There is silence and stillness right here at the very core of your being. So start from the fact that you already are THAT limitless silence and stillness that ever is. You are certainly not the limited sentient human being that you appear to others and yourself to be, but rather the ‘you’ that you truly and ever are is THIS unknowable limitless immediacy that is silence and stillness. This space of all-knowing naked non conceptual awareness which is the natural state has never moved, changed or altered in any way whatsoever.
This ever lasting life is utterly free and unafraid, there is no death in it. Are you separate or apart from life? No? Then you must be THAT Supreme Reality or non dual Absolute that you are endlessly seeking and trying unsuccessfully to attain. It is the very search itself that is the problem, you already are THAT ineffable Self or immediacy that you can never find or be separate from because what you are seeking you already are, and no one else needs to confirm your being as there is a knowing present here and now that you are, and that can never be negated. You know that you are without having to consult any outside authority whether that be a God, guru, or anyone or anything else.
“You must realise first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can prove your existence, because his existence must be confirmed by you first. Your being and knowing you owe nobody. Remember, you are entirely on your own. You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere. You are timeless being and awareness.”
Don’t just mouth the words of the ancient saints, sages and seers, the Maha-Vakya or great word or statement of Hinduism – I am That! Thou are That! Actually realise or re-cognise the fact that yes, I am THAT! You don’t need any external guru or authority to tell you THIS, you know ‘I am’, without anyone having to tell you. Do I need to consult Jesus, Buddha, or Mahavira to know that I am? Of course not! Get the confidence and conviction for yourself that says and directly confirms the scriptural statement – Be still and ‘know’ that ‘I am’ is God. Not the God of the church, mosque, or temple which is man made, but the supreme reality, such-ness, or very ground of being, beyond being and non being. Don’t ‘think’ that I am is God, because that is only a mental concept or construct, directly know that I am; not the concept I am, but know that this very fact of your own being is God, Truth, or Reality.
You cannot negate your being. You cannot say I am not. You know that you are, good enough, full stop right there, don’t try to work this out in your mind, because you will never find any answer in your mind which is only acquired memories and imagination. There is really no such thing as mind. Bring your mind out here and let me have a good look at it! You know, this mind that is giving you all this trouble and psychological suffering and that is telling you that you are not good enough, that nobody loves you, and that you are not enlightened yet; whatever that means.
When you look for your mind you cannot find anything there at all that you could call mind apart from this awareness, this impersonal ever-present activity of knowing. THIS is the active side of infinity, This ever present, unqualified immediacy, this activity of knowing that I am, just This, nothing else! This border line between being and non being is the razor’s edge, the Moola Maya or root potential for endless universes that are exploding from this awesome nothing or on thing below the bottom line traced out right there at the region of you neck and shoulders area where your view of your upper body fade out completely into this nothing or no thing. If you care to LOOK, you can clearly SEE and notice on present evidence, that when you glance down from where you are truly seeing from, again on present evidence, you SEE an upside down torso which fades out completely and merges or folds into this nothing, no thing, or emptiness below this bottom line traced out at your neck and shoulders area, that ‘is’ the awesome ground of all being right there at zero degrees from where you are, and from where you have ever been.
“No longer so damned cocksure I know what it is like being me, I dare to start all over again and ‘bow before the evidence’ – actually as well as metaphorically. I bend and bow so deeply that I come to the very edge of me and my world, to the Bottom Line it all arises from. A frontier that doesn’t prevent me from gazing past it and in to the Infinite Source of All, brilliantly on display yet awesomely mysterious.”
The mind is time which has a beginning and an ending, but this being that we are pointing to here is timeless without any beginning or ending. You may say that in one hundred years time I will not be around, I will have died or disappeared. Yes, of course, but who knows this? You, the dynamic manifest consciousness knows this. Wouldn’t it be imperative to realise or re-cognise the very fact of this timeless immediacy right here and now so that this groundless fear and psychological suffering can end totally and be seen for the nothingness that it really is?
