Tag Archives: wideawake-wisdom

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

awareness is an unassailable fortress

Posted on by

8

For those whose investment in their version of the ‘bondage’ dream is high, there’s bound to be a reaction when they meet any soul who dares to declare the immediacy of unconditional freedom.

It tends to go like this:

– if you are audacious enough to suggest that no kind of meditation practice or spiritual work will ever result in wideawake freedom (aka awakening or enlightenment), they’ll say you are truly deluded

– if you aren’t deeply engaged in analyzing your personal psychological pathology, they’ll say you’re in denial

– if you aren’t rushing around saving the lost souls, the children, the whales, the environment, they’ll say you’re irresponsible

– if you aren’t full of fear for the future with its threats of terrorism, mass destruction, financial collapse and mayhem, they’ll say you’re avoiding reality

– if you are happily and contentedly doing what you love, they’ll say you’re selfish

The good news is that none of this matters one nanojot to Awareness.  IT couldn’t give a toss.  (Just check in and see for yourself!)  Freedom is never anywhere but at the beginingless beginning.  Freedom is fundamental.  All the delusion, denial, irresponsibility, avoidance and selfishness in the universe can’t affect the freedom that simply is THIS.  Neither can accusations and insults.

Please don’t think I am trivializing or dismissing any of the practices or activities mentioned above.  There is room for every-imaginable-thing to manifest in the vastness of Life.  Everything has its place and purpose.  But once one has tired of all efforts to improve oneself and the world, and the quest has begun to move inwards rather than outwards, these things fall away of their own accord.  Perhaps they will re-emerge eventually, flowering as the focus of one’s wholly impersonal wideawake wisdom.  Perhaps not.  It ceases to matter, for one knows that whatever the dance of appearances, the Great Unlit Light of pure Awareing remains unmoved and unchanged.  It is the only unassailable fortress – yet It is without form or shape or location!

I remember my Granny teaching me the anti-bully rhyme when I was a tiny tot – “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me!”  Wise old wideawake woman.  She knew that Unknowable Knowingness was her true identity.

~ miriam louisa