by Jean Klein
If I am one with the functioning and nothing is outside it how can it be remembered later in time?
The fact that it is remembered proves that it appeared in your global awareness. This is what we mean by saying consciousness and its object are one. It is also sometimes called witnessing. In this global awareness things appear from so-called past or future but they all belong to the universal present. In reality therefore there is no memory. It is function in awareness, in witnessing.
When do we witness our actions?
You are always witnessing your actions, so don’t try to witness. Witnessing is not a function and cannot be represented. It is extremely important that you realize that you are the witness and that you cannot try to be it. It is enough that you become fully aware that you are the witness, for that eliminates the old patterns and the habit you have of considering yourself to be the thinker or doer.
When you act you are one with the action, it is only afterwards that the ego appropriates the act from which it was absent, and says “I have done this.” At the moment of acting there is only acting, without an actor.
Once the interfering subject is recognized as nonexistent it disappears. What remains is pure consciousness. Without the egosubject there can be no subject/object relation so that what appeared to be an object can no longer rightly speaking be one. It is nothing but an expression of this reality, this stillness.
Should we not make some effort to improve ourselves?
What do you want to improve? You are perfect; uncover the person who feels something is missing, and what remains is perfection. What is false disappears of its own accord, once it has been seen as false. You identify yourself with your body and your mind and because of this you want to improve. You will be dominated by these instruments just as long as you believe in them.
The moment you no longer believe you are the body and mind the energy used up in this error will be freed. Leave the mind and body free to be what they are and you will no longer be their slave. They are only fragments of the whole which you are. Simply take note of your imperfections and this awareness will take care of them. Once you understand that you are not the body and the mind, you can then accept whatever happens. Understanding your fundamental autonomy brings you to an attitude of total acceptance.
Every single thing is seen in the light of this welcoming, appears and disappears within it. As a result, things attain their full significance and harmony reestablishes itself. This welcoming is an alert awareness, uninhabited by the past. It allows whatever presents itself to unfold in and point to the welcoming, without being limited by the ego or deformed by memory.
In this Oneness we discover our nature: ultimate joy, and perfection.
There are moments in daily life when the mind is not agitated. These are windows where Truth can flow in. We should become aware of these moments. They do not come about by will or discipline, rather the outer circumstances bring the mind to quietness. Once the mind stops trying to grasp, once there is no effort to attain and become something, once energy is no longer projected in strategy and end-gaining it returns to a state of equilibrium where everything remains peaceful and points towards silent awareness, within which all thoughts and perceptions come and go.
But cannot we bring about the tranquility of the mind through meditation?
This quiet mind of which I am speaking is not the absence of thought. The absence of thought is a state produced artificially but the mind free from agitation has its own rhythm, its own pulsation. Between these pulsations are gaps of which one must be aware. They are not an absence or a blank state. They are full, presence. Allow yourself to be taken by them.
Truth cannot be perceived. It can only be lived in the non-dual continuum, the non-state where there is neither seer nor seen.
But certain forms of meditation bring one to the quiet mind and prepare one to be taken by what is behind the mantra.
Pronouncing a mantra correctly is a high art rarely achieved. When correctly pronounced it has the power to quiet the mind. When all formulation of the mantra is dissolved through the sound vibration you are one with the perception, the vibration. This vibration is still an object of observation but as you know from your guru that what you are is the light behind all perceptions, even this most subtle object dissolves in your being aware.
The art of the mantra is magic and to learn it takes a very long time and a very talented teacher. Usually you die before you master it!
Can we come to freedom and peace through helping others as Christianity teaches?
If you want to help others, you must be completely free from any need for help. When you experience this you are the biggest help possible to all those surrounding you. It is in non-action that all action is accomplished. You are not the doer of your acts, you are the awareness from which action stems. In relationships between personalities, between objects, there is only looking for security, there’s only asking. Even so-called giving is with a view to getting. Pure giving is your true nature, it is love. When the occasion asks you for help you will spontaneously help, and the help coming from wholeness, from love, will be highly effective. But when you are a professional helper acting on an idea you have of yourself or the world your help will always remain fractional.
But before I am realized isn’t fractional help better than no help at all?
The idea of helping is anticipation. It is action which comes out of reaction. See the deep motive of your desire to help. Real helping, as I said, comes out of non-action. When the world asks for help, help of course, help with discrimination but don’t be a helper.
What do you mean, “help with discrimination”?
Give to your fellow what he needs to accomplish what life asks of him. Do not impose on another your idea of how he should best live. Indiscriminate “help” is all around us. It doesn’t come out of freedom from the person. In a way such interference is violence, war.
Why do you say that perceiving is closer to truth than a concept?
