September 29, 2011

I am always already non-phenomenally here.  I can sense or feel this absence as clearly as I sense supposedly phenomenal presence, which is actually an illusion of mind.  In fact the two are one without a second, undivided and indivisible.  The truth is, when I describe it as Being-Knowledge-Bliss I am merely describing colors emergent from a prism.

I feel subjectivity as a wispy skeleton of ash at the edge of collapse.  I feel transparent and brimming at once.  This is nothing new.  I have simply awakened to what has always been so.

"What, then, is it?  No sort of "what."  Just sheer phenomenal absence, whose absence is us (THIS which we are)." - Wei Wu Wei

Senses are tentacles of the unmanifest.  Good name for a rock band somewhere in there.

Here is WWW at his best:

"Therefore 'it' is ultimate and absolute phenomenal absence and the absence of that concept of 'absence,' which is absolute presence."


Oy.  I think he has all the bases covered.  I'm pretty sure his statement is so pure it is foreign.  Dense, too, almost opaque and impenetrable at first.  But he encapsulates or projects reality in just a few words--no easy feat.  Dude is crazy deep.

Mind chills the wind,
Strips the leaves,
Snaps the trunk,
Uproots the tree.
Mind is a typhoon run amok,
But bye and bye,
I am the Eye.

The purpose?  To live life on a basis of truth rather than false premises.  Yes, this is a judgement, a spiritually visceral judgement.  In WWW's terms, a "whole-mind" judgement.

September 28, 2011

We rend "what is" into past, present and future, just as a blank key is ground to fit a lock and open a door, in this case the door of cognition.  All of time and space are but renderings of our imagination.  Problems ensue when we take our imagination for reality.  Conversely, our problems, which are imaginary anyway, are solved for once and all when we "re-cognize" this false reality as illusory.  This is enlightenment.  In reality, "what is" never changes a lick.  In reality, our brief bouts of selfhood are no more than flickerings of a flame.  This is neither good nor bad.  It is perfect.

September 27, 2011

My vision has been going south lately.  I struggle to read--very frustrating.  However, I did have some moments of incredibly moving clarity during a visit from San Pedro this past weekend.  Tears of joy clarity, the kind we all have buried deep within us beneath layers of conditioning.  I watched "Concert for Bangladesh" and completely broke down sobbing when Harrison sang "Here Comes the Sun."  The man radiated compassion.  Dylan, too.  I may just be an old fuddy-duddy, but I have yet to see a band or a poet carry the torch those guys lit for us.  Maybe U2 and Springsteen tried, but nobody lately.

September 22, 2011

Oh, this Wei Wu Wei, such a character.  It figures he's French.  He reminds me of a philosopher version of the French writer, Robbe-Grille.  R.G. had his day in the 60's I think, back in the Grove Press days when a lot of weird stuff came out as experimental fiction.  R-G was known for what I would call flatline writing: creating scenes with the unwinking and nonjudgmental eye of a camera.  No comment minimalism or objectivism, dry as church as I recall.  But he was terrific at whatever the hell he was doing.  Same goes in spades for WWW.  The man is uncompromising in telling the truth even if it sounds insane.

September 21, 2011

If  this "thing of ours" is so true and wonderful, then why aren't there more people seeking it?  Well, probably because it makes no sense from our vantage formed by a lifetime of false conditioning.  How are we to be encouraged to follow, as WWW puts it, "the pathless way that leads no body from no there to no here?"  Some may stumble upon it via the mystical aspect of their religious tradition.  Meister Eckhart is an example of this.  He is also an example of how the enlightened ones were persecuted by the dim bulbs of fundamentalism.  Others, like myself, may have been leading lives so miserably off track we were literally driven to seek it.  We had been softened up enough by hard knocks to listen to our intuition, to follow our "sadguru," as it is known in yoga.  Nor is enlightenment easy to teach, or even cognizable in the ordinary sense of the word.  Most daunting of all, enlightenment is a suicide mission for the ego, for our misguided sense of ourselves as separate and individual.

