David Carse
The difference between awake and not awake is so incredibly thin it hardly
can be said to exist. It’s as if, to use an admittedly strange image, all that
is needed is a very tiny shift in your mind, to shift your mind metaphorically
to one side of where it is, by an almost imperceptible amount; and that shift,
that pop would be sufficient to change the perspective enough so that all would
be seen as it is. Tiny; so tiny that almost nothing is needed. I call it a
‘phase shift,’ probably from watching too much Star Trek; everything remains as
it is, it’s just that the perceiving is brought into phase with What Is.
What has changed? Nothing; that’s how tiny a shift is needed.
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Walking in the Vermont woods at night, I learned at a young age that what
you could make out in the darkness, what you could see, depended on how you
looked. Repeatedly, you would see a movement in your peripheral vision and turn
to look directly at it, to see only darkness. Eventually, one learns not to
turn, not to look directly, but to keep it just in your peripheral vision, just
at the point where you are almost not looking at it at all. That is when you
can see it best. Subtle. It is lost, overlooked if there is positive movement,
direct searching, active thinking, anything but profound stillness. Focus on
it, and it is gone. All of the talking, all of the asking questions, reading
books, meditating, thinking, focusing, seeking, is all counterproductive
because it is pushing in the wrong direction, creating activity and turbulence
and noise.
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One of the really amazing things about all this is the realization that the
whole human tradition and history and movement and tendency toward
‘spirituality’ and ‘the holy’ and ‘sacredness’ is entirely off track. It is
totally misguided. There is nothing holy or spiritual or sacred or divine about
All That Is. It is entirely a-theistic. It is completely and thoroughly
impersonal from start to finish. The human tendency toward awe and mystery and
the numinous is just that: a tendency, part of the programming of the body/
mind organisms.
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I once spent an afternoon listening to a teacher explaining reality like
this: Say you have spent your whole life looking at a photograph of a tree.
Beautiful, full color, fine resolution. So you think that’s all there is; that
beautiful photograph of a tree is what you think of as reality. But I’m here,
he said, to take you back a step, before the photograph. (He had read Maharaj.)
So 1 show you the negative from which the photograph was made. (This was before
digital cameras.) Suddenly, you realize your whole reality has a flip side.
Here in duality, everything has its opposite, which exists along with it. Now,
if you place the negative over the photograph, you can see they cancel each
other out. Where there is dark in the photograph, there is light in the
negative, and vice versa. Even the colors are the opposite of each other.
So what you get when you hold them together is: precisely nothing.
The positive cancels the negative and vice versa so there is neither
positive nor negative, there is nothing. Void. And that is what reality truly
is. Not what you have always thought it is, and not its opposite, but the
simultaneous existence and non-existence of both.
The deeper one goes into what the West calls ‘unconsciousness,’ the Advaita
model sees as more conscious. What the West calls waking up, Advaita sees as
becoming more unconscious.
The western psychological model is to make ‘unconscious’ processes
‘conscious;’ that is, recognized and interpreted by the waking consciousness.
And the thought patterns that occur in dreaming consciousness are endlessly
interpreted by the waking mind. The Advaita model would see this process as
backwards, as dumbing-down the ‘higher’levels of consciousness in a way that is
amenable to the ‘lowest’ level.
Dreams, and also other messages from what is called the unconscious or
subconscious, often seem very strange to the waking consciousness, precisely
because they do not fit into waking ‘reality.’ Waking consciousness then must
interpret the dream to make sense of it in light of what it accepts as
‘reality.’
The usual way of interpreting a dream is to translate its content into
terms familiar with the waking I. If we followed the Hindus’ insight into
levels of consciousness, we would reverse this process. We would ask ourselves
what the dreaming I knows about the waking I that the waking I cannot know
about itself.
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Before awakening or after awakening, the body/mind organism continues to
operate as it is programmed and conditioned: and so it is always helpful to
know where one’s psychological blind spots are. Simply learning what and where
these are, without trying to ‘fix’ them, can be extremely helpful; but beyond
that there’s not much point working on the ego (or for that matter, working to
diminish the ego), since it is only a hologram or illusion which doesn’t
actually exist on its own merits.
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Of course, taking personal responsibility is a more mature understanding
than faulting and blaming everyone else, and so it is taught as a useful
strategy for societies and for individuals in the dream. But ultimately this
too is seen to be as empty a concept as the concept of the individual on which
it’s based.
