One time while meditating, I realised that that suffering comes from losing sight of our true nature which is unlimited, infinite, space like and ocean like by identifying with the waves/phenomena (mind, body) that appears in our true nature. In short: we are an ocean that mistook itself as a wave.
Our true nature is very fundamental, very obvious, but we're lost in/caught up/chasing after the dust that floats in the air and thus lose sight of the the luminous space itself.
Yet, our true nature is the only thing that can never be lost. It's always here, timeless, primordial, without coming and going no matter what ten thousand things passes through. It's indestructible. It's the substance and context in which all appearances are displayed. They are all the manifestation of mind/awareness.
Zen Master Sheng Yen:
Ananda was puzzled by why we have lost sight of our true nature. The Buddha replied that ordinary sentient beings do not see clearly because of their preconceived views. What they think is upside down, may be right side up. What they believe is correct, may be incorrect. The Buddha placed his hand down, and asked Ananda whether his hand was right side up or upside down. Ananda replied that it would be commonly held that the hand was in an inverted position, but he did not know whether the position was correct or inverted. The the Buddha explained that since we were born with our hands hanging down at our sides, perhaps the hand pointed up is really in an inverted position. Ananda knew what the view of a common man might be, but he also knew that this was not the Buddha's view. The Buddha used this analogy to show that the average person has a mind that creates discriminations, and that what he believes to be true, may in fact be false.
When the Buddha saw Ananda's confusion, he spoke: "Virtuous men, I have always declared that Form and Mind, and all causes arising therefrom, all mental conditions and all causal phenomena are but manifestations of the mind. Your bodies and minds are just appearances within the wonderful, bright and pure Profound Mind. Why do you stray from the precious, bright, and subtle nature of fundamentally Enlightened Mind, and so recognize delusion within enlightenment? The mind's dimness creates dull emptiness, and both in the darkness unite with it to become form. The mingling of form with false thinking causes the latter to take the shape of a body stirred by accumulated causes within and drawn to externals without. Such inner disturbance is mistaken for the nature of mind, hence the false view of a mind dwelling in a physical body, and the failure to realize that this body as well as external mountains, rivers and space, and the great earth are but phenomena within the wondrous, bright True Mind. Like an ignorant man who overlooks on the great ocean, but grasps at a floating bubble, and regards it as the whole body of water in its immense expanse, you are doubly deluded amongst the deluded."
The Buddha spoke about delusion, the inverted point of view commonly held by sentient beings. Sentient beings usually take external phenomena as reality, but because such things are not real, they can be compared to a cloud that moves across the sun and temporarily obscures the brightness: the one pure mind of wisdom. The body, the mind, the environment are all part of this wonderful, bright True Mind. All things are not apart from this mind.
If we maintain a balanced mind toward all of these phenomena, we become like the Buddha. Ordinary sentient beings see a bubble on the ocean and take it to be real and substantial; they forget the ocean from which it came. Most people take what they hear and know and what they possess to be part of themselves. What they have no contact with they disregard. The small part of the world they see blocks them from wisdom, like a cloud hides the sun. People are cut off from liberation and bound up with the little bit of phenomena that they know. This is being upside down. This is being inverted. This is seeing the part and missing the whole. There are people who visit a mountain, bring home a rock from its face, and never see the mountain's immensity.
The notion of having lost the experience of awareness is due to the mis-identification of yourself with the comings and goings of experiences. In other words, if you feel there is an increase or decrease of awareness, you have identified yourself with experiences, with one of the waves on the ocean, rather than the non-dual pure knowing of all waves. Since it is non-dual, it means that you are not a particular experience that comes and goes, you are the awareness that is manifesting and not other than all the waves. Never has there been any separation or duality and as such you are everything arising moment to moment, and not just a particular experience in a particular moment whereby 'I' 'merged' with reality. Being ignorant of this you have mistaken a limited expression of awareness as the totality pure awareness, the nature of mind, which has no intrinsic form but has the capacity of limitless expressions, which dependently originates with no beginning and end. You have taken awareness to be an object, a state, that can be 'experienced' or 'not experienced' and there is always this sense of a separate self that is 'not experiencing' or 'experiencing' that state.