One of the keys to this understanding is the realisation or the knowledge that time is not real and that in fact time is only a mental concept. What time is there if you don’t think about it? None at all! Is there a past if you don’t think about it? No there is not! Is there a future if you don’t think about it? Of course there isn’t! There is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today if you don’t think about it. “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” So all of your problems are caused by the thinking when it is not properly understood. Thinking when it is understood is not a problem and can be quite useful, but when it is not understood it can vibrate into all sorts of opposites being dualistic in its nature, build up a mental image and a made up conceptual story, and thus cause endless psychological suffering that doesn’t really need to be there.
Thinking when it is understood is nothing but a vibration or movement of energy, in this limitless energy that is consciousness itself. Life is energy and energy is power, however this power that is life is Omnipotence – all power. There is nothing that is separate from this energy or Shakti (a Sanskrit term for energy or power). Everything that is appearing in the world of phenomena is Maya or illusion as pointed out in Advaita Vedanta(the truth and actuality of non duality) in Hinduism; simply because anything and everything that ‘appears’ is and can be nothing but energy, patterning and appearing in various shapes and forms as different from itself. One essence, energy, or Omnipotence expressing and appearing as everything. Even though it appears and expresses as the phenomenal universe(a universe made up of phenomena) it has still not changed its true nature of limitless intelligence, this ever-present activity of knowing.
See for yourself that there are ‘not two’ powers like good and evil, heaven and hell, God and the devil, etc; there is only one power , one essence, one reality and you are THAT no thing or emptiness-awareness that every apparent thing is appearing on. Could there be any appearances without the space that they are appearing in? Ask yourself this, don’t just accept some jumped up guru’s word for it. See and know that I am THAT non dual Absolute, and that there are no others apart from me as THAT. Not two powers, only one essence or power! Can you as the apparent human being be apart from from that Omnipotence when THAT is all there ever is?
Everything in the appearance can be broken down into the basic elements, into sub-atomic particles, then finally into pure energy or basic space. Thinking is nothing but energy and energy is not divided up into the thinker and the thought, it is energy pure and simple. When it is seen that there is no separate ‘thinker’ of a thought, no entity as such, no “me”, So and So who is doing the thinking, thought is then free to flow. Being thought free is not to try to stop the thoughts as they are spontaneously arising, but to simple let them flow freely without having to refer them back to that dead image, “me”, So and So, who then wrongly thinks that he or she is thinking those thoughts.
Thought because it is a vibration can only function dualistically, it can only function in the pairs of opposites, that is its nature. Because it is vibration or movement it vibrates from happy to sad, loving to hating, good to bad, and on and on it goes. Observe your mind throughout the day and directly see that this is what it is doing,(recalling the past and anticipating the future, it is never in the timeless now that is this immediacy) constantly moving and changing from highs to lows etc, and that is why you can never get peace of mind in that sense; as mind itself as it appears and functions is constant movement. Peace is when the mind is not, when the mind is seen through and understood to have no independent nature of its own, seen to be nothing but a movement of energy taking place in awareness. “When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist.” When is this going to happen? It is going to happen now which is this immediacy, as there is no other time or place that anything can happen.
The mind is then quite useful for practical purposes, and is seen to be a good servant, and nothing else. The mind then is no longer your master as it was before, when it was seemingly giving you all this strife and psychological suffering, but is now a useful servant. “The mind is a good servant, but it is a terrible master.” Yes, and don’t we all know it!
