This is not religion.
It is not even spiritual. It is the truth, plain and simple.
It can seem like a mystical experience because it is something so important yet so foreign to us. The human mind has been conditioned to take things for granted, not to question things, not to ponder its own existence.
Religion often operates under the pretense of exploring the reality of existence. Only it claims to have done all the work for us, so we need not bother. All it requires of us is blind faith. Our unquestioning belief. Truth requires no such thing.
It is important that concepts of truth are challenged constantly. Yours, mine, everyone's. Because all anyone can own are concepts of truth. Actual truth is not owned by anyone, and doesn't need you or I in order to exist. It exists not only regardless, but in spite of you and I.
The truth is, there is no you or me. There is no self. There is no smaller self, there is no higher Self. There is the universe unfolding. If you look closely, honestly, with integrity and a certain amount of dedication, it will be revealed that self, or sense of self, only resides in thoughts. Thoughts of a self do not point to a self, in the same way that thoughts of a unicorn do not point to an actual unicorn.
This is no dogma. I implore you not to take my word for it, this is not blind faith, please take a look for yourself. This is in fact crucial, and I can't express this enough, that you do not take anyone's word for it. Look for yourself. Look deep and hard for any signs of an actual self. When you find a sign, trace it back to this self it is pointing to. Be absolutely thorough. It is crucial you know for yourself, for certain, that there is no you, as well as the nature of the void.
It's like this; if you've never seen fire, I can describe it to you, but it won't be the same as the direct experience of fire.
What you will come up with on your search for a self, is a mind and a body, and all the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations relating to that body. Only nothing owns them. The components which make up self are real, only they are attributed to the wrong place. "I", "me" and "you" are linguistic conventions which refer to nothing except for a point of reference in experience and/or the universe. And different points in reality simply indicate that it's varied. You are not mind, you are not body, you are not thoughts, you are not even a point of reference.
We think something must own these components, but usually we've never before even stopped to question why something must own them, let alone think about the possibility that there is no owner, and need not be one. We think there is an owner or controller due to this illusion of control, held by the self, or at least the mind. False concepts of self are created from thinking something needs to be responsible for either causing or experiencing something else, when really experience exists regardless. But there is no controlling, of thought, of sensations, or of feelings; you're not even aware of most of the biological and physical functions of the body, let alone in control of them!
A study into any mundane activity can demonstrate this. For example, putting on a jacket. The sun sets. The temperature drops in the environment surrounding the body. The skin prickles with the cold. Thoughts arise, "It's cold, time for a jacket." The eyes locate the jacket, and the hands put it on, one arm at a time. This all happens automatically. I do not need to tell my eyes how to look for a jacket. I do not need to tell my arms how to put it on. There is absolutely no me to be found, logically, in this process whatsoever. It can seem like I am responsible here for making the decision to put on a jacket, but obviously this is not the case. The conditions of the environment have changed, independent of me, and the body has responded by seeking comfort the way it's designed to. I can choose perversely not to put on a jacket in order to prove that I am a separate agent having free will, but this contrary reaction in itself has been forced by the existing conditions, and is dependent on them, and as such does not prove that I exist; just perhaps that a masochistic contrariness is a part of my nature, as well as the fact that the illusory self, when faced with it's own insubstantiality, will fight tooth and nail to prove otherwise.
This is also an insight into the nature of non-duality. If you look even closer, you will even see that all these things aren't even independent, from each other or their environment. There is no real separation here, beyond the illusion of separation. A person, or thing, and its environment are not mutually exclusive. Experience and experiencer are not separate. Reality can only exist in direct experience. Anything outside of that is merely conceptual and speculative, and therefore is irrelevant to what we are talking about here. All that can ever exist is direct experience. As soon as you try to separate experience from experiencer, it is no longer direct experience - a gap is created. The reason truth can't exist independent of the experiencer is because there is no experiencer! Objectivity and subjectivity are redundant because since reality can only ever be subjective (not to me or you - to itself), its direct opposite, "objective", can't exist, and therefore cancels "subjective" out as well.
So, if you're as serious and as desperate to wake up as I was, you wont just take my word for all of this. You wont just pick up a book on the subject and nod your head. You will have questions. You will have doubts. You will doubt what you believe, and what seems true. You will put it through every test you can throw at it. You will shred everything you thought you were and thought you knew to pieces. In fact you will almost certainly teeter on the very edge of madness in the process. But these are the hallmarks of the earnestness, integrity, and unshakable honesty that are imperative in finding truth. And trust me, it is all worth it.
| Share |
0 comments:
Post a Comment