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I Want To Hear from You
I want to hear from you. About your direct experience of awareness and consciousness and being. Not what you “think” according to someone else’s “insight.” Your own experience. “Others” don’t necessarily validate your awareness. I think you do. I think you know when you are speaking from conditioned self, the mind created sense of self. And I think you know in those moments of inner stillness when you simply “are” and words are superfluous. But I don’t really know that.
I am asking you not to be overly perturbed with “words” and “concepts “of what’s “real” or what is “illusory”, what is “self” and what is “not-self”, “mind” or “no-mind,” “right” and “wrong.” After all we all are walking, talking, thinking, feeling, breathing, embodied “points of view.” So what? We are also formless, timeless, deathless, consciousness. Either way it is as it is or it isn’t. I don’t believe Absolute Reality requires “understanding” for it to be. I think it simply is. That is a point of view.
The existential fact I see is that the universe is totally amoral. There is no right or wrong or fair or unfair in the universe. There is simply ever changing energy flow, with forms coming into existence and winking out of existence. It is totally impersonal. There are no gaps and no mistakes in consciousness. There is no “meaning requirement” for the universe to be. It exists whether there are words to describe it or not, or a “self” to perceive it or not. This is also a point of view.
Someone says that words that point out that words are illusory are illusory. The real does not need to point to anything, illusory or otherwise. After all, is there really any meaningful difference between knowing and un-knowing where mind is concerned, since mind can only “know” through words, ideas, and concepts, illusory “knowledge.” Another point of view.
Some of us seem to see primarily through a “fixed” point of view, a “me”, acting as if how it is seen through this fixed point of view is how it “actually is.” When fixed point of view encounters fixed point of view, there usually is disputation, culture clash. When open-minded point of view encounters open-minded point of view there is the possibility through language of energy and information exchange, whereby informing and transforming may or may not come about. Again, a point of view.
Nevertheless, if you don’t mind, and if you can, speak of your direct experience.
The best that you can do is plenty good enough for me.
I too seem to experience a similar dilemma. Water droplet consciousness and oceanic consciousness. They preliminarily exist as ideas in mind. At first they seem very much different. Then I come to realize that is from water droplet perspective, limited and uncertain.
Then something happens. I cannot say what that is with certitude. Some understanding gradually dawns that water droplet really, really, really is not and cannot be separate from ocean. And the implications of that non-verbal realization seem to take root and independent of intent or desire, some shift in perception occurs. And it is seen that This is That.
And when I'm moved to shout, “Hey, look, This is That!” The very uttering is like tossing stones into a still pool, and what was momentarily very clear and self-evident, now simply reflects ripples of distortion.
Thank you for your effort.
I like the distinction that you make between the utterance of "this is that" and "hey, look, this is that", Tony.
That has been my experience as well.
Ripples almost always accompany our interest/desire to have our direct experience be that of someone else. And conversely.
A poignant observation indeed.
This is Absolute Formlessness arising. Words collapse like dominoes in attempts to describe that. "The formless is the form." "The form is the formless." The relative I is not excluded. It too arises and is seen or not. Seen, it is formless. Like trying to catch butterflies! No claims being made here whatsoever. Just This as That - Just That as This. More succinctly This is That and That is This.
Which is why I intuit that most discussions which center on distinguishing between the real and the not real (AKA illusion)... are manna for waves to maintain their wavehood (literary license here) and belief/experience of separation.
But when a wave senses (outside of those senses that are characteristic of waves) that it is also the ocean, then...
illusion is reality, and reality is illusion.
And so it is Peter.
Thank you for your invitation for offerings of direct experiences.
Not surprisingly (to me, that is)... and whenever I effort to describe my direct experience of the ocean from the viewing point of a wave... the words tend to naturally take the shape or form of a koan. Some familiar; some not.
Such as:
Water is wet.
Rocks are hard.
The sky is blue.
Fire heats.
This is That.
Again, thanks for the invite.
P.S. I've noticed that significantly more rational constructs easily surface when I discuss wave-based ideas (i.e. reality, illusion, etc.). But they are glaringly absent when I attempt to assign words to describe my direct experience of the ocean (from the viewing point of a wave, that is). Koan-like utterances are the best that I can do.