to stop on red and go on green, and a whole lot of other good stuff in-between. As long as the personality is recognized as a kind of prop, with no inherent substantiality beyond what we grant it in our playful creativity, then there need be no problem. It’s only when we become fixated on it, misperceiving it to be our true identity, that we suffer its frailty and impermanence, and become trapped in vicious cycles of craving and aversion which only serve to reinforce our sense of separation from life and love.

Any notion that we as humans might entertain of “I Am” is necessarily limited and bound by the parameters of our temporary incarnation. However, it is precisely as and through these humble vehicles that the Absolute, Source Itself, the Supreme Reality, becomes cognizant of and enjoys the Play of Consciousness in this realm. Why else dream it into existence? Each one of us, as unique dream characters in the “Mind of God”, are here acting as the lens, the angle of vision for Source. It enjoys all points of view without judgment, but with the same unconditional love that is shone on all the manifest and unmanifest totality, which consists of nothing but the mirroring reflections of Its own being.

Just so, there are infinite realms of experience, and hence the sense of “I” will be endlessly modified in its evolution towards complete self-awareness as “That”, of which at last there is no other. By sincerely and thoroughly inquiring into who and what “I” am, the process is set in motion that will eventually take us beyond all of our conditioned beliefs and second-hand concepts and opinions, ultimately revealing our true nature and identity as that Supreme Reality Itself.

“That which makes you think you are human is not human. It is but a dimensionless point of consciousness, a conscious nothing; all you can say about yourself is: ‘I am’. You are pure being, awareness, bliss. To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness of the transient as transient, imaginary as imaginary, unreal as unreal.”
~Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Fate or Free Will

Are we ruled by some pre-determined destiny, or are we endowed with the capacity for the exercise of free will? This question has been the source of ceaseless debate among philosophers, religious pundits, and expounders of every persuasion through the ages, and convincing arguments have been made by believers in both camps, as well as those who have thoughtfully proposed some sort of middle way.

Rather than merely re-hashing positions that have already been staked out at length by better minds and more articulate voices than mine, I would simply like to suggest that the crux of the whole issue invariably depends upon one’s level of awareness, or interpretation on perception, which is in turn conditioned by factors such as belief and experience, but more often than not, by second-hand information.

In brief, depending one’s angle of vision, it may appear that we as human individuals are “programmed” prior to our first breath, and that everything that is to happen to us is indeed pre-determined. I will refrain from speculation at this time on the mechanics of such programming — whether it is performed by us ourselves, or in collusion with some “life-between-life” guides, or even by some higher powers who are directing our “soul” evolution.

From another (and perhaps more pragmatic) point of view, it may appear that we do indeed have the power to make changes in the quality of our life, whether in positive or negative ways, and so can indeed transcend our apparent fate by the application of will. This viewpoint can lead to a circular argument, however, since it could be noted that this supposed power is itself pre-determined, or “down-loaded” into the entity like software into an operating system in order to fulfill a destiny.

In and of themselves, both views (and/or some variation of the two) are provisionally true, but all such views are based on the assumed concrete reality of the “person”. However, the presumption of such a reality is not borne out by thorough inquiry, and that is the essential point of this essay. Indeed, the more we investigate, “To whom does fate or free will apply?”, the more we will discover that the so-called “person” is nothing but a bundle of dependently arising thoughts, sensations, memories, and perceptions, all strung together on an imaginary clothes-line called “I”, and in fact no such independent and enduring person has ever really existed, except in the realm of narrative fiction. That is, the persistent sense we have of some individual person (“me”) is based on a story – a fiction which is comprised of all that we may yet take ourselves to be in our ignorance, or amnesia.

Upon awakening, we realize that both destiny and free will ultimately do not apply. How could they? After all, if there is no person, than there is no place for the concepts themselves to land. Nevertheless, as long as we are occupying these human vehicles, there are two truths that constitute our experience of this realm — the relative and the absolute.

On the absolute level, with the liberating recognition that there is no substantial person, opposing notions of fate and free will are de facto rendered moot. However, since we are currently incarnating in the objective world, and in the sphere of our everyday relations here, we certainly have the power to direct our human hosts towards better behavior and an increasingly more conscious and loving response to life. Conversely, we can refrain from taking responsibility, thereby allowing the “animal” to have its way, with the consequent violence and selfishness that is characteristic of the species when left to its own uncontrolled nature.

