We often hear it said that the world is an illusion, you are not your body, nothing real can be destroyed, there is no self. Pointers of this kind are often misunderstood to mean that we should pretend to be nobody, and that we should ignore the body and the world and any apparent suffering that may be happening since all of it is “just an illusion.” But what these teachings really point to is that the world as we THINK about it and conceptualize it is an illusion. The self as we think about and conceptualize it is an illusion. The body as we think about and conceptualize it is an illusion. But there is undeniably something right here that is not a thought or a concept, and in fact, no thought, concept or label can ever capture the living reality of this moment. We can call this living reality traffic sounds or listening silence or the taste of tea or the felt-sense of presence or the knowingness of being aware or pure consciousness or the sensations of breathing, but before we apply ANY of those labels or think about it and divide it up and concretize it with words, there is the bare actuality itself, just as it is. That bare actuality, Here / Now, is completely obvious and unavoidable, and at the same time impossible to grasp. It is right here, utterly immediate, most intimate, without the slightest separation. It is what we are. It is seamless, unbound, unencapsulated, boundless, ever-changing and without division. There is infinite variation and diversity, but Here / Now is ever-present. There is a functional sense of identity with this body that arises as needed (we know which name to answer to and how to distinguish between our hand and the carrot we are chopping up), but when we look for the thinker of our thoughts or the maker of our choices, no entity is ever found. No one is inside this body looking out at a separate world. Any such idea is a mental picture, a thought-story, an imagination. Thought divides up this seamless, unbound wholeness into subject and object, self and other, inside and outside, mind and matter, but can we see that these are like the dividing lines on a map that have been conceptually superimposed on the living reality itself? The seamless unicity prior to thought has been called energy, presence, primordial awareness, Consciousness, Here / Now, emptiness, the True Self and many other names. But what is being pointed to is prior to any name. That living reality INCLUDES the name—it includes thought and language and imagination and absolutely EVERYTHING—but it isn’t bound or divided up by words and concepts. Every apparent “thing” that appears Here / Now (me, you, dogs, cats, chairs, tables, emotions, thoughts, sensations, ideas, enlightenment experiences, experiences of depression or anxiety) is empty of any inherent, observer-independent, objective existence “out there” somewhere separate from consciousness. The observing awareness and the thing being observed are one inseparable event. No actual boundary can be found where awareness turns into content, or where “inside of me” turns into “outside of me.” If examined at the subatomic level or seen with speeded-up time-lapse photography, even things that appear to persist over time (tables, rocks, mountains, planets, and so on) are seen to be in continuous flux, inseparable from and entangled with everything else in the universe. By paying close attention to the body, we find no body in the conceptual way we think about our body. And we find no self inside the body steering it through life. We simply find thoughts, sensations, mental images, mental movies, stories, memories, vibrations, urges, impulses, waves of energy, all appearing in the boundless space of Here / Now along with the carpet and the chairs and the trees and the images on the television screen. This is not no-body or no-self or nothing in the sense of some bleak nihilistic void or blankness. It is the living reality of this moment, full of color and smell and shape and sound. It’s simply not what we THOUGHT it was. It doesn’t hold still. It isn’t separate. It’s not “out there.” If we stay on the level of thoughts and ideas, “the world” appears to be a collection of different nations, friends and enemies, my country and your country. But from up on the international space station, the earth is seen to be a seamless, fluid, undivided whole. There are no separate nations visible up there, no borders, no seams. And at the subatomic level, it is equally devoid of substance and solidity. Again, this is not nothing in a nihilistic sense, but simply not what we thought it was. And ALL of this (the space station, the whole earth, the subatomic waves and particles) is appearing in this vast space of aware presence as one whole happening. As a new belief system or an intellectual idea, this is just more baggage. But as a direct discovery in this moment, it is liberation and unconditional love.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 19:15:38 +0000
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