Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Surrender

Is surrender what happens when you do not do ?
Surrender doesn't mean 'giving up'.
Surrender means Letting Go !
Surrender means that the Only thing that can happen is to Witness, just Watch, Observe. No judgment, No Opinion, No Belief. Wordless Observing. Thoughtless Observing. Mindless Observing.
And in that, there is a SEEING.
A SEEING of What IS
Now let's not get too pure here.
Thoughts or Doing will still occur, you can't willfully turn them off, but you can recognise them for what they are. That is an attempt by mind to do what it is good at. Maintain the status quo, keep within the familiar.
This is where (you have heard it said) that everybody is already enlightened.
Whatever IS, is. Shit included.
It all just IS. Even when it's not, it IS.
Do you have a choice which thoughts arise ?
Do you have a choice about anything ?

mind mistaking mind for reality.

An object (a tree) is seen. Seeing occurs.
Light of various wavelengths enter the eye and this stimulates nerves which trigger the brain to see shape and color. At this point the brain consults a database of previous experiences and learned information to arrive with a label "tree".
It is at this point that mind enters the show.
It might say "just a tree, pleasant color and shape" and minds' physical component, emotion, kicks in and a good feeling happens.
At this point most people are 'seeing' what was in the database and not the actual tree.
This all happens automatically and takes nano seconds.
Can you imagine if we didn't consult the database ?
Everything would be seen as if for the first time and there would be an overwhelming flood of information that needed to be sorted. But the database has been filled with both useful as well as 'actuality distorting' information.
We just need to sort out the wheat from the chaff and allow the inappropriate to 'bleed' away.
The point i make here is that this process is mind seeing mind.
To think ABOUT what is occurring, to recognise, involves thought. But only original thought. First thought. This is how communication occurs. Labels are applied.
Importantly here, we need awareness, not to start relating to the label instead of the actual.
The minds I kicks in as soon as we have opinion or judgement and obviously we have to think to consider if that is occurring.
To say that an I is involved here maybe nothing more than a recognition of a familiar, habit form.
If you see the opinions that ring the alarm bells for I involvement, then identification is broken.
If unthinking wallowing in judgements happens, then I-dentification with an imaginary self exists.
Without identification with the illusory I, thoughts will continue to arise (Thoughts will never go away completely - maybe) The I will always be on call for when it is useful, but will always be seen as story.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Reality...

There is no such thing as Truth. It is as much an illusion as Self.
Check for yourself. Have you ever Experienced a thing called Truth ?
It is just language talking about some supposed characteristics of something.
You are not separated from the Truth (presuming Truth = Reality) Nor are you separate from "what is". Reality is, As IT IS.
As Reality consists entirely of your current experiencing, tell me, is it possible for there to be Experiencing without an Experiencer or an Experiencer without an Experiencing ?
Is it possible for there to be any separation between 'you' and 'your' experiencing ?

Experiencing
reality is only
Experiencing.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Belief in the story of I

Some people say that the mind is I.
The reality is that the I is mind.
That is it is constructed of thought and is just a story, a concept.
This concept is powerful in that the emotional reactions to the story are very real and they imply that the cause (the story) is real too. NOT SO!
The mind won't immediately stop doing what it does, but the SEEing that it is doing mind stuff, is ALL it takes to break the identification with the belief in the story of I.

If I is the mind,
and mind is only some thoughts,
When thinking ceases ?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

about freedom...

This comes from a blog by Ciaran Healy; http://ruthlesstruthdotcom.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/second-kind-of-freedom.html

Freedom. What is freedom?

Well, there's two different kinds. One, is freedom FROM something. The other is freedom TO DO something you couldn't do before.

Yeah? Positive and negative freedom. Everyone tends to think of negative freedom. Freedom as the removal or this tyranny, or that tyranny.

Negative freedom is freedom from something bad. The civil rights movement, for instance, is a case of people fighting for negative freedom. Freedom from discrimination, freedom from inequality. Freedom from.

That's not to say it's not important, it is. But there's also another kind of freedom.

Freedom to. Freedom TO. That's something different.

Freedom TO is the addition of an option you never had before. If you are suddenly granted a pair of wings, that's not freedom from not having wings. It's freedom TO. Freedom to fly.

You don't have to fly. You can just sort of sit there. But you can, if you want, spread your new wings and take off. If you want. You don't have to. You just have the option to. The freedom to.

Freedom to.

Enlightenment is classically seen - and we have seen it, including myself, from the start - as freedom FROM. We've been looking for the end of suffering, freedom from suffering.

The problem with freedom FROM is that unless something VERY intense happens, you'll never fully root out the thing you want freedom from.

Racism is a good example. Did the Civil Rights movement deliver freedom FROM racism? Well, it definitely reduced the tyranny of it, absolutely. But no, there's still racism.

What it did deliver is freedom TO. With the new laws passed against discrimination, and the groundswell of public support for their cause it meant that black people had a new option, they were free TO live in ways that had previously been blocked to them.

Freedom TO.

Does liberation + gate + void end deliver freedom FROM suffering?

Nope.

Does it help?

Yup.

Does it deliver any FREEDOM TO's?

I would argue that with this eternal stuff, yes. Yes it does. It is brilliantly delivering a very CLEAR freedom TO for me.

The freedom to be cool. The freedom to be chill. The freedom to be balanced. The freedom to focus. The freedom to be open. The freedom to empathise. The freedom to apologise. The freedom to live an emotionally balanced life.

Yeah?