A House Built On Sand
The fundamental understanding inherent to nonduality
“The question that scientists ask is how matter becomes conscious. The new idea is that everything 'has' a 'degree' of Consciousness. It's called Panpsychism. The conclusion to this way of thinking is that the universe is conscious, and this is considered to be equivalent to the non-dual understanding but it is not. It is a misunderstanding. It is a form of materialism. The mistake is right at the very beginning. The mistake is the idea "I, the body, am aware." Once you start there, you're building a house on sand. Everything you think after that initial thought is going to contain the original mistake within it. If we think the body is conscious, then we're going to think dogs are conscious, cats are conscious, chickens, fishes, plants, etc. and eventually we'll think the universe is conscious. The universe is not conscious. Dogs, cats, and human beings are not conscious and never will be.
Only Consciousness is conscious. Only Awareness is aware.
So it is not the body that is aware. The body is not the subject of experience, but the object. It is not the perceiver, but the perceived. It is not the knower but the known. That is a fact of experience.
We hear things like, "everything is pervaded by Awareness." A statement like that is a concession to the mind that believes in a multiplicity and diversity of things. As a concession to that belief, we can say that all those things are pervaded by Consciousness. No one would ever say that the landscape in the movie is pervaded by the screen. There is no such thing as a landscape to be pervaded by the screen. There is just the screen which is modulating itself as the landscape. So the universe is not conscious or pervaded by consciousness. There is just Consciousness, which appears to itself as the universe.”1
What we call spiritual awakening is a shift in the imagined positionality of our point of perception. The point of perception itself never changes, only its imagined position does. Where imagination ceases, truth begins.
Our default positional viewpoint is situated in the person who could be, for example, victim to negativity. What awakening provides is a sort of permanent disassociation— one step back—to a default position in the awareness that witnesses the experience of personhood. So rather than trying to fortify “yourself” against negativity, one comes to realize that what negativity ‘gets into’ is not you.
“This person you are so preoccupied with, what is it?
What in fact is born?
This person is to the body what color and fragrance are to a flower. It comes into being when the foundation to support it appears, that is self-conscious.
What is born, in the strictest sense, is witnessing via a body.”2
The primordial will operates through containers, hence the world and everything in it. The wills do not have limitation but the containers do.
All that is, is filtered to almost nothing and experienced through a costume of sensation. We call that "our body" and in this confusion, we mistake the meat sack to be who we really are.
What we call "free will" is the infinitely free primordial will operating through the appearance of an individual unit. The unit is not independent or self aware and has no agency of its own whatsoever. Only that which lives it is free and aware.
The appearance of a body serves no purpose other than to capture for a finite moment within sensation the infinite One.
What a miraculous happening.
And yet every problem we face as a race today stems from our identification with a body that has nothing to do with who we really are.
You are not your race, your gender, your privileges or limitations, or any of the stories that you or society has written and which keep us in a constant state of upheaval. The mind is proficient in writing and accumulating stories as a means of sensemaking the unfathomable but conversely, the current societal theatrics are what becomes of a (collective) mind when it stays too long in a story.
Hear this:
identifiers are only important to a culture that doesn't want you to know who you really are
because if you really knew,
absolutely nothing could enslave you.
You have to know who you are beyond -this- in order to navigate this freely. The individual unit—plant, animal, human, alien, whatever costume in which the Absolute is appearing—is just a quantum witnessing processor that filters reality into discernibly manageable Experience. The way in which reality appears is determined by the structure of the unit, the container. Absolute awareness becomes awake to itself as an object when that awakeness is reflected within a container. Without the container, what would awareness be aware of except for itself? Nothing. There is never a moment the absolute is awake to anything but itself. There is nothing but itself. Objects are, despite their apparent multiplicity and diversity, “manifestations of the essential givenness, manifestations of the eternal Suchness”, to quote Aldous Huxley.
Within sameness there is difference. But that difference should be different from sameness is in no wise the intention of all the Buddhas. Their intention is both totality and differentiation.
For all intents and purposes, the why’s and how’s of mind, matter, refracted light through containers, is unsolvable and frankly irrelevant to the determination of your true nature. You are That which witnesses. Bring the mind to rest here.
We are pressed so tightly up against reality that we don’t even see it. The immediacy of what is happening is so eternally current that the mind falls into time, which is an afterthought of being. Once identified with mind rather than being, the conscious point of reference cannot help but see at a distance, to look for something else. But we are always looking for what’s looking. Identifying as the mind is just an avoidance tactic.
The primary worshipful relationship has to be with Reality— being without looking for something else. This is the challenge of humanness.
Again, Huxley:
That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory— all these have served, in H.G. Wells‘s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
This era of humanity finds itself mesmerized within the Artificial Paradise of personal identity, its false comfort, and the enjoyable decent into anger that comes from defending it from encroachers. Knowing who you are timelessly is the Door in the Wall of personhood. Every problem disintegrates under the burning clarity of seeing who has it.
“The subject and the object exist in you, but you are neither. You are changeless and permanent, prior to all consciousness. You cannot know what you are. You can only be it without knowing.”3
The answer to your problem is to see who has it.4
At the first moment of clarity, the desire to improve the mirage ceases.5
Rupert Spira
Wu Hsin
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Ramana Maharshi
Wu Hsin
Another interesting read to rack the brain and tell it to shut up and just be. Thank you and look forward to more wise and intellectual banter of clarity. Your voice haunts every word as I read.
Beautiful and wise truth.