September 18, 2011

"It is devoid of any trace of objectivity." - Huang Po

The one, the unity, the common essence, is boundless and undivided, empty and unqualified, encompassing both manifest and unmanifest.  It cradles being as implicitly and imperceptibly as loam cradles organic nutrients.

I am rereading "Open Secret" by Wei Wu Wei, the Frenchman, who was probably the most opaque and frustrating master I had ever read.  The work now reads like a primer, very pure.  What I took to be tortured logic has been supplanted by quick, clear recognition of truth.  I'm glad WWW finally got it right.  I'm happy they named the Web after him, too.

September 17, 2011

I laugh each time I learn of another "discovery" by science that belatedly (3,000 years?) confirms the truth of Advaita. It seems to me that much of 20th century science moved towards recognition of the perceiver's effect upon the perceived, thus coloring reality, or what we think real, in many subtle and heretofore unacknowledged ways.  Psychology, conditioning, environment, our particular experiences all affect and shape our experience of reality.  Advaita advances this a bit more by positing a reality absent of perceiver and perceived, undivided and indivisible. The sages tell us that there is no "doer" or "doership."  Now I read that a German neuroscientist at a prestigious Berlin research facility has conducted studies that suggest "consciousness of a decision may be a mere bio-chemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on our actions."  In other words, our supposed free will, our choices, are after-the-fact responses.  This scientist used a modern brain scanner to arrive at his conclusion.  The rishi's of old could have told him that numberless causes through infinite time underlie every supposed action we attribute to free will.  Everything everywhere must be exactly so for me to lift my little finger, supposedly volitionally.  We are not living, we are being lived and unaware of it.  This is the next paradigm, a new vantage for 21st century science.  Of course, the rishi's would laugh as they explained, because they knew it's all an illusory game anyway and that eventually, should we survive so long, we will come full circle to the truth:

"There is neither creation nor destruction,
Neither destiny or free will,
Neither path nor achievement;
This is the final truth." - Sri Ramana Maharshi

Ultimately, dark matter will be found to consist of ourselves, the same substance we observe when we gaze at our own face without a mirror.  It's everywhere.

September 15, 2011

S.R. states that he is passing on "a sacred technology" of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and enlightenment practices.  He sees them as being adapted and perpetuated in the West just as Tibet, itself, began to blink off beneath the Chinese invasion.  He urges us toward "a depth of understanding of the tradition fused with a real awareness of the problems and challenges of modern life."  Without exaggeration, practicing and teaching these truths will in great measure determine the survival of humanity, and more importantly, the quality of life should we survive.  On the positive side, every human being possesses a predilection, a propensity for awakening.  But it is buried deep beneath lifetimes of false conditioning all stemming from the basic misidentification of ourselves as separate body-minds.  Restless discontent and rampant consumerism are just further evidence of how far off the mark we live.

Too often we make the search for enlightenment a search for bliss, that is, our particular mental formulation of bliss.  Yes, bliss is at the very heart of awakening, but it is bliss of unexpected substance (or emptiness), "neti-neti" bliss, bliss consisting of freedom and absence, not endorphins and narcissism.   

September 14, 2011

I watched the Tampa tea party-hosted Republican presidential debate last night - aghast.  The low-light came when Ron Paul was presented a question of what the government ought to do for a thirty-year-old who rolled the dice and went without health insurance, had an accident, was in a coma.  Before Paul even had a chance to vocalize his usual "no government is good government" response, the tea party patrons in the hall began to shout "let him die!"  This crushing economic recession is inexorably crushing social civility with it.  I can only hope that I am witnessing a radical minority and there are enough of us left who keep our heads to vote down this stuff in a general election.  Otherwise all signs point to a fascist climate similar to 30's Nazi Germany.
"...
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." - Yeats

My boy, Yeats, knew our politics all too well when he darkly noted "the centre cannot hold."

"...instead of embracing the 'emptiness'..., in which we could find the bliss of being free from and unburdened by any idea, reference, or concept, we grasp at the dubious security of the familiar comforting drama of our emotions, driven by our deep habitual tendencies." - S.R.

