Tag Archives: experience

the primary fact

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Sometimes a stunning image calls for an equally knock-out quote. I’m moved to post this one from Nisargadatta, because there’s so much misunderstanding around the ‘primary fact’. It shows up as stories that equate Reality with divine or sublime objects, or posit that it’s an experience one should strive to attain (via a smorgasbord of profit-earning materials and activities). It’s touted to ‘bring’ peace, happiness, awakening, enlightenment, and of course the obliteration of all our messy emotions as well as the problems we have with ‘others’.

Bring? The primary fact is that these supposed attributes are immanent in every case.

The primary fact is not metaphorical, mythical, magical or mystical. It’s not able to be experienced yet all experiences depend upon it for their existence. It is prior to anything conceivable and depends upon nothing for its absolute and ever-available presence.

And yet: It can only be apperceived as its display. How sweet is that?

 

Tree of Life: photograph by Kenneth Mucke

 

Beyond the mind there is no such thing as experience.

Experience is a dual state.

You cannot talk of reality as an experience. Once this is understood, you will no longer look for being and becoming as separate and opposite. In reality they are one and inseparable like roots and branches of the same tree.

Both can exist only in the light of consciousness, which again, arises in the wake of the sense ‘I am’.

This is the primary fact.

If you miss it, you miss all.

– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

 

What are the implications of this view?

There is only The Dance. Today you are as twinkle-toed as a prima ballerina. Yesterday you dragged those feet as though they were cast in lead. Tomorrow? Who knows what will arise and choreograph your steps with exquisite fidelity to your patterned preferences and aversions?

It’s all the same, beloveds: Reality r-e-a-l-s on regardless; it only has one pair of shoes.

One-size-fits-all.

the great perfection

Photograph: Tree of Life, copyright Kenneth Mucke: more information here.

a letter from home

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[I can never leave – not for one heartbeat –
but I can write letters from home and this is one]

 

Letter to a friend

 

dear friend

are you looking for a sanctuary?
a place that’s private and quiet?
that’s rent-free, and can’t be bought or sold?

(you will never be evicted for any reason
whatsoever!)

that you don’t have to share – even with your family
or lovers – because you can’t?
that requires no maintenance?
that needs no insurance because it can’t be damaged?
that’s as large or small as you wish?
that you can take everywhere you go –
even when you have no fixed earthly abode
and you find yourself “homeless”?

that’s as solid as rock, yet lighter than a baby’s breath?
that has views onto both the temporal and the timeless?
that has a warm hearth glowing, and a welcome mat
with your name on it, at the door?

would you believe me when I say
it is wherever YOU are, no matter what your experience?

it’s wrong to say it’s close,
it isn’t even near

it’s simply right here, when thinking disappears

with warmest love

– miriam louisa

 

Image source

 

are you so sure you are not awake?

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Enza Vita writes with refreshingly ruthless clarity on the myth of “awakening” as an experience, a state or some kind of esoteric attainment which will guarantee unshakeable bliss and the end of all one’s undesirable failings and foibles . . .

 ~

“I know I am still not awake, and I have a tremendous longing to be free.”

 ~

Are you so sure you are not awake?  Are you sure you understand what “awake” is?
Why do you think that you are not awake?  What is this I that is in this unenlightened condition?

All questions contain and perpetuate certain assumptions that we see as the boundaries in life.  While thinking that you are not “awake,” you are believing that you are somehow lacking something.  That is what is played over and over again in your mind, and it causes you great suffering.  Do not fall into that trap!  Go to the root.  What is it that is aware of this statement?  Realize what is at the root of that experience of not being awake and it will free you from the assumed limitations.

You are already free; however, this is a freedom that has never known bondage and so cannot even be called freedom.  This freedom doesn’t come from some action to attain it, but from the realizing of a freedom that has never been constrained.  As the seeker you feel bondage because of your belief in a separate I, a separate ego, and this ego imagines that this freedom means a freedom to do whatever it wants.

Real freedom is liberation from the bondage of the ego.  When the concept of an I goes, the question of freedom is resolved.  Then you are free to be in harmony with what is, as it is.

You already are this freedom pervading everything and everywhere.  All boundaries and limitations are in your imagination only.  Like the space in a room, you are already free.  Just like the four walls cannot contain the space within it, so the body-mind cannot contain awareness unless awareness is imagining itself imprisoned.