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In practical terms, nine tenths or more of the perceived problem, this
so-called ‘bondage,’ or more practically, unhappiness, has to do with the
concept of responsibility. People do love the concept of free will, go to the
block for it, believe life isn’t worth living without it. But a consistent
examination reveals that it is only an idea, not your actual experience at any
point. ‘Causation’ is so complex that there is no way you can truly say ‘free
will’ has any meaningful input into any action performed by the mind/body you
call yourself. Can you actually find one action which you can be sure, which
you can prove was yours alone, or yours significantly, or even yours at all and
not the result of the interconnected net of influences of genetics, environment,
training, culture, conditioning, historical ‘accident’, ‘chance’ encounter, and
so on? Ultimately, you cannot. Once this is understood, it is possible to see
that what we think of as individuals are not subjects, not points of origin,
but are objects, instruments through which Consciousness, ‘cosmic force,’
‘divine energy’ works or flows. The concept of ‘responsibility’ then pretty
much relaxes and goes away. ‘You’ are no more responsible for what occurs
through the mind/body you call your'self’ than the flute is responsible for the
music played on it by the musician.
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Q: Does psychology or therapy have any place in this process of waking up?
D. Carse: It’s interesting that you use that word, because that’s the
difference. Therapy is a process, something the dream characters go through
here in the dream. Process and growth and becoming only happen in duality; such
is the nature of duality. Awakening is not a process, it is popping out of the
context of process, out of duality.
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Q: could the sage be the instrument through which a killing happens?
D. Carse: Why not? If it is part of the perfect infinite unfolding in
Consciousness for something, anything, or any combination of things to happen,
how can they not happen?
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Q: Okay, so the sage is really just like an ordinary person?
What does he gain, what is the benefit of enlightenment?
D. Carse: It is the body/mind organisms and their functioning that are
alike. The sage knows he is not the body/mind, not a person at all. There is no
one to gain anything! So the benefit would be for those around him, like the
guy’s friends maybe, or when he had students... Ha! ‘The guy’s friends,’
assuming it’s a guy and assuming he has any friends, might find him harder to
get along with than before! But yes, sure, there is the potential for great
benefit for others.
Q: the students?
D. Carse: Who says he has any students?
Q: But wouldn’t a sage teach?
D. Carse: Why? Once again, only if it is in the script in the dream for
that ‘sage’ dream character to teach. Only if it was the ‘destiny,’ according
to the cosmic unfolding, of that ‘sage’ body/mind organism to talk on the
subject.
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Q: So okay, what is the difference between a regular person and a sage?
D. Carse: Just the Understanding, my friend. Only the seeing, the knowing;
that is all. Just the Peace that passes all understanding. And what good is it?
None at all, you could say. Buddha said, “Truly, I obtained nothing from
enlightenment.” And Huang Po wrote, “There is just a mysterious tacit
understanding and no more.” The sage is not a super¬ human, a regular person
with something added. The sage is a regular person with something less; the
sense of being a separate self, a separate individual, is gone: there is no one
home.
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Q: i’ve heard that in the sage, everything happens spontaneously.
D. Carse: Yes. And do you want to know what else? In everyone, everything
happens spontaneously. In you, everything happens spontaneously.
Q: I don’t experience it like that.
D. Carse: Exactly. That’s the difference.
Q: Do you believe that the Understanding can happen to anyone?
D. Carse: I don’t believe anything.
Q: What?
D. Carse: There are no
beliefs here.
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Q: can this
Understanding happen to anyone, any body/mind?
D. Carse: Of course.
Q: Could it happen to
me?
D. Carse: No, of
course not. That’s the difference. But it could happen in the case of the
body/mind organism which at the moment you think is you, and then there would
be the understanding that there never was a ‘you,’ a ‘me’ for anything to
happen to, and that who You are is the Consciousness in which all this appears
to happen. The Understanding and the belief in a ‘me’ are mutually exclusive:
if one is there the other will not be.
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In essence, the illusion of time is exactly the same as the illusion of
space, which is exactly the same as the illusion of the individual self. They
are part of each other, depend on each other, and prop each other up to form
samsara, the objective manifestation brought about through the agency of perception.
This is why the illusion of the individual self, or even simply the illusion of
the self as an individual ‘doer’ of anything, can be used as a focal point
toward the Understanding. When this illusion dissolves, the illusions of space
and time go with it.
