Tag Archives: choice

the beauty of your absence

Posted on by

0

The following wideawake wisdom-shots are from an interview with Jean Klein conducted by Stephan Bodian.  I found this interaction, quite simply, amazing. It covers all the ground from the initial apperception of the impossibility of a separate ‘me’-self, to the exaltation of ultimate liberation. Please follow the link below the quotes to read the entire transcript. Gratitude to the Nonduality Highlights for sharing this treasure.

Liberation means to live freely in the beauty of your absence.  You see at one moment that there’s nothing seen and no seer.  Then you live it.

For me, the point of meditation is only to look for the meditator.  When we find out that the meditator, the one who looks for God, for beauty, for peace, is only a product of the brain and that there is nothing to find, there is a giving up.  What remains is a current of silence.  You can never come to this silence through practice, through achievement.

First you must see how you function.  And you’ll see that you function as somebody, as a person.  You live constantly in choice.  You live completely in the psychological structure of like and dislike, which brings you sorrow.

If you identify yourself with your personality, it means you identify yourself as your memory because personality is memory, what I call psychological memory.  In this seeing, this natural giving up, the personality goes away.  And when you live in this nothingness, something completely different emerges.  Instead of seeing life in terms of the projections of your personality, things appear in your life as they are, as facts.  And these appearings naturally bring their own solution.  You are no longer identified with your personality, with psychological memory, though your functional memory remains. Instead, there is a cosmic personality, a trans–personality, that appears and disappears when you need it.  You are nothing more than a channel, responding according to the situation.

Enlightenment – being understanding – is instantaneous.

Once you attain this enlightenment or this current do you then exist in it all the time?

Constantly.  But it’s not a state.  When there’s a state, there is mind.

Even when you give up the last object, we still remain in the duality of subject and object. You’re still in a kind of blank state, and this blank state itself becomes an extremely subtle object.  In this state, it is very difficult to give up the subject – object relationship.  Once you’ve attained it, you’re locked into it, fixed to it.  There’s a kind of quietness, but there’s no flavor, no taste.  To bring it to the point where the object vanishes and you abide in the beingness, a tremendous teacher or exceptional circumstances are necessary.

~ Jean Klein, interviewed by Stephan Bodian

Source: Undivided Journal

free will and hash browns

Posted on by

0

The notion of free will is such a hot potato*. It scalds the hands as it’s juggled around mind-space. Yet when it’s at home in its spacious place it makes delicious eating!

You don’t actually need science or experiments, philosophy or religion (although their conclusions can be fascinating) to find out for yourself all you need to know about the dynamic called free will or volition. The process couldn’t be simpler. It’s as easy as ABC, but not necessarily in that order.

Let’s take B first and let it stand for body. Let’s be very careful: can I honestly say that as a body I have any kind of free will? If I did, would I choose to fall down steps, get sick, be ugly, be fat, go bald, be hungry, grow old, die?

Let’s take C next and let it stand for cerebral activity. Mind: thinking, feeling, perceiving and all that stuff. Can I say that I have control over the things that happen in my mental world? If I did, would I choose to repeat unwanted thoughts endlessly, to have nightmares, to fixate on past events, to grieve, to compare myself unfavorably with others, to suffer?

If I’m convinced I’m a body and a mind it hardly seems sensible to claim free will for myself – it’s both masochistic and illogical. Yet if I can’t find my free will in them, where will I find it?

I will have to look elsewhere. This implies finding out exactly where ‘I’ am located. For some reason this prospect is frighteningly uncomfortable for many. The potato is burning their hands so they drop it and turn away from the inquiry. Which is a pity because clarity is only a question away, and Life is begging its asking.

It’s this: I have the feeling of autonomy. I feel as though I make choices. I feel responsible for the things I do, from picking up my cup of tea to abandoning my college course. Yet my experience refutes this. I cannot find volition in my body or my mind, which indicates that I am not my body or my mind. So what am I?

Sitting with this question and ticking off the what-I-am-not boxes unpicks the problem. Why is this so difficult? Wouldn’t you think any intelligent human being would leap at the chance to find out what they actually ARE?

There’s a story. It’s called ‘me.’ It’s scared. It knows it’s only a thought-up story and that if thoughts get looked at too closely it will be exposed. It’s afraid of extinction. Ticking off the I-am-not-the-story box takes some doing for most folk. I suggest ticking it off just to see what might happen – with an eraser handy. What happens? The eraser isn’t needed, for when you tick off the I-am-not-the-story box, you notice that there’s still something present that is aware of what’s happening – and weirdly enough, it feels just like dear old You.