You see clouds in the sky, and they may pass in front of the sun, but does this change the nature of the sun?  Perhaps the clouds are signaling a coming thunderstorm, but does a storm change the nature of the sun?  Your thoughts and feelings are like these clouds.  They sometimes seem to obscure the light of your inner self, but they do not change it.  First see what you are.  Understand your true nature.  Then you see that what dances in front of you does not affect you at all.  Focus on that sunlight, and not on the clouds!

~

Enza Vita
Source: Enza Vita’s Newsletter.  Sign up for it at http://www.enzavita.com – where you’ll also find information about her new book “Always Already Free”.

this awareness is not aware that it is aware

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To say that “awareness is aware of itself”
is to split it into two:
one bit as the viewer
and the other as the view.

But is this really so?
(Not according to any teaching
or dogma or philosophy; no,
save me from second-hand ‘truths’!)
What’s the experience right here,
beyond the cunning concepts
that inevitably appear?

Awareness awares.
That’s all that I can say;
its ceaseless unlit light
both creates and acts its play.

Even emptiness is empty
and mind a four-letter word;
my gut rips wide open
as I fall on my sword.

Just this! I cry –

yet instantly it’s clear
that thusness is a step too far
from the lucid living light
that’s plainly shining

h e r e

[~ ml – emmelle – on exiting retreat]

oh my god, we can finally really relax!

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We have to be alert that we don’t have a subtle definition of Awareness that colors its nakedness.  That means we make Awareness into a state of experience.  That would be like: “Awareness is a clear openness that is spacious and serene”.  We then have defined Awareness and by doing so we have made it possible to lose the “state of Awareness”. When we aren’t feeling that “clear openness that is spacious and serene” we feel we have lost Awareness.

But Awareness has no definition, all experience is the experience of Awareness. Awareness has no form or state of its own.  That then allows Awareness to be every state, every feeling,every emotion,every thought, every perception.

That being so, what is there left to achieve? Every experience, happy, sad or neutral is the appearance of Awareness. We give up completely the notion that Awareness has to have some particular flavor or color. Oh my god, we can finally really relax! Its over!

Every experience is equal in Awareness!  What could you possibly practice?  You are already aware, so you don’t need to become aware.  Everything is already happening however its happening, so there is nothing special to do.  No special “state” to attain!  If you experience a special state, that’s fine, but it will never become stable.  The only stability is your unchanging perceiving of whatever is experienced.  That unchanging perceivingness is Awareness, the heart of the Dharmakaya (Pure Being).

~ Jackson Peterson

Posted to Way of Light

birthday poem

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In this uncreated emptiness

– an unfurling, unfolding
energy-locus trembling with
sensations so varied
they appear to hold
no common currency –

experience swings

from melting tenderness
and wide-eyed wonder
to the creaking pain
of bodybits worn and stressed
(there’s a tutu pirouetting
on satin points in one scene;
stomping across the stage
leaden-hoofed in another)

In this uncreated emptiness

there’s a seeing, a knowing
a luminous awareing of every tonality
and every texture
every nuance of light and shade
shimmer and flicker
conspiring to create an apparent world

there’s an immaculate stillness
unchanging, unmoving, unaffected
by the stories told by
pleasure, pain or perfection

there’s a brilliant beingness
in which every dance
listed in life’s repertoire
is danced by the one

whirling
crazy lover
inexhaustibly romancing its insatiable
self

 

emelle says:

off with the training-wheels,
away with the Zimmer-frame
I raise my glass to Life!

Beloved, let this heart beat long enough
to whirl a few more orbits of the sun
dissolving, giddy and swooning, into your arms
which are
none other
than
my own

 
– ml

mind can fake it up to a point

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At the end of the day, you will reach a point of knowing that there is nothing to learn and nothing to experience.  However, there is something that makes itself known to you, and in that realization there begins a slow loosening of the habit that has you pretending to be what you are not.

Whatever your experience is of what you are, this is but a playful unfolding taking place within the totality of what you really are.

Mind can fake it up to a point; it creates the most subtle experiences.  Do not stop at experiences and do not stop with any conclusion.

The moment you think you have spiritual knowledge or that you know how it works, identity is present, mind is active, and further identification is taking place.  How does one know when mind is involved?  Simply because the mental capacity always has a personal agenda.  With real discovery, Silence is beyond description, the personal “I” is nowhere,  nothing can be said, there is nothing to be said.

~ Jac O’Keeffe
A selection from Born To Be Free

“… nothing to be said.”  Yet we look forward to Jac’s new book-in-progress, and send heartfelt prayers for her speedy recovery.

Post Script July 28, 2011 – Jac’s new book will be titled ‘From Awakening to Liberation.’
You can sneak a preview  of Chapter 3, Desire, at Non-Duality America blog.

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