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A preliminary, intellectual understanding of the Teaching would lead one to
conclude that the best way to help is to be empty, to stop trying to be
helpful; and the best way to be ‘caring’ is to stop caring and get out of the
way. But it goes deeper than that: What is, is unfolding perfectly. There is no
way to not be helpful; there is no way anyone can get in the way.
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Trying to eliminate attachments in order to bring about the seeing is of
course back-asswards once again and doesn’t work. How many people do you know
have ‘attained’ enlightenment, or even happiness for that matter, by doing
violence to themselves in this manner, trying to cut out what is naturally
there?
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There are no mistakes. It is not possible to make a mistake. You are not
the doer of any action, the experiencer of any experience. How can you be the
maker of any mistake?
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What happens through these mind/body things, happens. If there is learning
to happen, it will happen. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes change happens,
sometimes it does not. Sometimes such change follows insight, sometimes it
precedes it. The perceived chain of cause and effect and the mandate to better
ourselves are seen through as parts of the dream/game.
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The source of suffering and unhappiness really is all this attachment, this
hanging on to our cherished ideas even though they obviously don’t work and
have never given anyone lasting happiness.
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There is no thing to attain, no where to go. There is only acceptance of
what is, on the deepest possible level, and even that only happens if it
happens. If one is not ready to hear this, it will not be heard no matter how
well articulated. When one is ready to hear it, it can be said in passing by
someone on the street and it will strike home. When there is a body/mind
organism in which this is ready to happen, a certain word or phrase in a
certain context can be, like in the Zen story, the “sound of the pebble against
the earthenware pot” which causes the cascade failure of the mind and the
occurrence of Realization... Which is the only possible end to suffering.
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Acceptance is very deep, is infinite: and it starts here, in your own
heart. Whatever arises is accepted. If resentment arises, there is acceptance
that resentment is happening in this body/mind. If there then comes a layer of
judgement, that the resentment should not be happening, then the acceptance can
go deeper, to accept that the judgement is happening.
If there is another layer, of feeling bad about your¬ self perhaps, or an
unhappiness that you are the ‘kind of person’ in whom resentment arises, or
feeling bitter or hopeless, or whatever; then that too can be included in the
infinite acceptance. If there is an urge to be more mindful or attentive to the
root causes of resentment, then there is acceptance that such a motivation is
arising. There is no end to the acceptance. And then it extends outward, to
events and situations and other people. Deep acceptance, at all levels, of
whatever arises; even if it is not liked; even the not-liking itself.
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The dream characters do not need to know; they will play out their parts in
any case. Even this dream character whose part in the dream is to wake up in
the dream and realize it is a dream character. So what? Who cares? Ask
yourself, who is it that feels like it cares, feels like it wants to know?
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This sense of caring and importance runs very deep in the conditioning and
is not easily seen through or set aside. Even seekers who are familiar with the
concept that ‘none of this matters’ will be brought up short by this idea that
even ‘awakening’ is part of the script for the dream character in which it
occurs, and is of no significance.
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How can anything that happens in the case of any dream character be of any
significance?
Stop!
There’s nothing going on here; it’s a dream!
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It has been said that if you want to know when you’re getting close to the
Understanding being total, to awakening, it’s when the importance of awakening
happening, in the body/mind you call yourself, fades. Of this awakening
consists: the awareness that anything happening to this body/mind, whether it
be awakening or death, or misery or luxury, is all happening in the dream to a
“child of a barren woman,” to use Maharaj’s phrase; to a mythological creature,
an idea, a fiction, some'one’ who can’t exist. None of it matters in the
slightest. It looks important from the dream, but I confidently assure you it
is not.
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Caring and a sense of importance attached to the whole issue of awakening
finds its highest traditional expression in the bodhisattva vow. The
bodhisattva concept is just so quintessentially and beautifully Buddhist;
sacrificing your own enlightenment until all have ‘attained.’ The height of
altruism, self sacrifice, and high mindedness, taking the “greater love than
this, no man hath” theme to the next level. Beautiful; can there be anything
greater in human aspiration? Just absolutely sweet and gorgeous, and I hate to
be one to break this, but it’s malarkey. Completely dream- bound thinking.
