That Unfolding

Someone asked me- “How do you act i everyday life after you’ve experienced the awakened state. How do others react to this“?

The seemingly cleaver reader will (like I would) wait for an answer that indicates a dualistic mind at work.
So let me begin with saying: There is no “me” that can choose to act in a certain way. Neither is there a “me” that have had the experience of “the awakened state”.
Mind games aside, here comes the answer:

It’s not that complicated really. If you are conditioned to be an actor playing a specific part in a specific play, you just play along.
The conditioning of this Me-actor  and this play happened, and continues to happen,  without me knowing it.
I did not choose that to happen. I was not aware of becoming an actor and I didn’t know the play was made up by the workings of human mind.
No one is controlling it. There is no author, no director. It just unfolds according to the given conditions.

The Director or Governing Laws of choise (God, Buddha, Brahman, Laws of the Universe, Randomness, Energy, The Divine Power etc) are themselves part of the play. They arise within the human mind.

“They arise within the human mind” should also be added to the list above.
“”They arise within the human mind” should also be added to the list above.”  should also be added to the list above.
And the creating of external forces of creation thus grows ad infinitum.

Adding “And the creating of external forces of creation thus grows ad infinitum” makes the whole thing absurd.
When you realize that whatever your mind comes up with should be added to the list, there is laughter.
The play starts to become playful.

So the play is created within human mind because that is how the mind unfolds, how it works. But human mind is not all there is. Human mind is only part of what unfolds in the totality of ever ongoing creation.
Everything else is “What Is”.

What Is can only be understood by human mind.
But the understanding cannot be complete. Mind can only comprehend what happens on the staged reality created by itself. That is, the minds version of What Is.
Therefore, mind is always dealing with itself, without knowing what it does, without being mindful of itself.

The eye seeing everything but seeing itself.

The answer to the question is simply that I keep acting like before. I know my part and I know the play. It follows the rules of the dualistic mind.
It is about dividing, understanding, predicting, controling and achieving.
We all know the play, don’t we?
The difference now is that I know this is a play. I know my part is based on the basic premises of the play. I know these premises to be an artifact of the human mind. Nothing more, nothing less.
I also know that this knowledge, just like any knowledge the “I” can “have”, is part of the play.
It is in a sense artificial knowledge.

The concequence of this “knowing” is that I can play my part without being caught up in it, as if acting/action was all there is. When circumstances allowes for it, I can take my costume of and watch the play as a spectator. Relaxing in a comfortable seat, amused and amazed.

Just sitting
Just looking
Not acting

Gradually I have come to value this play for what it is. To become a true spectator made me uneasy for a while. I questioned the use of playing along. The acting suddenly seemed like “pretending” to be something I was not. The play seemed unreal.
Thankfully this play-aversion has lost it’s grip. The acting is not for real, nor is it un-real.
It seem like dividing What Is into play vs. reality is just another part of the play.
It seems like – since the human mind is also part of What Is – the undividable, the non-dual, can divide itself while still being whole. 

Not One
Not Two

All of this is of course not true, nor is it not-true.
This is not the way it works, still it works like this.
All of the above has unfolded within the play.
That is all there is.
That unfolding.

Discovering a Path To Abandon – That’s The Real Shit

In order to free yourself from your self you must give up the apperance of  a self in the first place. To do that we’re supposed to enter some kind of path towards that very end. When we enter the path, we’re stuck in the beliefe that there is actually someone, me, doing it. It has to be that way. If not we wouldn’t bother with it, right? If no one is there, who’s doing all the required practice?

The purpous of all religious or spiritual practice pointing to the supposed liberation of the true self is to deploy a cul de sac, a path which leads nowhere, a dead end. The dead end can be viewed as a symbol of how seeking, in itself, is an activity leading away from actual life. Paradoxically, it is generally seen as leading towards the much desired “real” life, the ultimate being.

From my current perspective, you are advised to stop seeking altogether. But how is this possible when there’s no one there to stop it, or so I prupouse. Well, you have to start on the wrong foot, like it or not. If there is something to give up there must first be an activity which to give up. If I don’t do anything – which is ultimately true – how can I stop doing it?
Now, assume we’re all searching for something we believe is missing, the first step towards giving up the search is the sense of being a seeker. It is when you define yourself as a “seeker” that the marketplace of spiritual practices appears with all it’s incence, bells, hymns, scriptures, vows, rituals and rules of conduct. It’s a very strange marketplace because it appears as the anti-marketplace. Still it functions as marketplaces do. There’s directors, employees, offices, offerings, merchandice and buissness per usual. There’s nothing bad or good about all that. It just is as it is and that is It.

Anyways, if you, the seeker, buys into the practice of seeking in a very structured way, you have finally something to give up. The giving up has been made possible by this dualistic construction of seeker-practice-liberation. The absurdity is that it works the other way round.
Liberation is already here, so you can drop the practice and then you can drop the seeker. Voilá, what´s left is that which Is. We end up with Everything That Is and the fact that Everything That Is equals Everything That Ever Was as well as Everything That Ever Will Be. It’s omnipresent and all inclusive. The Mother of All Inclusives.

But the way to get here is to first recognize that you are in fact seeking, and then to get there, into the dead end. Striving on the path on which the sense of self is indeed enforced you must try really, really hard. you must meditate, concentrate, jump up and down, recite sutras and sing gospels, rub your chacras, live mindfully, praise the lord and so on.
 If it happens so that the seeker knocks herself out sufficiently on this brick wall of “trying to achieve liberation”, then she might give up the practice. Then it can go either wayI suppose. As long as she doesn’t also give up the “seeker”, some kind of depression may arise. She’s stuck with a “self” that has failed it’s suicide attempt and that’s rather depressing ain’t it? On the other hand, if she drops not only the practice but also the practitioner, there is no one there to have failed. Also, there is no one there that have succeeded. Faliure and success becomes completely irrelevant, and that is maybe the taste of freedom.

