No-Mind

Mind is a governor, a throttle on the unimaginable velocity of pure consciousness, a tuning fork rendering audible one small swath of the music of the spheres, a prism eliciting color from clear light. Say what you will of a material world, for us it consists solely of mental imagery, thought, and thus it is subject to all the disturbances of reactive thinking.  How then, when most lives waver and veer between cacophony and a din of white noise, worldly and ever restless and discontented, can we awaken into consciousness reflecting itself within an undisturbed mind?

Yet, deep within this disharmony we sense a still, small voice urging us to correct course. Our path to liberation converts disturbance into impetus.

Freedom

It soars beyond mind as an eagle soars above the shattered egg from which it hatched.  It is brimming and void at once.  We bend our mental bows to their utmost, firing terms like "God" and "Allah" and "Brahman" in our effort to bring it to earth, to our world of creation, but this eagle ever soars out of range. Creation will never circumvent consciousness, because it consists of pure consciousness alone.

Just now here in this garden
A lizard basks atop a Buddha's head
Sunning itself in a flower pot.
From the pool a fountain rises
Then falls in a thousand sparkling drops
Splashing, churning, returning,
Incarnate again in fountain evanescence
But for that single drop, or two,
Who disintegrate, free at last for good
From this roiling round of birth and death.

   

Paradise Lost

Today's front page recounts the usual: a war against a brutal tyrant waged between his goons and a "liberating" force dedicated to commensurate brutality has driven a million refugees into neighboring countries, where they now dwell in makeshift tents unwanted, hungry and freezing as winter begins. Oh, and far from hungry, obese Americans who use certain unregulated, over-the-counter dietary supplements are discovering that they now have irreversible liver damage.  Then there's this week's expose by investigative journalists: for 15 years after World War II, the crew of a U.S. tanker were repeatedly ordered to dump barrels of radioactive waste into the Atlantic Ocean (barehanded no less!) and have since been dying off from rare ailments linked to radiation--and their VA claims for benefits were roundly rejected....And we're the "good guys"?

Welcome to samsara, our world of diversity, of "this" and "that", of the implacable play of misguided ideation.  How can we--how dare we--call such a den of suffering mere appearance, an illusion?

Yet we must ask ourselves, if mankind knew deeply and experienced convincingly peace, contentment, acceptance and assurance that the eternal is the only reality and that each of us is in fact that very timeless, space-less abode of Being-Consciousnes-Bliss, that each of us make up an ocean yet think ourselves a wave, would our morning newspaper ever bear such sad tidings again?

Yes, this world is illusion and we are deluded participants in it.  But so is a dream, and the pain and fear and joy and wonder of a dream are very real to the dreamer.  We cry during tear-jerker movies, we scream during horror flicks, we are riveted by thrillers, we fall in love with one character and hate another.  We are enthralled, convinced by their verisimilitude.  We live our lives in such a theater--illusion is reality for most of us.  Must we escape it?  Can we escape it?

Yes and yes and only then  will that heart-wrenching newspaper resolve back into the living tree of truth from which it was rendered.    

Truth

Who am I?  What am I?  I am a sensory apparatus bundled together with an organizing and interpreting organ called mind.  I am a quivering mass of cells composed of molecules consisting of atoms constituted by sub-atomic particles not a whit different or separate from the cosmos in which I live and breathe.  And all of this, cosmos, mind and body, emerge from the infinite, ineffable potential of pure consciousness.  Right?

Wrong.  In its ceaseless attempt to understand and explain, this particular mind has just conjured another apparition from "what is" like a Michelangelo carving David from a slab of marble.  It's nice, it's beautiful, and it's not reality.  Reality is one, not two, unity, not diversity, and even these thoughts and words amount to no more than imagined disturbance of imagined stasis--a breeze within a cocoon of atmosphere swallowed by the void of deep space.  