Wonderful, tear-jerking, romantic drama, and completely irrelevant once the
awakening occurs. The whole idea only arises in the dream, when there is taking
‘individuals’ seriously. If indeed the individual is the child of a barren
woman (doesn’t exist and never did) then who is there to sacrifice, and who is
there to sacrifice for? And of course it’s the same with the Christian concept
of Jesus ‘dying for our sins.’ It’s all dramatic nonsense, what I tend to call
‘silliness’ or in Maharaj’s term, ‘great entertainment.’
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The apparent indifference of the Understanding to these high-drama
‘important’ and ‘spiritual’ things in human life can be seen by normal and
well-meaning folk as cold-hearted. It’s not; it’s so the opposite, so
completely compassionate, but I don’t know of any sage who has been able to
explain this adequately and bridge this gap. And it is a gap: from the human
perspective, the bodhisattva represents the very highest virtue: from the
Understanding, it’s irrelevant though somewhat endearing silliness.
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Of course it’s all venerable ancient tradition, along with karma (whose
karma?) And rebirth (no ‘one’ is born, let alone reborn). But tradition often
doesn’t hold up in the simplicity of the Brilliance. East or West, thousands of
years of tradition have a tendency to corrupt and fabricate. There is a
well-meant tendency to teach comforting but dream-bound concepts to give folk
some immediate relief. The distinction between these and the Understanding is
sometimes subtle and oft lost.
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In a way that is hard to enunciate, the Understanding, the Seeing, when it
occurs, is extraordinarily simple, and in a very subtle way many things are
immediately transparently clear. Which from the human, intellectual, or moral
perspective can easily sound like unacceptable presumption; but to that
objection there can only be a shrugging of shoulders here. It is what it is,
and if it is not acceptable, that’s cool too; after all, there really is no
compelling reason for it to be accepted.
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From the perspective of the Understanding, when there is no longer
identification as this particular body/mind organism, which particular feeling
or need or thought or emotion arises in which particular body/mind organism is
of no significance. Including the body/mind organism in which the Understanding
has occurred.
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While one in whom awakening has not happened may well be concerned with
whether they are or are not acting or emoting or thinking or appearing in an
‘appropriate’ or ‘enlightened’ manner, to the body/mind organism in which the
Understanding has occurred this is of no particular concern.
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Why should there be any special concern or interest here whether the david
thing gets sad or angry or occasionally feels confused or acts inconsiderately?
These things may not seem desirable, but desirable to whom, and from what
perspective?
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Comparing, sifting, learning, struggling, imagining, feeling, thinking, all
chasing after wind. Instead there is the awesome, overwhelming gift of
stopping, of letting it drop.
Let it stop. Let it drop away. Stop taking it seriously. Stop taking it at
all. Let it be. Be still. Simply stop. Let grace stop you.
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If you stop, something amazing happens. The individual stops being
involved, stops acting; and amazingly, everything continues to happen. Without
‘you’ doing it. Because, surprise, ‘you’ were never doing it.
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Try this as an experiment, if you can. The sense of separate self will
panic as you come to the point where you stop doing anything; it may actually
prevent you from stopping. But if the grace of stopping happens, and there is
the experience of watching everything continue to happen, you will never again
be able to believe there was ever anyone there doing anything.
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The only way to freedom is surrender. You stop pushing, asserting yourself,
and illusion stops pushing back, asserting itself. Stop pushing, putting energy
into the system, and there is no energy in the system to push back.
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Notice how nearly every thought you have is a ‘me’ thought, an I thought.
Almost every thought you have starts with I or is about ‘me’ or ‘mine.’ I
feel..., I think..., but it’s not that way for me..., and my experience...,
where / am coming from...,’ and so on. Even when those words are not used, the
thought is important to you because you think of it as your thought. Your
opinion. Something you feel about yourself or your ‘reality.’ Drop it.
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If you insist on trying to fit the teaching into your growing patchwork
jigsaw puzzle, your lifetime of learning and knowledge, you will reduce it to
just one more meaningless bit of ignorance. Please don’t. Don’t try to
integrate this. Don’t take notes and go back and re-read them and compare them
to something you read somewhere else. This doesn’t work like that. The only way
this works is if you stop taking notes and start taking this personally, as it
were. Take it very intimately. Let it stop you.
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The basic Understanding is that you do not exist as an independent entity
or agent, but only as an object in the dream of Consciousness. All this
bargaining about surrender and death is just an attempt by that illusory agent,
that non¬existent doer, that fictitious individual to continue on in its
mythical and mythicallife.