The past never really happened at all, it only ‘appeared’ to do so, just like the night time dream disappears and is seen to be illusory and unreal on waking up. The dream doesn’t happen while you are awake, it only takes place when you are asleep. You can recall the past or you can ‘imagine’ what might take place in the so called future, but the only reality that the past has got is what you are giving it presently, what you are giving it now. This immediacy is the only moment you can ever live, you can’t live a second in the past or the future. So if you are caught up in the mind stuff of dead thoughts and concepts saying to yourself, what if this happens or what if that so called event happens, you are not really living at all, you are stuck in the head stuff, stuck in time that is unreal and imaginary. This is where the living is, in this immediacy, not in what you hope might happen in some future time. If you are not in this immediacy and are instead fixating on the mental thoughts and concepts that can’t keep pace with the very vitality of this livingness, of this ever-fresh immediacy, then you are missing out on life completely.
The conceptual entity, the person, Mr or Mrs So and So, is a dead image, it is not the real, and so can not keep pace with the ever-fresh presence of the moment. Yesterday’s realisation is not a bit of good, it is now dead and has lost its vitality, so it is useless to try to hold onto and cling to an insight, a realisation, or an understanding, for only in the movement of the livingness can there be the possibility and enabling of ever-fresh and new insights of Truth or Reality to appear.
When does now begin? Doesn’t it begin now, presently? When does now end? Doesn’t it end right now? So as it is ending it is beginning again spontaneously, and this Spanda or throb, this somewhat of a movement is what constitutes this very immediacy that can’t be grasped with any label or concept. So there is no ending or beginning to this immediacy that is the natural state. When does life begin? Does it begin when the child is delivered to the mother after a nine months pregnancy? Does life end when any so called human being is pronounced to be dead or deceased? Of course not, life lives on itself and does not know death.
There is something, no thing that is, that knows the life-force and that is not subject to decay or corruption. There is an unborn, an unmade, an unbecoming that is free of and beyond or prior to, all life and death. This is what needs to be known, not by any entity, object, or thing. This ground of being is not subject to decay or becoming, it is what we might call a cognising-emptiness, an emptiness suffused with awareness or naked non conceptual knowing or Such-ness. Here thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value. In this world of Such-ness there is neither self nor other-than-self. This you will never grasp with a concept, but must be seen-known, re-cognised directly; and this is only possible when the mind is totally emptied of the dead past, and when all of the accumulated and acquired knowledge and language of the imagined human condition has been fully abandoned, discarded, cleaned out, relinquished, or put aside so to speak.
Everything remains the same and “as it is”, with things and objects appearing and disappearing, yet you know the truth about these so called appearances, and that in themselves they have no substance or independent nature of their own whatsoever and are like the reflections that appear in the mirror. The reflections that appear in the mirror are apparent, yet non existent. You can see the reflections in the mirror, they are definitely there but if you try to extract any of the reflections from the mirror it quickly becomes apparent that they have no separate independent nature of their own and are nothing but the mirror itself.
“The real does not die, the unreal never lived.
Imagine a big building collapsing, some rooms are in ruins,
some intact.
But can you speak of the space as ruined or intact?
It is only the structure that suffered and the people who happened to live in it.
Nothing happened to space itself.
Similarly, nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out.
The goldsmith melts down old jewellery to make new.
Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off, like a discarded garment.
The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death.
The body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long.”
See the incontrovertible truth and actuality of this and forget about belief all together. Do you believe that you are, or is there a naked knowing that you are, already present there with you, thereby rendering any and all beliefs unnecessary and utterly irrelevant?
“A pinprick of “knowingness” has flashed against the background of my innate “not knowingness.”
In it appear all the universes.”
“All this is tranquil, One without beginning, middle or end, which cannot be said to be existent or
non-existent. Know this and be happy.”
The perfection of what is.
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Notes from Kings Cross Tuesday 1st August 2017 Next Post:
Notes from Kings Cross, Friday, 2nd February, 2018
This. Is. Perfect. All that needs to be said.
Yes but even the Buddha lived in a commununity. Or as Alain de Botton notes in ‘Religion for Atheists’ religious community reminds us of things pertinent to life ie we fail continually at the autonomy you speak of, so we need a weekly, or even more regular, reminders via a collective of like minded people.