Turiya

Because it can be reproduced by anyone who follows this path--diligently, earnestly--enlightenment is the spiritual answer for this age of science and skepticism.  Faith is supplanted by tangible experience, real bliss, not emotionally induced religious ecstasies.  Real bliss is not some temporary surge of extreme happiness or sensory overload.  It is characterized by freedom from constriction, expansiveness, absence of impingement of body and mind and what we construe as external and internal worlds.

Enlightenment is constant, not temporal.  If we must call it a state of being, then it is a default state, always running like an operating system behind the computer program of our lives.  The program may be turned on (birth) or turned off (death), while what we really are precedes, under-girds and proceeds regardless.  Jesus alluded to this when he spoke of a "kingdom of God within you" and referred to himself as "I am the vine."  Seasons may pass, leaves will fall and flowers wither and then blossom again, while the vine abides forever.       

Ego

Dispassion is less some sort of coldheartedness than it is freedom from the incessant pressures of instinct, desire, craving and fear in their multitude of forms.  As the sun of dispassion rises the tyranny of body-mind subsides.  Subsides, not disappears, as too many seekers aspire to and expect. Currents subside, waves subside, and with sustained immersion in contemplation of scripture and informed meditation practice we find ourselves gradually floating rather than battling upstream all the time.  The silt settles, revealing the inherent clarity so long concealed by the tumult of our lives.

This is not a matter of suppressing thought, another frequent mistake of seekers.  We are opening, encompassing, dissolving imagined boundaries and merging at last into the real Self.  Nor is this to say that we now float in a dead calm, ever.  Everyone wants nirvikalpa samadhi right out of the chute, which amounts to another nagging desire, another expectation, simply more mental disturbance generated by our conditioned mind.  Some hindrances to awakening are readily discerned while others are camouflaged in ever present and often subtle egotism.  No, our immersion may instill deeper and deeper peace, but those baits and hooks of samsara still dangle everywhere.  The peace arises as we learn not to take these baits, aware now of the hooks buried in each that in one impulsive moment can wrench us back into the frying pan of ignorance.

Equanimity, freedom, bliss, these are all aspects or fruits of our true nature, rays of a sun hidden in our heart of hearts.  Paths like jnana yoga and self-enquiry, philosophies of non-dualism such as Advaita, these are the keys that will free us at last from self-imposed prison.       

Heart

The path to liberation begins with a practice that cultivates discrimination, a systematic method of distinguishing the eternal from the transient in who we are and what we experience.  Mindfulness meditation, self-enquiry and jnana yoga are all trails leading to the same mountain top.  For all intents and purposes, the "neti, neti" (not this, not this) of jnana and the "who am I?" of self-inquiry and the keen and constant "noticing" of mindfulness mirror each other.  They assume something eternal and unchanging as the only reality, they ask probing questions of all that we think and sense, and by a prolonged and earnest process of elimination they arrive at the same crumbling precipice where reason finally fails and clarity reigns.  Their validity has been established over thousands of years of recorded awakenings and shared experiences.

From the standpoint of our conditioned minds this is all nonsense, and indeed non-sense is an apt description of what can not be described.  Many mistake one of its fruits, dispassion, as a sign that Advaitan philosophy is some kind of zombie-inducing kool-aid.  To the contrary, genuine awakening actually fuels greater empathy and compassion--how could it not when now we see at last how lost and misguided mankind is?  Freedom from the conditioned mind adds depth and a new poignancy to our perspective of life and those with whom we share it.        

Surrender

Is enlightenment truly an escape from disease and death, from pain and suffering?  Yes and no. First of all, it is not an escape, but rather the single enduring fact of our existence, the only constant in this ephemeral cosmos we call reality. Whether we heed it or not, it abides just as atmosphere exists whether the day is sunny or stormy.  As time it is eternal, as space it is infinite, as awareness it is pure consciousness empty and unstained by the body-mind we misidentify as self.  So in that sense, yes, enlightenment is liberation from birth, death, pain and suffering.