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Nisargadatta Maharaj called the individual self the “child of a barren
woman.” It’s hard for any such individual to take this seriously, to accept
that it has no existence other than as a myth, a construct in mind. But without
this total acceptance, this complete surrender, the Understanding, enlightenment,
awakening, is - by definition! - not possible.
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What is being asked is whether it is possible to awaken while remaining
comfortably asleep. This is what the sense of individual self, the ego, wants.
And, there are a multitude of teachers who will cater to this, who will bring
you a wonderful experience in the dream and call it awakening. ‘Awakening
lite.’ But listen to or read the true masters; the Buddha, Ramana Maharshi,
Nisargadatta Maharaj, Huang Po, Hui-Neng, Wei Wu Wei, even Rumi or Teresa of
Avila, among others. When they talk about the Understanding, awakening,
acceptance, surrender, they use words like complete, final, total, utter,
absolute. The very basis of the Understanding is that you are not. This cannot
be accepted without at the same time surrendering every vestige of the idea
that one is. Totally.
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Within the dream, the common wisdom is that you must understand something
before you can accept it. But this will lead at best only to intellectual
understanding and intellectual acceptance. Characters in the dream cannot
understand, evaluate, or judge waking up from that dream in any meaningful way.
By its nature, awakening turns the whole dream on its head. Nothing applies.
Rather, the Understanding must be accepted before it can be understood. There
must be awakening before there can be any evaluation or real understanding of
awakening. That’s why it’s called surrender. And the complete, total surrender
and the complete, final Understanding, are the same.
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Go away. Sleep your happy dream life. Why would you want this anyway?
Self-annihilation is never chosen. The only ones who come to this are dragged
kicking and screaming. Or are tricked, lured into the jungle and then ripped
open, hollowed out, gutted. Or accosted at a bus stop; blasted, moorings cut,
left to drift. If you are going to be so dragged, so tricked, fine. Has nothing
to do with me or with you.
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It is this mistaken concept of a separate, self-determining individual,
taken to extreme, which results in arrogant and destructive behavior toward
others, toward environment, and so on; but even in its most basic, benign form
is the cause of separation, anxiety, and suffering.
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The ego seeks fulfillment, but what is Understood in this annihilation is
so huge that no mind, no ego, no heart could ever possibly hold it. The human
race has no idea what fulfillment truly is.
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Asking how you integrate the Understanding into your daily life is like
asking how you incorporate total freedom into captivity. You don’t. Maybe it’s
the other way around, what remains of your ‘life’ might be incorporated into
the freedom of the Truth. But in fact there isn’t anything there to
incorporate.
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In Truth, in the Absolute, in All That Is, there is no evolution, no
progress, no becoming better, no becoming. All is as it is. The idea that the
world is in bad shape and that the present point in history is pivotal and that
something has to be done, is as old as the human mind; it has always seemed
thus, at every point in ‘human history.’ In truth everything is in perfect
balance; the world never gets better and never gets worse, although to the
apparent individual instruments it may seem that it does.
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This belief in ongoing evolution, the dream of becoming a better person,
the goal of improving oneself and others and society and making the world a
better place: all these and more certainly seem to be noble beliefs and goals
by any standards. Our cultures value them as ideals and it is believed that
these high goals are what keep individuals and the human race from descending
or regressing into chaos. And of course it is the ‘divine hypnosis’ itself that
allows these beliefs, because without them the dream would not go on.
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Teachers who draw on these recurring themes (personal improvement, saving
the world, becoming a better human being) in the dream to appeal to the ego’s
hopes and dreams and to popularize their message are deluding themselves and others
and have not seen beyond the dream.
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The accounts of what it is to realize the dream as dream are usually
reinterpreted in the light of what ‘we know’ - in the dream! This kind of
thinking of course misses the whole point of what is trying to be conveyed.
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To questions as to why he was not out helping the world, or working to ease
suffering, or at least trying to reach more people with the teaching, Ramana
Maharshi would answer; first, how do you know I am not? (Your judgments are
based on physical appearances only.) And secondly, why do you assume that there
is something that needs to be done, that the world needs helping or that people
need to hear a teaching?
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Awakening or enlightenment is also called “Self Realization,” because it is
a matter of realizing who or what the Self actually is. It is the realization
of who ‘I’ is not.