In the pure timeless, unmoving awareness, there isn't such a thing as coming and going of awareness. The sun (of pure awareness) in the sky (space of being) shines brightly no matter what appears. The sun rays and the sun are one and the same, there is no duality between awareness and manifestations. It always IS regardless of what manifests and is not separate from what manifests. Awareness never comes and goes, it simply shines on and on, taking on whatever form that dependently originates. Thoughts come and go, bodies come and go, what is your original face before you were born? Still this knowing.
From the perspective of the sun, there is no rising and setting, there is just an endless outpouring of sunshine: but if we shift our attention and identification to the changing content and mistake it as something that has a beginning and end, there appears to be a rising and setting of a particular experience. You mistake a particular experience as 'Awareness' and objectify it as an ultimate state and when this experience ends, you think you lost awareness (notice the duality: 'me' and 'awareness' or 'me' and 'experience'). This is not actually the case but is an illusion due to fixation or identification to a particular "wave" or experience. In reality Awareness did not 'end', it simply manifests in another form due to dependent origination. There is no end, there is simply an ever-evolving process/dynamic flow of being/becoming. Apparent obscurations are in reality also simply the expression of this knowing. Actually the analogy of the sun is imperfect since it may give the idea that there is an unchanging sun shining on changing phenomena. In actual experience awareness is a non-dual knowing without subject/object division. The phenomena itself is self-luminous, there is no unchanging center.
It is not wrong to say that an experience is Awareness, but it is wrong to reify it as an ultimate state since all states and experiences are equally the energy and manifestation of awareness without subject/object division.
This cognizant emptiness which is not other than the dream-like display of appearances shines without beginning or end.
The pure knowing co-emerges with appearances but is unborn and unceasing.
As Guru Padmasambhava taught, this pure knowing which is not an observer and is not separate from the flow of observation is not permanent/unchanging (it is eternal but changing), yet it is not something manufactured or created.
An analogy is that Awareness is like a flow and continuum that never ceases like river flowing ceaselessly. Being like the flow of water it is lacking in any substantial permanent essence. The waves or flow is also not suddenly created or manufactured nor does it cease at any point in time. The waves/flow just dependently originate without beginning or end.
So what we must see, realise, experience, is this ever-present timeless awareness with no coming, going, beginning, or end, yet without reifying it as a metaphysical essence separate from all other phenomena. The flow of phenomena that dependently originates without beginning or end is it -- the luminous empty cognizance. When you realised that this luminous empty cognizance was never separate from everything we experience, then you see that our basic identity as everything arising moment to moment without duality goes on without beginning or end.
Just to clarify: All ignorance are the result of attempts to separate to separate the inseparable, objectify the unobjectifiable.
The moment we talk about
awareness or about anything, we treat it as an object separate from ourselves that can be
experienced or not experienced, that can come and go.
You cannot be aware/unaware of something called 'awareness' because
that would imply it is an object and there is someone separate from
that that could experience/not experience awareness. That separate self
and the awareness separate from myself is a total conceptual
fabrication.
This illusion of separation is the source of all seeking and suffering.
By that separation we have missed the directness and non-duality of reality. It already always is without subject-object division, it is the true nature of being/reality. In reality there is no experiencer experiencing awareness... only pure aliveness that knows itself. Realising this, one realises that I am not an object (apart from me) -- and the so called 'awareness' or 'non dual experience' is not what I experience, it is what one is, or rather what simply IS. It comes with a tacit realisation that you are not merely a lifeless corpse, body or a machine. I am alive. I am Life. I AM. This I AM is never doubtable because it is more real than real -- it is so real you can never deny your own being, nothing can be more real than the pure presence of Being. At any moment even if doubting arises, I AM that clear knowing/presence in which doubting is arising in. This I AMness is Self-Knowing, it is known only by BEING it. When the practitioner realises beyond a shadow of doubt that this is who he is (rather than interpreted as something 'he' experiences), then this is no longer a mere transient experience but a permanent Realisation of the nature of one's being. To realise this it is important to use methods like contemplating on the koan, "Who am I"? However this is only a partial, not complete realisation, and many more stages of realisations must unfold to clarify the non-dual, anatta, empty nature of Awareness. One must also give rise to the realisation beyond a shadow of doubt that a pure sound, a ringing of a bell, is itself pure non-dual awareness and is no more I AM than I AM. Everything shines as nondual awareness. One realises that I am not a separate person experiencing things, I am that Beingness and Knowing that is simultaneously everything. However to distinguish that pure presence as a metaphysical entity apart from everything is to fall into error. You are the sensate universe itself, and that is what you are. So at the level of I AM realisation one realises that the pure sense of presence is what one already is and isn't something one experiences, similarly at the level of non dual and Anatta realisation it is realised that nondual awareness is what everything Already Is and isn't a stage that can be entered or left. In other words, non-duality and anatta is not something or a particular state to be experienced, rather it is what Everything (Already) Is. In seeing always just scenery, no seer. In hearing just sound, no hearer.
