Tag: paradox

Don’t Believe A Word

On By centerlesscenterIn Advaita, Awareness, Beyond Spirituality

Don’t believe a word anyone tells you about enlightenment, awakening, liberation, original nature, or any other name for IT. The only way you will know for sure if this IT is for real is to find out for yourself.

The process, if you can call it that, as there is no you to do this, is to eliminate everything about yourself that is transitory. Why? If something is transitory, it can’t be considered real in the context of the search for IT. That is, if something is real, it will not come and go. It will be ever-present and undisturbed by anything that happens.

Getting back to ‘there is no you to do this’. This might sound perplexing, but when you eliminate all that you think you are, including all the temporary attributes of your body and mind and the ever-changing perceptions of the objective world, you find that this also eliminates the ‘you’, the personal self. So, in the end or beginning, depending on how you look at it, as neither an end nor beginning can actually be found, there is no you to search for liberation in the first place.

Now, and this is the important part, don’t believe a word of this.

Neither Here Nor There

On By centerlesscenterIn Awareness, Beyond Spirituality, Love, Non-Duality

We use ‘neither here nor there’ to dismiss a subject as irrelevant. But we can also say that our essential being, Awareness – that which knows the coming and going of all things but doesn’t come and go with them – is neither here nor there. Some say Awareness is ever-present, which makes it here and there, but it can’t be found, so it’s also neither here nor there.

Recognize this knowing presence that has always been with you, always is you, regardless of the circumstances, good, bad, or neutral. Whatever is happening is not happening to you as a body-mind, but in you as this aware, knowing presence, the origin of all things.

As no limits or boundaries can be found to your awareness, recognize that this must be true for everyone – if something is limitless, where is there room for two? If this is understood all confusion vanishes like darkness exposed to light. And we can rightly conclude from this discovery that we are all unique expressions of this infinite and eternal oneness whose qualities are stillness, spaciousness, happiness, and love.

Now Showing: THE PARADOX

On By centerlesscenterIn Awareness, Beyond Spirituality, Natural State, Non-Duality

For someone who is deeply interested in the nature of being, the most important thing to discover is that there is no individual self. There is no ‘me’ that we’ve come to identify ourselves with. There is no one to improve, no one to get liberated, no one to be born, suffer, and die.

To get at the centerless center of our being, a serious seeker may ask ‘Who am I?’ But don’t get sidetracked by the question. Don’t waste your time with answers like ‘I am a man or woman who is of a certain age, has a family and a job, practices a specific religion and votes for the popular candidate.’

The individual self can be likened to a character in a movie that thinks and acts as though she or he is real. But it’s obvious that these activities don’t really belong to the character, they belong to the screen, come and go on the screen, are made of the screen. From the screen’s point of view, there are no characters. It only knows itself, just as consciousness, the aware presence in which all people, places, and things arise, only knows itself.

When the movie ends, the character on the screen disappears, but the screen remains unstained by anything that appeared on it. Similarly, when our thoughts, sensations, and perceptions come and go, which is their very nature, consciousness remains untouched, unchanged, ever-present, and aware. Always.

Now shift your perspective from being caught up in the movie, from being a character in the movie, and simply, naturally, notice the screen. Be the screen. Be unlimited consciousness. Be yourself.

Actually, you don’t have to make an effort to be anything. Any effort would be on behalf of a separate self that we’ve discovered doesn’t exist. So what can you do? Absolutely nothing. Absolutely not nothing.

The paradox – we are and we are not; we can and we cannot. In the helplessness of the situation, Richard Sylvester might suggest that we just relax.

In this non-doing doing, all vestiges of a personal self fall away and we stand revealed as our original, naked, innocent being. All residual concepts of self and other dissolve in what can be called the nameless, endless, absolute knowing of all-embracing oneness.