And that goes double for conservatives.

September 13, 2011

That higher spiritual reality is here and now in life, if only we can discover and enter it." S.R.

"It's like an entrance to eternity." - Wojtek Ballzun, a railworker from Warsaw as he gazed at the sunken fountains of the 9/11 memorial.

September 12, 2011

Amongst all the 9/11 coverage this week I watched one show about the selection and building of the memorial at the site.  Five thousand applicants sent in ideas, visions, models, and ultimately one utilizing the footprints of the original towers was chosen.  Two massive pond/fountains were hewn from the foundation, some 30' down below the surface, probably about 1 acre each.  But what really struck me were the words their architect used to describe them.  Standing within the vast space of one of these fountains still under construction, stories beneath the ground, the man explained the design as an effort "to evoke the absence of presence," and thus the impermanence of things we tend to think permanent.  He could as easily have reversed it to the presence of absence and in either case be dancing with very subtle and very real descriptions of our intuitive seventh sense.  This was one sensitive architect.  He went on to describe the fountain waters as representing "gentle persistence."  What better way to describe the yoga of enlightenment as gentle persistence continuously flowing to awaken a feeling of the absence of presence!

September 9, 2011

Eyes opened or closed, no matter, everything perceived becomes incidental, secondary to a unified state of presence.  Everything I say or write obscures it - what paradox!  This seventh sense does not distinguish, it engulfs, swallows whole effortlessly all that is.  It is empty and full at once.    

September 8, 2011

"All substances are my own mind, and this mind is emptiness, unarisen and unobstructed."  - Tibetan Book of the Dead
"Thinking this, keep your mind natural and undiluted, self-contained in its own nature like water poured into water, just as it is, loose, open and relaxed."  TBLD

How to "keep your mind" like this, that is the key for me now.  To help us get there, yogis of all stripes have broadcast hundreds of methods, most of them based upon some form of extended concentration: breath, mantra, parts of the body, sensory objects, chakras, mental constructs, visualizations, etc.  Followed in earnest, any such method may take us to a precipice of mindfulness, of sorts, where we stand completely immersed and still, gazing into an abyss.  The great teachers nudge us off the cliff with their pointers.  We fall from "I am" to "am," and that false bottom drops into neither "am" or "not-am."  We fall until zero-gravity brings us to a halt in a state of undiluted clarity and fullness, water poured into water.

September 4, 2011

Let be be finale of seem. - Wallace Stevens

September 1, 2011

America has a self-appointed (wealth appointed) aristocracy every bit as moneyed and honey'd as that sheikh-filled sandbox across the pond--uh oh, I'm reading the paper again, damn it.

August 31, 2011

Is what I experience non-dual?  Yes in that the "sensing" is global, boundless, without a center.  The explaining is dual because I must use words such as "emptiness," which imply their opposite. S.R. says that we must establish ourselves in this state until it becomes a constantly blazing fire, evaporating all sensual and mental clutter before it has effect.  Me?  I am a sputtering fire, still falling back into darkness, conscious and then unconscious in intervals.  The samskaras run deep.

I've noticed that ever since I started receiving and reading the newspaper first thing each day my mood sours, whereas before first thing out of the gate was spiritual reading and contemplation and good vibrations.  I may have to resist the paper, at least until sundown when I can walk off the fumes.  American air is humid with venom these days.
  

August 30, 2011

The seventh sense is global, that is to say, beginning-less, endless, without dimension or qualification.  S.R. describes it as the clear sky just before sunrise, in other words, empty yet all-pervasive and all-pervaded.  As experienced in life, this sense dissolves identification with the body-mind into transparent consciousness, hollow mind-stuff.  What is sensed is blissful.  Dissolution of the body-mind takes with it all the ties that bind: emotion, desire, fear, memory, expectation, all boil down into a single weightless, boundless, untainted presence.  You are doing it, or rather, you are it right now, already and always, just unawares.  Opening to the seventh sense requires less effort than lifting your eyes to the sky.