by A H Almaas
To begin to challenge innate ignorance means learning to recognize something that we don’t even have a category for. It’s just like seeing something exotic for the first time. You see it, you experience it, but if it is subtle or is there all the time, you don’t recognize what it is. You don’t realize the significance of what you are seeing. For example, people from temperate climates who visit far northern areas see snow as simply snow. The natives, however, live with snow most of the time and are familiar with many variations of coldness, dryness, texture, and density and thus see many different forms of snow, hardly considering them all to be one thing called snow. Only over time, and with the demands of experience, would the newcomer be able to recognize snow in all those variations.
As an adult, you won’t know what True Nature is without guidance or a true curiosity to learn. If you’re too young, you won’t know what it is because you don’t yet have the capacity to recognize it. The capacity to discriminate and understand requires a certain level of mind development. However, as the mind develops, it develops with learned ignorance.
DEVELOPING OUR CAPACITY FOR DISCRIMINATION
The ego develops with the mind, and as that happens, our discriminating capacity grows. Babies already have some discrimination, but it is far more rudimentary than our adult capacity to tell things apart, to know what they are, and to recognize their significance and their relationship to other things. Babies’ discrimination is just the possibility of recognition. All of it is hard-wired recognition and instinctual cues. But we know now that babies do have a kind of knowingness that is operant much earlier than developmental psychologists used to think.
It takes time for the mind to develop the capacity for discriminating knowledge, and though researchers may not agree on the exact timing, it is agreed that this development happens in stages. We all start life with inherent ignorance—we know that we are, that we exist, but we don’t know what we are. We experience, but we don’t know what we experience. We see, but we don’t know what we are seeing. In time, we learn what things are, and we also learn how to recognize, how to discriminate, how to tell things apart and know them. All of this develops the capacity of conceptualization.
How does this happen? We develop our capacity by coming to know the usual things that people know. Phenomena at the most obvious, gross level—the physical level—are paramount at the beginning. So we begin by knowing our bodies, knowing other people, knowing things in the physical environment, and so on. And this is followed by increasingly more subtle kinds of knowing.
As we have seen, by the time we have developed our learned, conceptual knowledge, it is really learned or conceptual ignorance, because it obscures the True Nature we started with. Our learned ignorance veils and disconnects us from who we really are. To recognize True Nature and have it available to experience, we need to penetrate and see through our learned ignorance. But to understand True Nature, we need to overcome our innate ignorance.
UNDERSTANDING OUR TRUE NATURE
How do we come to understand our True Nature? And what does it even mean to understand it?
There are three aspects to understanding our True Nature. First, we need to know what True Nature is. Second, we have to recognize it as our own nature, not as something outside of ourselves or as an abstraction. And third, we need to understand the relationship of our True Nature to the rest of manifestation—to the thoughts, the feelings, the body, the objects we see, and so on. To know what True Nature is, to know that it is what we are, and to know its relationship to everything in manifestation—that is full understanding. That is illumination. That is enlightenment.
Each of these three steps brings us toward more complete understanding. And each step of understanding is more difficult than the one before it. So, we might recognize True Nature, but be unaware that that is what we are. Or we might recognize True Nature and know ourselves as that, but we might not yet know how it relates to everything else. Let’s look at these three steps in more detail.
The first step is to recognize what True Nature is. This means to distinguish it from more familiar elements in our experience such as thoughts and feelings, sensations and energy. We need to see how it impacts our perception and affects our relationship to our experience. We must know that True Nature is the fundamental nature of experience and understand what that means in order to recognize it as True Nature.
The second step is to understand yourself as True Nature. This means having full discrimination and insight, at the adult level, into who and what you are. It is possible to recognize True Nature—the first step—but not know that it is you. You might think it’s God. Or that it’s an angel who has descended into the room. You experience that this presence is empty and light and luminous, and it feels so different from how you know “yourself” that you think it must be some kind of wonderful angel. You recognize that presence, but you don’t know that it’s you. To understand yourself as True Nature means that you recognize, “That is my nature.” And this occurs not through thinking, but through experiencing.
The third step is to see that True Nature is the nature of everything and to know how it manifests everything. We don’t know how things work because we don’t understand how things are related to True Nature.
Seeing the relationship of True Nature to everything else will help us recognize and understand how things work. How do things happen? What is action? How does action occur? How are action and inaction related? Understanding these things is essential to the wisdom of living. If you’re just sitting and meditating, you don’t need to know True Nature’s relation to everything else. But we don’t just sit, we live. Our mind functions with all its thoughts and feelings. We need to understand the relationships that exist within all parts of our life.