What then causes the situation to go either the depressive route or the liberating route?
Well I guess ther is no one to answer that.

Shit Happens. Sometimes “good” shit. Sometimes “bad” shit. Always The Real Shit.

What Makes My Self Mine And Not Yours?

My Self is the inter-action between my physical body with all is’s reactions to the environment and that particular environment with all is’s reactions to my body.

The inner workings of Ultimate Reality, sort of…

Consider the figure as a picture of the relations between Forms and Emptiness. Books on this has never pictures in them to go with the message which to me is surprising. Well, there’s always the Bodhi Tree, the Mountain and the River and whatnot, but they all say the same thing;
-This Is The Truth, This Is Reality, Open Your Eyes And Realize That The Answers To All Of Your Questions Are As Simple As This. Fair enough, but I’m trying to paint a picture of the actual confusion that makes me blind and keeps me asleep. Naturally this will not be beautiful at all. It’s not a beautiful thing to paint. It’s abstract, heady, rational and by default confusing. I find it impossible to paint a not-confusing picture of confusion, so here we go.

To be Form there only need to be One Form. There would be no one to recognize it so in essence it would be unknown. Therfore we can leave that hypothetical argument aside. It’s irrelevant.
To be unconscious Forms there need to be at least two of them and there need to be Emptiness in-between. In fact, there could not be two forms without some space in-between.
To be self-consious Form, which is the Form you and I are most interested in, there need to be one Form that consider itself differentiated from other Forms. As with unconscious Form, we need also Emptiness.

So, in the picture You are the red dot and Ground is the black circle. In reality Other Form is not one circle but millions because You are constantly encountering a lot of Forms simultaneously (chair, animal, sun rays, airwaves etc). The circle is better thought of as a ball of threads/forms that swirls around you. Sometimes you bounce onto the ball, sometimes the ball contracts and bounce on you. There’s a constant dynamic in this relation and it can’t be avoided. You are 24/7 100% in relation to other form whether you like it or not.

Allright then, our mind can only deal with differentiation, duality that is. We cannot think of Emptiness as a Form. Our mind tells us that Emptiness is defined by the abscence of Form. It is Nothing. So from a minds perspective there’s no point in looking into Emptiness. It will find Nothing. So if you’re not looking for anything take a look at Emptiness, right?
Well, when meditating we’re looking for something, so we go elsewhere. We’re looking for our True Self.  Ok, says mind, then we’ll look at what is You and compare it to what is Not You. That’s the only thing your mind can do, and it is pretty good at it.
Problem is that the mind can only find the Formal aspect of You and that’s not the whole picture. As we’ve seen, the red dot can only exist when together with Other Form and Emptiness. The missing part of your True Self cannot be found within yourself and definitely not inside Other Form. It has to be within the empty space that makes different Forms possible. So mind has to be dismissed when searching for the missing part. It cannot relate to Nothing. So how do we look? The answer is; we don’t! If the only way to consciously look at reality is by using our mind, then we cannot find any part of reality that resides in Emptiness.
This is where the Zen concept of No-Mind come into play. It sounds stupid, but in this perspective it is totally rational. When we come to this point, it is best to say – “Nevermind” to our mind.
But we must be careful not to jump to conclusions here. When we realize that the True Self is not to be found in our physical form with all it’s content of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, memory and awareness, we might think – Oh well, my True Self is Emptiness then. Very not so! If we do that, we forget that we’ve already found a big part of what is our True Self, our physical Form that is. Going back to the picture, if no red dot then there’s no one to conclude – I am Emptiness. So we have to embrace that part of True Self which is Form and then move on with it. There’s no escape from the reality of Form. Therefore there’s no point in trying to deny it. If you look for your True Self without your Form (which in practice is impossible), you’ll only find fragments of the self bouncing in Emptiness. How sad.
So we take our My Form on a mindless tour around the empty space between that and other forms. It is there we can find the missing pieces. Our mind cannot find them because it sees nothing in Emptiness. They have to be experienced mindlessly so to speak. Therefore, those parts of True Self cannot be talked about directly. That would be “minding” them and as soon as that happens, they’re gone. Remember, mind can only grasp Form.
To sum it up; True Self is partially Form, but not entierly so. It isn’t Emptiness either because Emptiness is …well, “empty”. Rather,  my True Self is My Form plus what happens in the space of Emptiness when My Form interacts with Other Form. That means, if there’s any sense in it, impermanence is of two distinct qualities. One obvious where My Form is in constant decay, and one less obvious. The slippery one is to be found in Emptiness where part of my True Self is in constant change due to the dynamics in relations between Forms. That part is in every moment both created and lost and thus impermanent in a circular fashion. In that perspective it would be possible to say that my True Self is in constant decay as well as constantly reborn and killed. You are the one walking the ground as well as the walking itself, and the walking is in itself made up of you and the Ground. Without this relation between you – ground there would only be Emptiness. But instead of Emptiness there is a relation in action and that relation contains equal parts of your form and the ground’s form. Part of the True Ground is thereby found in part of your True Self. Those parts are found within Emptiness, but they are not Emptiness. They are Oneness residing within Emptiness but inherently empty without the duality of different forms.
That is the Ultimate Reality.

If all this seems a load of BS, don’t blame me.
You did it.