AUTUMN DAWN
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Awareness of awareness is entirely non-dual. Buying into the concept is dualistic, but the actual practice is never dualistic. The key is to establish your practice beyond the idea: in awareness, rather than thinking.
Awareness of awareness begins when attention is shifted from what is being experienced, such as body and mind (apparent objects), to I (apparent subject). The only use of any idea in all this is to remind oneself to include I in awareness of my life. Having been reminded, actually shift attention back to I, observing what I am doing now.
I am both my problem and the solution to my problem. When attention keeps going to I, the apparent source of attention, where I am coming from, I begin to appreciate the nature and extent of all my problems: I. I react mentally. My mental reactions are the only cause of all my problems.
When I realise my mental reactions produce my problems, not what happens, I stop depending on what happens, for happiness. Now, whatever happens is good. Every day is a good day!
Ultimately, I am my mental reactions. No I apart from my mental reactions can be found. This is revealed by degrees as I notice my mental reactions, their unwholesome effects in the form of personal suffering, and I stop reacting at all. When I don't react at all, I am not. Only awareness is. Awareness of awareness is.
This awareness is by nature non-dual.
Ultimately, when I observe what I am doing, I notice I am “following”. This is a bit more advanced and not for beginners. Beginners, please keep shifting attention to I, thus withdrawing attention from my unpleasant feelings, whenever I suffer. In this way, I, as a beginner, purify my emotions. Don't try to understand “unfollowing” till awareness of yourself as subject is well understood through constant practice, and your emotions have been purified to a significant extent.
When people have been seriously hurt they want to follow. They want to understand what actually causes them to ache so badly, and how to free themselves from this terrible ache. This is comparable to baking a cake. If one has the recipe, one can bake the cake successfully.
Knowledge works for everything except to understand Now. No knowledge can ever enter Now. Now is a mystery, inscrutable and unknowable. This means all “recipes” for living in the Now must ultimately be abandoned. A severely hurt person cannot do this: only someone who is no longer hurt, can enter not-knowing with perfect confidence. Someone who has purified their emotions to a marked extent through self-enquiry can feel their way into this, and eventually walk with perfect confidence in the unknown and unknowable Now.
For beginners, don't try to live in the Now. When I try to live in the Now, I and Now am separate. This creates and sustains inner conflict and contradiction. Instead, simply keep shifting attention from what I am experiencing (apparent objects), to I (apparent subject). I am the Now. In this there is no duality, and therefore inner contradiction and conflict end.
When my emotions have been purified to a significant degree, I lose my defensiveness. I realise nobody and nothing can hurt me, except my own lack of self-understanding. This naturally makes me keen to understand the whole process of inner contradiction and conflict ever better.
In this significantly purified self-awareness, when I now look, I see that I am “following” one or more ideas. I am trying to bake a spiritual cake. But the spiritual cake doesn't yield to any recipe. All my knowledge is ultimately useless here, being unable to enter here. I now therefore see that I am the past. I am comprised of all my knowledge. I am the knowledge tree in the Garden of Eden: that fellow who knows good and evil.
I therefore now begin to see that authority has no place in deep enlightenment. My knowledge and my techniques, based on that knowledge, are all useless here. When I now momentarily abandon all my knowledge, I discover I am not. Only emptiness is. Emptiness is observing emptiness. This emptiness is full, complete, filled with Love.
Knowledge is useful for everything except for understanding Now.
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