The very essence of awakening is the realization that there is no one here
to awaken; that there is no individual, are no individuals.
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Any questions about the nature or the activities of this purely mythical
beast called ‘me’ are therefore revealed to be nonsensical. The simple
question, “What are you doing?” For example, can only be met with laughter or a
simple shake of the head, unless it is sensed that the questioner may be open
to hearing the real answer: “Doing? Me? There is no ‘me’ to ‘do’ anything, nor
has there ever been. Nor, if you could but see it, is there a ‘you’ to ‘do’ any
‘thing’ either; nor any ‘things’ for ‘us’ to be doing.”
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Someone, perhaps it was Robert
Adams, once suggested that there should be a Great Gathering Of Awakened
Beings, and anybody who showed up would be immediately disqualified.
((Ironically, there is such a
gathering now, annually. Most of the well-known teachers who have published
books and tour the world giving satsang attend and give presentations.)
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Transparent deluded manipulative
exploitative nonsense.
And even perhaps on some level
the idea behind it was well meant; somebody who really believes they are an
awakened being and that they are going to save the world by awakening ‘more people
than ever before!’
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What happens, happens. In
which apparent form what dream event happens is of no significance.
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In the American Dream Machine
version (which, by the way, is not limited to America), enlightenment is
redefined to include anyone who has had an enlightening experience. We now have
‘awakening lite,’ in which you can call yourself awakened while still enjoying
being fast asleep, and it is happening all over the place.
The result is a kind of tent
revivalist satsang movement. According to many of the teachers on the guru
circuit, awakening is happening wherever they go, to people just like you, and
it’s the next great wave in the evolution of humankind to the next level of
cosmic consciousness. Where have we heard this before?
Everywhere, and about
everything. It is the way of all the earth, the ‘divine hypnosis,’ to be
deceived and to stay asleep pursuing individual and collective liberation,
personal and group enlightenment, when the only truth is completely impersonal
and can be found only in the annihilation of the illusory individual.
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This way of seeing things, and
the way of seeing things after true awakening or Understanding has occurred,
are mutually exclusive. When awakening occurs, the whole context which contains
individuals, the race, time, and value judgments is seen as an illusion, a
dream. Awakening, enlightenment, means popping out of the context in which
evolution makes any sense.
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Awakening means popping out of
the context in which awakening makes any sense.
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Somebody comes along saying
they have ‘achieved full enlightenment.’ (Comically redundant expression, that;
what other kind is there? Half full?) Now, how the hell can 99.9999999 percent
(so to speak) of the population of characters wandering around here in the
dream evaluate such a claim? How can they tell? But that question doesn’t seem
to occur to anybody. A remarkable number seem eager to believe the claim
anyway.
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Many spiritual seekers, and
many spiritual teachers, talk about having had “an awakening experience.” They
have had a profound experience of Oneness, of meaning (or perhaps several such
experiences); and as a result everything, including themselves, looks different
and new. On the one hand, there perhaps is no better way to express this than
to say that it’s like waking up. There are no exclusive rights to the analogy
anyway; it means what everybody does every morning when they wake up from
sleep, so why not use the analogy to refer to a renewing experience?
On the other hand, this kind
of waking up has nothing whatever to do with what is being talked about here as
awakening. The very fact that it is referred to as “an awakening,” or “a series
of awakening experiences...” Is a tip-off. One experience among many. The
effects of such experiences may be brief or may last for a long time, sometimes
for years, before they fade. Then if you’re lucky there will be another one.
Such experiences are profound, and beautiful, and bring about change, and
nothing is ever the same. They are very wonderful; indeed this is the most
profound and most meaningful thing that a human being can experience. It is
what is called mystical experience, and it brings with it mystical knowledge.
But it is still a dream experience by a dream character.
What this kind of waking up is
referring to is a dream character having an experience, in the dream, of waking
up relative to their prior level of awareness in the dream. But anything that
can happen to a dream character is still in the dream, is still a dream event.
It is not what is being talked
about here, is not what has been talked about by the sages, as awakening. This
awakening talked about by the sages is not part of ‘everything.’ It is the end
of everything.
It is not an experience, and
it is not knowledge. It is the end of the experiencer and the knower.
It is that the dream,
including the dream character in which this occurs, is seen through, and as
such ceases to exist; is seen to have never existed.
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