A perception is the first message given by the senses before the brain names it or the psychological mind qualifies it. Most people’s perception of their bodies is atrophied because they go away from the perception and immediately conceptualize it. The perception is always in the present, immediate, but conceptualization is memory. Most of the time we feel and function through memory.
In everyday life we rarely give sensations time to make themselves felt. We prematurely intervene, conceptualizing and qualifying them. Perceptions and concepts cannot exist simultaneously and we tend to cut the perception short before it has fully flourished.
So, if I understand, the senses are in contact with our surroundings but we miss this contact because we live in the memory of former sensation?
Yes, we have conceptualized sensation, crystallized it, qualified it. Perception, that is cognition, and naming, re-cognition, are natural functions which happen spontaneously without the need for a center of reference, an I, a propagator of opinion. But we go away from these immediate functions, we don’t wait for the unfolding of the perception, we don’t welcome what our surroundings offer us. When we live in memory we cut ourselves off from the universe, we live in isolation. This is the root of all suffering.
Is perception non-dual or can we move nearer to non-duality?
Perception itself is non-dual, it is one with the awareness within which it appears.
How can we become aware of the awareness in which perception appears?
Pure perception is contained by what we call awareness. In this instance the container and the contents are identical. He who knows the contents, in other words, he who is aware, who “knows” himself as awareness and not as the psyche, is knowingly aware, is present at the time of perceiving. He is the living witness, at the same time the audience and the actor. Once this perception comes to an end, or between two thoughts, he is aware of being, but there is no sensation linked to it.
The background is like a white sheet on whi
ch we draw: lines appear, the drawing takes form yet the white sheet does not disappear into thin air. The drawing covers, camouflages the whiteness but the whiteness is still there behind it. Sensations camouflage just like the drawing, so he who does not know himself, “he who is not aware,” only sees the discontinuous lines, separate one from another, he does not see the white sheet. He is lost in the sensation, forgets himself.
Isn’t this awareness of oneself also a perception?
No, it is vital that you understand that awareness can never become an object; it is neither outside nor inside, it is free from time and space. It is the vastness, the container, in which all states, all objects appear. It is your nearest and can never be perceived as the eye cannot see its seeing. The ultimate knower knows itself by itself. It needs no agent to be known. Awareness is not a perception. It is an apperception.
What is the difference between this apperception and what you call direct perception?
Perception calls for a subject/object relation. Direct perception does not go through the mind. It is the same as apperception.
Why can there not be a regression ad infinitum of perceivers?
Consciousness is our totality, our total expression is in consciousness. If consciousness could be perceived it would not be our totality.
Why must we have a totality? Cannot our being be an infinite regression?
If we do not live our totality we live in fraction, in subject/object relationship, in discontinuity. This brings conflict in our life. First accept this state of all appearings, the discontinuity of existence. In real acceptance, the accepted is in the accepting. This accepting is your wholeness. But it must not remain a concept, second-hand information. It must be lived, made first-hand.
Do we have very few pure perceptions?
Yes, very few indeed when you consider that a sort of memorybank intervenes very frequently. When a perception is pure, there is no memory. For example, I can direct my attention towards the flower and think that I feel it but I do not really feel it, I have only provoked memory. If, on the other hand, I could remain present to the flower and not refer to the past, to memory, the flower would appear as much more than I have stored in my memory. It would surpass all expectation, appearing in its fullness before my innocent eye.
Is this remaining present without letting memory intervene what you mean by listening?
Yes. Listening has no center, it is multi-dimensional welcoming.
You say we cannot go and meditate. What you call meditation is the background, the container, but is not sitting and listening, remaining present, what we would normally call meditation?
This sitting is a laboratory for exploring the motive to want to meditate, for finding the entity who is looking for god, peace, happiness. As long as you have not discovered the nature of the meditator you will continue to sit and look for it. But eventually you will see that the meditator can never find peace, god or happiness because it belongs to the mind, to the intellect. When this is seen, and it happens suddenly, there is no dynamism “to meditate:’ All that remains is presence where no one is present to anything.
So should I sit regularly until I find the meditator, or find that it cannot be found?
You can find this at every moment in life. Don’t make sitting a practice, a habit, an addiction. Wait until you feel the invitation to simply be quiet.
What shall I do if the invitation doesn’t come very often? I have a busy life and it seems to camouflage the invitations.
See that you are lost in your activities. As soon as you see this there is some space between you and your activities.
But I know I am lost in my activities. I am very aware of this fact, that is why I came here and asked you the question. Seeing it is not enough.
