by Wu Hsin
Listen only, not with the intellect, but with undistracted listening.
If you use the intellect, you'll end up saying "I understand intellectually, but.............". You may think you have accomplished something, gotten somewhere. But it's not so.
If you listen completely and allow the words to sink down deeply, what needs clarification receives clarification.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
Man's search for happiness arises out of a skewed perception. "I am not happy...........obtaining such and such will make me happy". It's sort of trying to fill in assumed holes in oneself.
But it is misguided.
If happiness were intrinsic in an object, where in the object is it located? If it is intrinsic, it must always be giving you happiness, from the date of its acquisition until your death. But that is not your experience. The object seemingly provides happiness, but only for a time.
What gave you happiness as a baby does not give you happiness when you became a child. Likewise, as you continue to get older. Each time, some other object takes its place.
As such, happiness is not intrinsic in the objects.
A happiness that comes, will go. Only the happiness that is immanent will never leave.
The happiness you can imagine is far too limited; why settle for a few coins?
So instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what is it that you have never lost?
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
Everything contributes to everything else. No effect has a single cause. Trying to assign causes to events is nothing more than entertainment for the mind.
Assume that Y causes Z. If X causes Y, then is X not also a cause of Z? Can you see how the regression is endless?
When one considers all the conditions that must be satisfied for a single action to occur, the notion of a single cause is revealed as flawed.
If you concede that everything is connected, then it becomes obvious that everything has numerous causes. Yet, if everything causes everything, the notion of cause seems without point.
We only believe we understand causes, but it's self-deception. We conclude that the leaves falling from the trees are the cause of winter, that lightning causes thunder ............. and we're self satisfied.
The interconnectedness of everything is such that discerning a single cause for an event is impossible.
We tell ourselves we understand and it is this very misunderstanding that keeps us ensnared.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
You are constantly striving to be something you are not, because you are afraid of being nothing in particular. Our identity is attached to our "thing-ness".
You live in confusion. It must be this way because you are not reacting to the world as it is. You are reacting to how it appears, as it has been filtered, interpreted and judged by the mind.
The desire for realization is just another escape route. One may say it is a higher escape route, but it is escape nonetheless. It is the dissatisfaction with, refusal to accept, what-is.
Paradoxically, it is the acceptance of what-is that foretells realization.
The end of confusion begins with no longer believing the mind.
Look at things as they truly are. See the mind and the body as reflective of the nature of the organism.
Observe them without judgment. Once they are fully understood, one can move beyond them.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
Listen to Wu Hsin, but do not expect to benefit in any way.
Who is there to be benefitted?
Any seeming benefit is only another stitch in the tapestry of the personal narrative.
The herbal medicine you require is already growing in your own garden.
You need only look there.
Give that your consideration.
Let us now return to the silence for a time.
Master Wu Hsin continued:
Wu Hsin does not possess even a single concept that can approach the Ultimate.
There are no snares Wu Hsin can set to capture it.
Yet, the fruitless speech continues to issue forth.
Can you now understand why Wu Hsin has nothing to give to you?
Let us pause.
Master Wu Hsin continued:
One cannot apperceive the truth by filtering it through one's concepts of the truth.
Wu Hsin provides the evidence of truth by shining his lamp on untruth.
Wu Hsin never prescribes; he merely describes. Never confuse the descriptions for prescriptions.
Nor does he necessarily provide what is desired, as if a cobbler preparing a pair of sandals to your specifications.
Wu Hsin speaks only of what is, rejecting what is not.
Hearing these words should be like the eating of food: take them in, digest them, extract that which nourishes you and eliminate the rest.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
The Master began:
All your life, you have known yourself through the body and the mind, through phenomena. Looking at phenomena for knowledge and understanding has become habitual.
How then, can you come to know your true self when it cannot be perceived?
Both the mind and the body are discontinuous. During a single day, they come and they go. Yet, there must be something that is continuous to register the discontinuity.
What you are searching for is not objective. How do you propose to find it?
Can a shadow merge into its source? Can an object know its subject?
Such notions arise from a fragmented point of view.
If one deeply understands that consciousness precedes all appearances and you are that consciousness, that is sufficient.
If anything else is required, it will come in its own time and by its own way.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Master began:
Sentience has arisen in an insentient, inert form.
The seeming person is not the perceptual center; the person is one of the many phenomena that the Conscious Life Energy perceives.
Where you are is the site where everything takes place, where all phenomena rise and set.
What you are is the Knowing of the rising and setting.
This is sufficient for today.
The Master began:
I am the point of origin and the terminus. I am Infinite Potentiality, prior to any beginning.
I am that from which all phenomena emerge and return. Unperceivable, I am the Knowing of the presence of all phenomena and the Knowing of their absence.
Because I am, all is; the sun shines, the grass grows and the heart beats. To say more is to be redundant.
As Wu Hsin, I am an expression of this Potentiality at a specific locus of space and time and as Wu Hsin I am Its Instrument of perception and action.
As Wu Hsin, I am a part of a world yet not apart from it.
You are, and you know you are. This is Knowing Presence, your true nature.
To know it is to be It and to be It one must spend time with It. Yet, all your time is spent away from It, entranced by phenomena. As such how can you hope to know It?
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
The Master began:
It's important to understand that there is nothing external which is not first internal.
That Most Internal requires a psychosomatic structure in order to experience Its expressions. All is an appearance in It, perceived and cognized by It.
What you refer to as your world is unique and totally exclusive to you. No one can know what your world and your experiences of it are like, not even Wu Hsin.
