Affirmation, Negation, Higher Order of Certainty

Affirmation, negation: the mind wants things nailed down. Certainty is a necessary nutriment for the mind, and so it wants to set a seal upon that which it considers to be real. The problem is that affirmation and negation are concoctions: mental confections to assuage the animal sweet-tooth for certainty.

Meditation is not an end in its self. Meditation is an exercise that builds resources of self discovery. Much of what we identify with as "self" is the animating structure of the mind. We say "I" to the impersonal inclinations of instinct. My certainty is mine in the same way as my hand is mine. Barring cases of deformation all hands are structurally identical, and differ only in detail; and like the fruit-in-the-bottle monkey trap we must relax our grasp on ordinary "certainty" if we are to become truly aware.

The knowing that coincides with being can not be reified. When we entertain affirmation and negation we give up awareness as a hostage to mind. The finest fruit of meditation is the awakening of the pure awareness that is the fullest fact of our being. The intelligence which is the natural faculty of this awareness manifests a degree of facticity that quite satisfies the mind's appetite for certainty,

Sectarian isms of every stripe, dogmas, and madness; are mental accretions: they are diseases of affirmation and negation. The supple flow of awareness in the unfolding moment has made a knot, a tumor; has created an eddy circling its own creation. There is another way of being, and meditation is the key that opens the way.





Ego Pin, Imaginary Tail, Inconceivable Donkey




how is it that your hand

is so like that of the Buddha