The progress of insight may be summarized in short: I AM, then I AM Everything, then just Everything Is. Whatever that is experienced, if mistaken to be separate or something that comes and goes, is evidence that insight has not arisen.
p.s. There never was a problem with the waves on the ocean, and in fact Awareness is always only Manifestations.... there is no separate Witness or Self that stands apart from manifestations. All experiences are only awareness knowing itself as the form. The problem is we objectify ourselves as separate from that experience, and make it into a special state that 'WE' as separate persons experienced and then 'lost' it, and then prefer it to some other states. There is no purest state. All states and experiences are the same non-dual reality. We do not experience things, we are all experiences seamlessly, and the words 'experiences', 'awareness', 'manifestation' are synonymous. Awareness cannot be objectified (that would imply someone separate from 'awareness'), however its presence is undeniable and it simply knows itself as everything. There is no 'IT' that can be pinpointed, it is just the magical display of appearances interdependent with whatever the conditions are.
We never know anything as a separate experiencer, such an experiencer cannot be found. Reality is simply everything being itself, i.e. not 'I' knowing the bamboo, but rather, we enter into the mode of being where the bamboo is the bamboo itself, and from there to look at the pine tree and the bamboo. Everything becomes manifest in their suchness.
It should be emphasized that this must occur as an insight that reality is already non-dual, it is not the case of of a separate self unifying with reality -- the separate self cannot be found to begin with, there is always only non-dual-being-reality, or the scenery sees itself, the sound hears itself.
Notions like 'I once merged with awareness but then lost it' is false since there never was an 'I' that can merge or disappear into awareness, non-dual awareness simply already is and is self-knowing.
So we can never lose awareness, because it is not an object separate from ourselves, it is simply beingness being everything. However we are always fabricating a false sense of duality, a false sense of separation, that can only disappear through deep insight occuring as a result of practice and investigation.
The video by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh came to mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odWIPhj-ivo&feature=related
hey eternal, i a 21 young man. i wish to know join free talks and sharing sessions in temples or places alike, learn more about buddhist teachings and maybe help out in volunteer work. any recommendations? thanks~
response moved to http://buddhism.sgforums.com/forums/1728/topics/378929
Updated my 2nd previous post as I realised my original post was confusing.
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http://www.whatneverchanges.com/writings/e091019.html
We are Nothing – But the Light is All “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, Presence-awareness does not come and go. If you are saying, “I can sometimes rest in awareness, for a little while, but then...,” you are not talking about awareness, you’re talking about your mind. You are noticing what the mind is doing – where you’re putting your attention, what you’re thinking about, and what you’re resting in. It’s fine, but it’s not what’s being pointed to. Presence-awareness is just what is. This. It’s “within or behind” all that you are thinking about, noticing, and resting in. It doesn’t come and go. It has never stopped since the moment you and the world appeared. Can you turn on a light that’s already on? You can rest in a peaceful, empty mind. That’s fine. You can cultivate that with practice. But you can’t cultivate presence-awareness. It just is. You have no power over it. It is not a tool, and it has nothing to do with what is going on in the mind. You don’t move the mind to get to it. It’s already shining here – from behind, from within. And it is all. This light of presence-awareness, which is here always, is all. It shines upon things, of which the individual self is one. But it itself is not a thing. Can you rest in it? It is what you are. Is it necessary to rest in yourself, or are you simply that? |