Self: one hand clapping

When one inhabits that exquisite state of pure undifferentiated awareness found in meditation there is no Self: there is only awareness. Self is a natural and necessary product of the differentiation made inevitable by consciousness. Where there is consciousness there is Self. Because the focus of awareness which is consciousness exists as a center to which "things" are external, the external "not-self" of which one is conscious gives rise to and defines Self. Self is the sound of one hand clapping.

Nothing is external to Awareness. Awareness has no inside and no outside and no Self.

It is difficult to accurately describe these aspects of the real because language tends to be casual in its references. Phrases such as "self aware" serve well enough for street talk, but they are clumsy and misguided for other than colloquial purposes.

Let consciousness relax. Let consciousness dissolve into the awareness which is its substrate: this is meditation. And only by meditation does Self discover its identity and its abode.

Illusion

What would it mean to no longer harbor illusions of any kind? Illusion is that event where things are not seen such as they are. When things are not perceived accurately one's actions will be accordingly askew. The grief made inevitable by labors of illusion is the stuff of which legends are made.

There are all kinds of illusions: illusions peculiar to our biological make-up, political illusions, spiritual illusions, etc. Though illusions are often shared across some broad spectrum of humanity, all illusions are personal and coalesce around some existing predisposition.

Predispositions are formations of consciousness. Awareness has no form.

Only by meditation does one achieve the inner silence which makes inevitable an awareness of the subtle predispositions which are the enablers of illusion.

The Great Teachers

There is a wonderful parable that I first encountered in the Gurdjieff material which goes something like this...

the devil and his side-man are stalking mankind down the road of life...mankind reaches down and rejoices in something found...the side-man ask the devil "what's man found that is the cause of such rejoicing"...the devil says "man's found the truth"...the side-man says "well this is a bad business for us"... the devil says "oh no, we're going to help him arrange it"

The great teachers were pioneers. The great teachers were those precocious individuals who, though born to the earth, awoke as the children of the universe.  They dealt not in ideologies, they expressed the simple truth they found before them. It is not a crime that ten thousand ideologues have filled the space between them and us. It is the inevitable capture of truth by idea.

The soil of being is like that of a desert island: it takes millions of years of death and decay to produce a single flower.

Let us hope that on Earth this time has come.

Now

Charles Darwin was a man of his time: a brilliant inquisitive mind in a world supine to discovery. The voyage of the Beagle (aptly named for a kind of hunting dog) halfway around the world gave him days on end of staring out across the timeless ocean. The vast emptiness and seething sameness of this environment may have set his mind in sync with that timeless ever present Now which is the simple fact of existence. From this vantage point it is not an inconceivable leap of vision to see creatures morphing in-place as awareness refines the utility of consciousness in the Now.

Consciousness is one of the faculties of Awareness. The central illusion common to consciousness is Time. Awareness is ever Now, and Now is ever seething with inevitability. Consciousness is the ability of Awareness to pick up and follow the threads of the inevitable.  The existence of the inevitable and the echo which is its trail within the domain of conscious awareness, give rise to the illusion of Time and all of its subsequent confusions.

This is not to dismiss the obvious utility of the concept of Time, but rather to point out that concepts make a poor roof on a rainy day.

Concepts are an anathema to meditation except as they lead to shelter (which is to say it is a matter of utility). Meditation enables the alchemy which turns leaden concepts into golden realities. Meditation is the difference between Goethe's sorcerer and his apprentice. And Magic is the articulation of Now to influence the Inevitable.





A Thing of Beauty


seven days of snow

un-tread


pristine

before my home



because awareness has no form it can not be resisted

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Any objective observer will have to admit that the world is not made a better place by the existence of humanity. We are a high maintenance creature that takes what it wants and doesn't mind leaving a big mess behind. If we are ever to live in symbiosis with our lovely Earth we need big sublime ideas. As it is we find humanity in the sway of a plethora of ridiculously small ideas.

Ideas are projections of imagination and as such are mutable, and all it would take to end the enmity and corruption and needless grief oppressing the peoples of the world is for individual human beings to use their imaginations differently. This is not about to happen because the imagination of humanity is fascinated by ridiculous small ideas. And these ridiculously small ideas revel in ridiculously complex answers to very simple questions: for example...the question of existence.

Sublime ideas are no less the products of imagination than ridiculous ideas. The power of the sublime is it's inclusiveness. What makes a sublime idea truly SUBLIME is it's perfect symmetry with the real, and it's utility. A truly sublime idea is one that like mercury seamlessly absorbing it's separate blobs, effortlessly unites small concepts into one coherent self-evident form.

The ridiculous is not going away any time soon, and those problems large enough to insist upon the sublime may be insurmountable by the time the obvious becomes apparent to the hopelessly occluded.

Fate hinges upon the use of imagination.