doership

life’s ultimate brain-numbing paradox

328

Is Advaita* philosophy fatalistic? Escapist? Depressing? Negative?

Perhaps, if you’re asking from the perspective of an assumed independent entity, one who claims personal responsibility and purpose and is driven by either the carrot dangling from the stick in front, or the pressure of the ‘thou shalts’ from the rear. Perhaps, if you believe in goodness and evil, right and wrong, and that it’s ‘you’ that exercises the power to choose between them.

Perhaps not, if you’ve looked deeply and discovered that the independent person you took yourself to be is (gulp) a construction built up from thoughtstuff. Perhaps not, if, having profoundly understood this, you see that beliefs aren’t something you have but what the imaginary person is.

In the world of appearances, it always depends on where you’re looking from.

Looking from the absolute impossibility of independent person-hood, to whom could it matter? Looking from the relative reality of a daily life however – the one we apparently inhabit – it matters all right. Damn right it matters.

But there’s something about the weird knowing (weird in that there’s no knower) that ‘I’ is the ball of thoughts bouncing back and forth in an infinite rally creating the illusion of separation, as well as their very source, that bestows the freedom to be fully and fantastically human.

This is life’s ultimate brain-numbing and head-shaking paradox.

~

*Advaita = not two.  Actually, not even one.  Indivisible thusness.

if you want to understand why you suffer you’ll need to want it a great deal

296

This morning, after so many sodden days wrapped in mist, the mountain emerges under the gaze of the great Shining.

A verdant world is revealed.  Greens of every radiant tone, still heavily wet, sigh under skies of powder blue.  The grass, dotted with little red mounds of ant-work, is alive with leaping jumping whirling insect life, and seven fat guinea-fowl are busy breakfasting.

The cottage is named Bliss.

~

We really don’t have a clue what we do.  Life acts and we assume responsibility – praise, blame, satisfaction, regret, guilt.  If you still imagine that you ‘know’ what you do, that you drive your Lifeboat, no doubt you’ll still be suffering one way or another.

If you want to understand why you suffer you’ll need to want it a great deal, for it will take all your powers of choiceless observation.  That involves patience.  It means being able to endure not being sure of anything.  It means no conclusions.

If you can bear to look for yourself at all the ways you sabotage the truth of your non-existence, you’ll understand the root of suffering.

~

the revelation of wideawakeness

157

if this wideawakeness fails to erase the dream
of personal doer-ship, you’re still dozing
if it fails to erase the concept
of separate self, you’re still dreaming
if it fails to erase the assumption
of a solid, objective, real world
(ie time and space)
you’re still fantasizing

this is what wideawakeness reveals:
no-thing … Life-ing …
in the boundless non-temporal womb of Creation,
totally nourished and supported
by ITs Light and Grace

~
sublime . . . s w e e t . . . e  a  s  e
~

sweet release

108

within this dream (which has no without)
every action performed seems to spring from the sense of personhood –
a me/doer, a someone, who chooses and controls

waking up in the dream means realizing
that the inexorable movement of Life has been the doer all along,
and that the dreamer just snatched all the credit – or the blame –
in an attempt to feel real

there’s immense release in this:

no one to beat up
no one to blame
no one to be proud
no one to be humble
no one to be guilty

sweet release: are you ready for it?

~

the wide-awake eyes of emptiness just watch

69

the term ‘waking up’ is spot-on when
attempting to report the apparent
shift in the brain that occurs –
spontaneously – when it’s directly seen
that no one here ever makes
any kind of decision,
or does anything
at all

the dream of doer-ship dissolves and
Life’s unimaginable livingness seeps
through the cracks in the cocoon
and simply gets on with … living

ahhh…
the wide-awake eyes of emptiness just
watch – whether, or not
the dream dissolves

~

ditching the death-grip

23

the grip of the imaginary me-self
is a death-grip

the grip IS the self

when that death-grip relaxed –
relaxed for a millisecond,
just long enough
for a rip in the cocoon to open
there was immediate
apperception
of its cause:

the fundamental illusion
in the living of a life
is the unexamined belief
that there is an object
(me)
that ‘does’ it …

when there is only a life being lived by Life

~