Greed takes a good long look at itself. Made of mind, fed by mind, of no enduring substance other than an uninspected movement of desire which doesn’t know of anything beyond itself and so can’t stop, it suddenly sees itself in action, its own essential emptiness manifesting as the fruit of selfish thought, like a wild saxophone taking over the stage at the expense of every other thought which only longs to lose itself in the seductive music of virtual reality, to fall back into the gravity of its own imagined source and disappear. This is how it self-corrects. Recognition is liberation, just as liberation is delusion.
So too for hatred — in the mirror of itself it sees itself, its present hateful countenance. In the glare of its hatred it scares itself. It actually would like to just sit down with a fat glass of Bourbon and a Cubano, take the shoes off and enjoy the looming crash of breaking worlds it has set in motion, but hate gets no rest, there is always more to hate, more watered-down whiskey and cheap tobacco dives where the grumbling is thick and they keep the lights turned down low.
There too in some seedy old shack is found ignorance. Ignorance can’t recognize itself, for if it did it would be transmuted into wisdom, and that would strain the credulity of greed and hatred, so it simply goes along to get along, ignorantly, until wonder of wonders it spawns that magical child, delusion, though it knows nothing of it. It revels in the singular pseudo-bliss of itself, even while its offspring populate the dream with creative characters who bear a striking resemblance to ourselves.
Because delusion is dream-like in its arising, enduring, and eventual vanishing, it cannot be said to have any fundamental reality. In that sense, it is a paradoxical mystery that courses beyond the comprehension of any intelligence which is subsequently formed by the coincidence of swooshing cerebral fluids, sparking neurons, and ripening causes and conditions to approximate some imaginary phenomenal center that serves as a subject entangled with numberless whirling objects, all dancing without purpose in the immensity of an infinite impersonal void.
Never can it be said that it is mine, that it is my self, that it is what I am, because what I am is the basic aware space in and as which everything seems to appear and disappear, though in reality nothing happens, begins, or ceases — neither greed, hatred, nor ignorance. This can be easily verified by refraining from identifying with any appearance, perception, feeling, memory, sensation, or mental fabrication, until nothing more can be realized or forgotten, and only then “what is” reveals itself, as it is — pure delusion.
Because it is pure by nature, delusion itself is spontaneously self-illuminating. Whatever the experience — happy or sad, vivid or dull — it is the precise form of our own awareness, exactly as it is being experienced, and thus it is perfect, just as it is, in the very form that it is. It is only our resistance to “what is” that creates the desperation of spiritual or material paths, schemes, and methods, which in turn only prolong the chronic neurosis of unhappiness, replete with greed, hatred, and ignorance.
Consider this: radiant light or murky darkness make no difference to the transparent sky of a vast and empty hologram. There is no higher or lower, better or worse. Neither praise nor blame apply, nor does the human persona’s judgment of right and wrong, good or bad. All delusion is equal in value, having no inherent value itself.
When seeing has no seer, hearing no hearer, and perceiving no perceiver, then awareness cannot be saddled with any identity, history, karma, personality, or even any fixed locality. Where is the sky? Who is the sky? When was the sky? Because nothing under the sky stays the same, the nature of all phenomena can be regarded as “impermanent”. Because there is nothing that can actually be grasped and designated “the sky”, the infinite space in which all appears, thrives for a while, and vanishes is itself no different than any other prop in a fictitious story told by nobody.
Silence pervades the three times and ten directions. “Vast emptiness” is only a provisional term intended to stop the tears of child-like dream characters. In reality, there is no such thing. There could never be. There is no vastness, no emptiness, no word. All of that is exquisite delusion. Even “exquisite” can be discarded, for if there is nothing, to what can it be compared? Unperceivable and inconceivable — that is what we are, yet we are greedy, hateful, and ignorant too. To imagine otherwise is delusional. Stay silent.
Silence is the Mother Principle, except that silence is not the absence of any sound. That sort of silence is only a relative condition, dependent on conditional factors, but true silence is not a state or result of any combination of causes, nor can it be an object to itself. Whatever can be devised by the marvelous functioning of the divine creative intelligence does not apply to that prior silence which is elsewhere called (by the deluded) the Absolute, the Supreme, the fundamental Basis.
Out of this no-thing — perfect silence — the whole grand totality of universal manifestation flashes noisily into being, expands to fill the entire cosmos with its cacophony, and simultaneously dissolves, without the slightest glitch or hesitation, and without the most minute particle or trace of a substantial self, except what can be superimposed on a non-event by the functioning of pure delusion. Therefore, delusion is the source of all identification, all mental formations, all emotional reactivity, all mirror poses and self-images, and any apparent perception of duality or non-duality. Truly, there is no way around delusion, for to seek such a way is the play of delusion itself. Stay silent.
When the mind moves, delusion is its function, its signal and its signature. Nothing that can be conceived, observed, known, or imagined is real. To subsequently establish or cherish some story about any of it is delusional, and so these very words are the adornments of delusion too. The ultimate expression of delusion is the claim, “I am this”, or “I am that”. From there, greed, hatred, and ignorance ripple out through the frequencies and are only resolved by collapsing back into the welcoming womb of delusion, then rising again and again in this perpetual festival of illusion as our playful dream creations which we conceptually designate as the self, the world, the everything. So be it.
The Conscious Process 