Of course that doesn't hold much water with the cancer patient just now vomiting from chemotherapy, who in this moment, in this body, suffers intolerably.  Reassuring any tortured soul with the claim that he is eternal and body-less would seem a cruel joke.  But suppose that the diseased body and agonized mind are in truth the stuff of dreams, very real, very sad and painful as we dream it, only to evaporate upon our awakening?       

Teachings

Enlightenment is not an affirmation, no matter how often or how sincerely we profess it to ourselves. It is an experience without the senses, a revelation without the mind.  It is a direct result of self-knowledge.  We may read that we are always already enlightened, which is true, but we are always already ignorant of this, veiled, lost within a clutter of cravings and welter of misguided conditioning. Breaking free of this is a task requiring sustained meditation, contemplation and application per the directives of a truly enlightened sage.

Perhaps only a handful of authentic sages have left a blueprint for us to follow, and of these many had to couch their message of liberation in terms of religion.  They knew that they had to preach to a choir in order to reach the few who had ears to hear truth.  We must frequently sift through the dross of orthodoxy to obtain the gold of their instructions.

Personally, I find the same essence in Jesus' words as I do in Ramana Maharshi's, but I prefer the latter because his canon consists of direct recordings and transcriptions free from the accretion of centuries of zealotry.  So, too, with Nisargadatta Maharaj.  Maybe Eckhart Tolle will float your less esoteric boat.  Just begin the search--a host of good teachers are out there providing different strokes for different folks.  

  

Beyond

I have no edge or boundary, no center, no substance.  I am prior to anything conjured by mind or detected through the senses.  Any vestige of subject or object is a product of mind, a hologram projected upon a screen of pure consciousness.  I am not this mind or its musings.  I am Being-Consciousness-Bliss just as color is immanent in pure light.  This world of diversity is no more than a dream from which I have awakened.

And so, too, can you, because you are precisely what I am.

Maya

Now you have it, now you don't.  Life is a perpetual tease for most of us.  Relentlessly we press forward through the rat race chasing after what we think we need, after people, places and things we are convinced will sustain us, while knowing full well that ultimately every illusory pixel of this picture, including ourselves, is destined to wink out.  Alas!  It's all so grim when we stop to think about it, so we don't.  Most of us just ride the roller coaster oblivious, thrilling in peaks, screaming in valleys, bittersweet sad at the end of the line.  Life is a poignant and all too brief dream.

Some of us find respite through faith in deities, in icons and scriptures of deities, in emotional rescue no matter how fleeting, but for those of us born and baptized in science and secularism faith in things unseen and hoped for will not suffice.  We want tangible methods and reproducible results.  We want visceral answers to our deepest questions.  Is this simply hubris or is it rather an instinct for truth we follow?             

Forward

Advaita not only resolves the age-old conflicts between science and spirituality, it obliterates the very source of our questions.

Advaita teaches not that we are saved or doomed, but that we are enshrouded in ignorance.  It teaches us that we are not who or what we think we are, in fact, that "who's" and "what's" are illusory fabrications.  That's a tough sell, and it usually registers only after extensive investigation into the transience of every aspect of our existence.  We don't want to be reminded of this.  On the contrary, from the moment we are born we are called to "walk, run, chase, flee" after things of the world.  We are conditioned from birth to arise from oceanic bliss like swirling and sucking waterspouts, transience devouring transience, without respite wherever we roam.  And then? Dissipation, dissolution, despondency, death.  The illusory ego and all of its illusory treasures resolve back into the ocean of consciousness.

Such is a typical life.  We dance upon the waters of a mirage.  We squander our days chasing after ceaseless cravings, held hostage to mind and body--to what end?  Wealth?  Power?  Egotism run amok.  Ignorance breeding futility.  No matter what we amount to in worldly terms, we are ever children implacably buffeted by a cosmos we will never trust or control.  We attempt to whistle past the graveyard with our emotional myths and our intellectual moats, but to no avail.  Still the thought of death, especially our own annihilation, chills to the bone.        

Dedication

To seekers everywhere who somehow, despite our inbred ignorance, are drawn to ultimate truth that belies our senses and torpedoes our minds.