You have conceptualized your seeing, because you live in concepts. You have made a thought of being lost and being busy. By seeing I don’t mean see intellectually; real seeing is direct perception as we discussed earlier. It is facing the facts, the sensation, the state of things without a justifier, controller, without rationalizing or thinking about them. There is no seer in seeing. It is an instantaneous apperception that occurs when you no longer try to escape the facts. Then all activities are in you but you are not in them. You will no longer feel lost in activities, no longer feel identified with them. On the contrary activities are lost in you.
When meditating, my respiration occasionally troubles me; I feel it as something solid that I would like to stop.
One should neither want to breathe or want to stop breathing. There must not be any volition. Simply watch the coming and going of the breath as you watch a cloud or a bird. You will see that your breathing is full of tension. In letting it simply function your breath will come to its natural organic movement. What is important is that you come to that moment when you feel yourself in being aware. Being aware is listening, listening to whatever presents itself, just as when many different sounds occur, a child playing, a car engine running, a bird singing in a tree, and you don’t choose among these sounds nor grasp them. You neither try to ignore them nor pay attention. In this way what you hear is not able to take a hold in you and the energy usually deployed in grasping, in controlling the breath or sound heard, will return back upon itself, and you will experience true listening.
Isn’t this listening a perception?
No, it is not a perception. Although this reality knows itself, it is not a subject/object knowing. Listening, non-directed attention, is the natural, the inbuilt, functioning of the brain.
So is listening the same as consciousness or is it an expression of consciousness?
Listening is of the same nature as consciousness. Unconditioned listening is the most subtle function. When listening is sustained it unfolds in consciousness.
How can we be this consciousness, this silence, and at the same time carry out an activity calling for memory, the handling of concepts and other forms of attention?
All of our everyday activities find their full meaning and fulfill all their possibilities in self-knowledge, in this consciousness. Once you are knowingly this awareness, you no longer identify with the mind. Then you will experience a dynamic energy whatever activity you undertake, but it will no longer be a driving force dominated by will, binding you to an object. It too is an expression of consciousness.
What does self-knowledge taste like, feel like? I assume it is not completely flavourless!
The Self knows itself, of its own accord, without the intervention of any means. It cannot be described because it is not in the realm of comparison or complementarity. You cannot smell incense burning nor see the leaf of a plant without using the corresponding sensory organ, but consciousness knows itself all the while the varied aspects of manifestation occur. Water is not altered by the many different fish swimming in its depths, it is ever water. I can give you another analogy. You only taste the things that are in your mouth, the objects, but the mouth has its own taste.
Maybe you cannot fully understand the true vision of things because you are not yet fully convinced that nothing exists on its own outside you, everything finds its being within you. What you see and do are creations of the moment. It is only memory that creates the illusion of continuity. It is memory that proclaims that you were here yesterday or the day before.
So we could say that this knowledge is honey and that we taste it at the same time?
Knowing knows only itself. It is aware of the surroundings and at the same time aware of being aware.
My biggest stumbling block is the world of difference that exists between the intuition I encounter while meditating and the fact that everything is forgotten once I undertake my daily activities. In the end I begin to wonder why I meditate at all, for an hour later I have forgotten everything and am once again submerged by objects.
The problem is this: during meditation you experience and contemplate a vacant state of mind, what you perceive is the absence of activity. You know this absence but
do not yet know the knower. Once you are knowingly this knower, you will be the knowing, whether the mind is active or passive. There will be no difference, no change. From then on this awareness will be unwavering certainty.
The total emptiness which you will experience during meditation is in a way still an object. Absence of thought inevitably implies its eventual complement, presence of thought. Thus although you sense a state of deep peace free from activity, it is very important not to emphasize this blank state, the empty mind. Living meditation is not the absence of mind activity but is the “support” of activity and non-activity. If you emphasize the knower of the empty mind and not the empty mind itself one day this void, this blank, will also vanish and you will encounter ultimate stillness. This stillness will remain during all activities.
Up till now you have contemplated a calmed mind, but should a bird sing or someone speak, your inner silence is broken. That is why you ask this question. By its very nature the mind is occasionally empty; it is nonetheless nothing but an instrument.
What should we do when there is a striving towards something during meditation?
You must simply observe it. Soon attention will shift to this observing and not the object you observe. You will be attention, attention without object. This might seem to be a meaningless way to talk about attention because we are accustomed to being attentive towards something. But pure attention is absolutely empty of all direction. It is not focused on an object, it is free of any memory. It is simply expanded alertness.
You spoke of sound. Once there is no more emphasis on it do we still hear it?
As long as the child is crying you still hear it because the function of the ear is hearing. When there is no more emphasis on the sound, that is, when you no longer direct your attention to it, choose it, and name it, then what remains? The inbuilt function continues, it is vibration. The specific sound dies away completely and what remains is pure listening.