So you see, your beliefs shape your experiences which, in turn, reinforce your beliefs. If this dynamic is not broken, you are forever ensnared.
That's why it always comes back to a ruthless examination of one'
s beliefs.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
There is endless a cycling from Knowing without an Object to knowledge of an object.
It is in this regard, life appears on Me, to Me.
The individual, although on one level completely illusion, on another level could be said to be particularized consciousness.
When the scope of one's individuality is expanded and expanded, the particular becomes the totality.
Let us now return to the silence for a time.
Master Wu Hsin continued:
The destruction of the world does not affect the space that holds it. With or without this world, the space continues.
When the silversmith melts his coins, how is the silver affected?
In the same way, the death of any individual does not affect the Absolute that ultimately birthed it.
What is real and what is momentary?
In clarifying this, all is clarified.
Let us now return to the silence for a time.
Master Wu Hsin continued:
You are nothing perceivable. You are the perceiving of all that arises.
All experience is of consciousness experiencing itself. If you abide in consciousness everything will be happening spontaneously.
If you are still at the body-with-a-mind level, you will think that you are doing something.
Individuality is a personal matter. When the pure mind or actual-I extends itself beyond the function of observing, a reflected-I arises which one refers to as "me".
To these, Wu Hsin has no attraction. His interest is only in the impersonal.
Ask yourself: stripped of body, senses and mind, what am I?
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
We believe our thoughts because there is an assumption that they state something valid about me, my identity, my happiness or my reality.
There is no evidence that you are a thinker of thoughts. There is no evidence that you are thoughts' creator.
We can say that thought is witnessed or observed. This is not arguable, but it's as far as we can go.
Thoughts come and go in a continuous stream; each departs to make room for the next. The series creates the sense of thinking and we ascribe thinking to mind.
Mind is a process that arises subsequent to your true nature, Knowing. This Knowing cannot be perceived, yet is vividly present and beyond doubt.
We cannot control either the content or the frequency of our thoughts. Why, then, work with thought? What we can do, instead, is to understand the types of thought.
The first kind is of the present moment. It relates to what occupies you right now: solving a puzzle, playing a game, or cleaning a pan. They point to what-is.
All other thoughts relate, in some degree, to what doesn't exist: the past, the future, all imaginations.
Give your attention to the former, ignore the latter and clarity cannot but flood in.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
All states of mind are just that: states. They come and they go on a background that, for most, remains unexplored.
In this regard, the content of the dreaming and waking states are the add-ons to this background.
Seeing this, one realizes that one is neither the processes of the body nor the brain.
This is the irreversible removal of obstacles to the recognition of that which is eternal and immanent.
It is abidance as the subject, allowing the objects to go in whatever direction they are moved to go.
It is the resolution of the tension between the ongoing sense of self in ordinary experience and the failure to find that self upon rigorous investigation.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
The Master began:
The brain-in-a-body is the bridge between Consciousness as Subject and Consciousness as Object, that is, manifestation.
It is the instrument Knowing uses to know Itself. In this sense, consciousness equals experiencing. Experience is the “taste” of consciousness in the same way that sour is the taste of lemon.
Nowhere in the process does there arise the need for a person.
We take a pattern and give it a name. But there's no reality to it. It's merely another thought form, another label.
There is no entity, as such. It is nothing except a set of neurological processes, conceptions and perceptions, and the organism's reactions to these.
What, then, is enlightenment or self realization?
It is an event, the cessation of identification with the limited.
It is a return to that time of the organism before the arising of self consciousness. It is that time before the birth of personhood. As such, no person gets enlightened.
Then, you may well ask, what is a person to do?
You live without self concern. You simply open the door, sit quietly, and see what arrives.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
The Master began:
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state of Pure Potentiality. It is beginningless and endless.
Consciousness requires contact with some thing. Essentially, this is the arising of duality.
The actualization of the Potential yields Consciousness.
There can be no consciousness without awareness as its support, in much the same ways as silver is the basis for all silver jewelry. And it is so intimately ours!
When the names and forms are removed, the silver becomes obvious.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
Phenomena eclipse the Background. Free yourself from the preoccupation with names and forms and see what remains.
All phenomena point to your existence as the center of perception.
However, until you take your attention off of the pointers, you will remain ensnared.
The senses, by their very nature, chase after pleasant sensations.
That explains why we want to hear great music, see beautiful sights, eat delicious foods, etc.
Yet, this enjoyment is the snare; it binds us to the sensate world. Involvement of any type binds.
Ponder this; more tomorrow.
Today, the Master began:
Setting aside everything we think we know allows wisdom to dawn in us.
What is undeniably observable is that there is a cycling through three distinct states every day. The first two are recurring appearances and non-recurring appearances; they are products of the mind. The third is a blank or the absence of appearances.
Admittedly, there are terms more commonly used for each of these. But Wu Hsin will not refer to them here.
What is telling is simply this: There must be something present in which, on which, and to which the recurring appearances, the non-recurring appearances and the blank arise.
This Knowing of both the particular and the absence of the particular is what one is. To say it another way, it is the knowing of the manifest by the unmanifest.
It is never not here.
Let us now return to the silence for a time.
Master Wu Hsin continued:
Today, Wu Hsin will make an admittedly futile attempt to describe the ineffable:
Amongst the multitude of "thou's" there is a singular I which serves as both their source and destination.
It is the One Principle with different expressions via different instruments.
It is without form and therefore is unaffected by the world of forms.
It is the unification of That which is realized with that which realizes, clarifying the personal aspect of the impersonal.