In other words, there is choice and there is choicelessness, depending upon one’s relative level of awareness, while in Reality, there is neither. As the great sage Ramana Maharshi noted: “Find out to whom free will or destiny matters. Find out where they come from, and abide in their source. If you do this, both of them are transcended. That is the only purpose of discussing these questions. To whom do these questions arise? Find out and be at peace.”

War and Peace

“You fight others all the time for your survival as a separate body-mind, a particular name and form. To live you must destroy. From the moment you were conceived you started a war with your environment – a merciless war of mutual extermination, until death sets you free.”

~Sri Nisargadatta

There is a historic human tendency to anthropomorphize delusional aspects of consciousness by naming them the virus, the ego, the archon parasites, demons, the devil, and so forth. By virtue of just being born into this realm, we are told that we have inherited these various sinful entities as part of the total human package – nasty companions riding along on our shoulders and spoiling our innocent fun.

Of course, what follows is the implication that we have to “do something” to rid ourselves of this apparent affliction. Thus begins the endless internal conflict, with the mind divided against itself into opposing camps of light and dark, good and evil, and the ensuing elaboration of this war in life and relationships.

This never-ending battle manifests as the felt sense of chronic discomfort and dis-ease, self-doubt, neurotic ambivalence, and for many, the more clinical psycho-pathologies. To these, all sorts of methods, schemes, and life-long strategies are prescribed by the priests and doctors to be applied as remedies against the projected nemesis. In fact, the preachers have been kept in perennial business by promising through all manner of propaganda that their cult or scheme is the best one for the job, even to the point of waging physical war with other cults over which one is superior.

So, how does the conception of this disease become reified in our psyche? From where does the dissatisfaction stem? Upon sincere and thorough investigation, we can recognize that it arises from ignorance – ignorance of our true nature and condition. To begin to understand the root of this ignorance, we need look no further than our own mind, since this misunderstanding is nothing but a state of consciousness.

At first there appears to be a steady stream of thoughts which we take to be ours, apparently infected with all manner of bugs and bothersome critters, so that we can never truly and deeply rest. In the course of our human development, we become so habituated to this state of chronic disturbance that we never even question it.

To complicate the matter, we tend to imagine in our mind that we are something separate and different from the world of sentient beings around us, and hence are condemned to endure a perpetual conflict with these perceived “others”, in a struggle to acquire what we need to survive and flourish. Of course, such a state of virtual war precludes the experience of any true compassion.

Moreover, this state of consciousness is reflected back to us in all our relations, because everyone is under the spell of a similar delusion, and so the ignorance is self-reinforcing. We walk the earth, a restless “stranger in a strange land” – alienated not only from others, but also from ourselves. It’s a literal nightmare – a horrible dream!

The wise, rather than merely accepting and even fueling this fabricated struggle, will instead turn attention around and trace back to the beginning of the conflict itself, eventually recognizing through inquiry and consequent insight that whatever appears is mind, and that mind itself is essentially a shadow. Attempts to catch it and control it are futile. That’s just shadows chasing shadows. One can’t control or eliminate a shadow by running after it and trying to grasp and manipulate it.

Whatever is seen, smelled, tasted, touched, thought, imagined, or remembered is not real. In fact, it is all of the same nature as an hallucination. The conflict itself is realized to be our own creation — stress and suffering we’ve been perpetrating on ourselves.

By earnestly inspecting its smoke parade and inquiring into the nature of this conflicted mind, we eventually discover that attention becomes quiet, supple, and fresh when freed from any fixation on the streaming contents of mind. Then, when we look at the mind and see nothing – grasping at no provisional identity based on the sense of separation and opposition — we can let go and relax into that. It is not a dull empty nothing, as the mind fears. It is the dynamic stillness of non-dwelling.

Sitting, standing, walking, lying down – we stay with this stillness, discarding whatever else arises in mind, and refraining from trying to manipulate any thought forms. Even if demons or angels appear, discard them. Let go, let go, let go. Ultimately, surrender even the one who would surrender, the apparent witness of mind. As the Taoist sage Lao Tsu noted, “To a mind that is still, the whole world surrenders.”

At a certain point of ripeness, the light behind the veil of mind will shine through. This is the “second birth” — spirit baptism. This light will reveal all, including the interdependent nature of all arising phenomena, and thus our fundamental inseparability beyond conditioned self-images of isolation and consequent dis-ease. When this light is joined with one’s living experience and “embodied” in conscious relationship to all, then life becomes spontaneous and the way naturally unobstructed. The war with oneself is ended. Peace at heart.

“Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.”
~Tilopa

 

 

 

See also:

http://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/the-silence-behind-the-mind-and-true-transformation/