Which brings us to A. A is for Awareness. Awareness is what’s left after all the boxes in one’s entire repertoire of imaginings have been ticked off and there are no options left. No way out. The ‘I’ sense is home in spacious Aware-ing and the potato is a gourmet delight. Down it goes, never again to whet mind’s appetite.

The View opens up, vast and free. Awareness reigns as the sole player in the Game. What does that mean? It means … you’re IT. Awareness is free to do and be and know and experience whatever it wishes, and it does, as You. You are its built-in modus operandi.

You, aka Awareness, are free to believe that you are a body/mind with volition. You are free to believe that you are an autonomous, separate entity. Or an awakened one. Or a striving-to-be-enlightened one. No worries! You as Awareness are also free to be a hot potato, to juggle them or to eat them boiled, mashed or hashed. How awesome is that?

You, as Awareness, are free will in eternal flow and flux.

– miriam louisa

*Hot potato? – If English isn’t your first language you might not know that this is a term for a very contentious and often non-negotiable idea or issue. I know, it’s weird, but no doubt all languages have a term for the ‘no-go’ areas of belief and fixation.

on saving your own life

Posted on by

1

This Unlit Light: Georgia O'Keeffe - It was Blue and Green

 

Yes, it’s a paradox.  You’ve fallen into the wild knowing that the life you thought was ‘yours’, isn’t.  It isn’t yours any more than the rise and fall of your overlooked breath.  You are awake to your wild awakeness.  Well, occasionally.

And yet.

And yet the choices involved in being alive and healthy don’t go away.  It’s a lie to assert that they do, and a trap to believe that they should.  Every minute of every day choices are being made – in most cases, unconsciously.  Patterns of conditioning are playing themselves out, tirelessly.

Wild awakeness – effortless awaring – has a knack of bringing robot-mind into focus.  There’s a glimpse of the old reflexes groaning on.

And at that precise point a nanosecond window of opportunity opens – the story can change.

The ‘I’-stream, the lifestream, can flow in a fresh and unknown course.

(‘I’-stream?  Lifestream?  This language is being invented as writer-mind moves into ineffable territory.  These terms imply something utterly non-personal.  And yet wholly You.)

Life has no agenda other than its ongoing health, wellbeing and survival.  It knows the score in these matters.  And it knows when to withdraw its resources and start over.  That can be pretty tough love.

But for those of us in whom Life still has an investment, the toughest love turns out to be Self-love.  It scares us witless to ponder the ultimate unselfishness of Selfishness.

Yet Life has an awesome way of looking after itself once efforts to contain and control it are deconstructed.  Notions that life needs saving act to build a mega dam across its path – a dam that generates dis-ease and stagnation.

The paradox is only apparent: whatever you choose – whatever – is the movement of Life as it branches, eddies, streams, dances, disappears underground, springs forth, tumbles, flattens out in depression, rages, murmurs, merges, evaporates … while it pretends to be You.

– miriam louisa

God is the ultimate sticky-beak

Posted on by

2

This Unlit Light - Cosmic Question Mark

 

If I was going to symbolize the God-idea (why not – isn’t that thought’s job?) it would be as a question mark.

I don’t mean a ? as in mystery – although that fits too – I mean as a dynamic.

It seems to me that the unknowable unspeakable whatever-it-is that lives this lifestream moves on the well-oiled wheels of curiosity. It’s the ultimate sticky-beak and nosey-parker, insatiably wondering about … everything that can be experienced and known in the infinite arena of existence. Ceaselessly wondering, but never, ever, reaching a conclusion.

Questions fuel my life and determine the choices ‘I’ make, the paths ‘I’ tread. One of the lovely things about senior-hood is that you can look back over a life and catch those questions. I marvel at that, and at the questions that laid out my lifepath.

In a back-to-front way it’s like you’re standing at the stern of a boat, watching the wake and suddenly seeing it as an arrow, an arrow frothing and surging with shoals of questions… an arrow propelling the lifeboat with your name on the prow towards an eternal horizon of possibilities.

 

Image source: National Geographic

just another little story

Posted on by

0

As if a resident migraine and food-poisoning weren’t enough, L had an appointment at the Dental Clinic today. One of those pricking and scraping episodes, interspersed with hair-raising blasts of freezing water on screaming gums. L is not heroic. She lay whimpering and wanting it to be over. Then went home for a long lie-down.

What I love about these little stories is that L can stand for Louisa (me-myself-I), or for Life.

If L = Louisa, there’s drama and soreness and suffering.

If L = Life, there’s drama and soreness but no suffering.

Who chooses?

That’s another story!

(I’ll put my money on L.)

Chuckle