MOVING THROUGH IGNORANCE TO TRUE NATURE
We have talked about ignorance and how it functions as an impediment to enlightenment, to knowing our True Nature, to living in the freedom of True Nature. Our practice of inquiry is fundamentally to help us see through the ignorance, to recognize it as ignorance. As ignorance is recognized as ignorance, it will transform to true knowledge, to the perception of the truth.
What is the process by which this occurs? We always begin our inquiry by seeing what is true in our experience. I might recognize, for example, that what is true is that I don’t like the way a friend is ignoring me. By exploring that truth, I might come to see that I don’t like it because it is similar to the way my mother ignored me, which made me feel worthless. So I believe, in relation to this friend, that I am a hurt child and she is my mother. So, we can see in some detail what accounts for our feeling one way or another. The truth we see at first is the truth about what is not true. We recognize the false as false. As I see my self-image and the projection on my friend, it becomes clear that neither is really true. She is not my mother, and I am not that image of a worthless child. I am actually something more alive and immediate, a presence that has inherent value because it is what is real.
This brings us then to recognizing the truth—recognizing what we are actually experiencing and recognizing that truth is our True Nature. We discover that that is what we are, not just what we experience. Many steps and experiences of being with the truth as it reveals the false or learned ignorance may be needed before True Nature is revealed as our nature. And love of the truth must be our guide. Ultimately, by staying with the process, we arrive at the third level of understanding, where we see and know that True Nature, our True Nature, is what moves everything—that it is the source of everything.
How does this discovery happen? By simply being where we are. Throughout the journey, whether we’re inquiring or we’re meditating or just going about our business, we’re learning to be present and aware, to just be there, not doing anything to anything. This attitude invites True Nature to reveal itself, to reveal that it is what we are, and to reveal how everything else relates to it.
IMMEDIATE KNOWINGNESS
So, as we
see, in some sense, our practice is a matter of self-knowledge, self-illumination. It’s enlightenment, a knowing. The knowing we’re talking about here is not conceptual knowing, remember. Conceptual knowing always becomes conceptual ignorance. Even if you know something that is true, even if you recognize something about your True Nature, the moment it becomes conceptual and gets filed away in your mind, it becomes an image. If you take the image to be reality, or start to see reality through that image, it becomes a veil again. It becomes ignorance.
So, the knowingness we’re talking about has to be immediate. That’s why we say you not only have to be aware, you have to be fully present. Your consciousness of what you are experiencing has to fill the entire field of your awareness. It has to feel whatever is there, without veils or filters. Whatever you are feeling—hatred, rejection, resistance, anger, happiness, spaciousness—you allow it to fill all of your awareness, so that you feel it directly and completely. And the feeling of that, the experience of whatever is arising, is inseparable from the knowingness of it—because you cannot know True Nature conceptually, through the discursive mind.
Nevertheless, the development of the discursive mind is a necessary stage in developing the discriminating capacity of our inherent awareness. And it is useful for performing the tasks of life. But it is not the kind of knowing that is needed for realization. That kind of knowing has to be more of a felt knowing, an experiential knowing. I call it immediate or direct knowledge.
In the West, we have a word for it—“gnosis,” which means “knowing.” But gnosis is a knowing through Being, through immediate contact in which the feeling and the experience of the knowing are inseparable. So, we need to refine our language and understand the terms in a way that makes our discernment more attuned and more acute. By seeing the nature of gnosis—the direct knowing that confronts our ignorance—we can appreciate that it is nondual knowing. We move beyond the duality that pervades our perception and our usual knowing of the mind. This in turn makes it more possible to see and recognize True Nature.
That is why our practice of inquiry is an inquiry into our experience. That is why our meditation is the immediacy of Being, which is the beingness, the presence, and the awareness that pervades the presence. And the awareness that pervades that presence creates the possibility of recognition, of direct knowing, or gnosis. When that capacity for recognition is developed, and we are experiencing True Nature, we can recognize that that’s what we really are and that it is actually the nature of everything.
What you don’t see, doesn’t develop. If you don’t recognize a particular part of your experience for what it is, it will not reveal itself completely. So the potential in human beings to know their True Nature cannot be realized in an infant or an animal because neither one can recognize True Nature for what it is. We need to recognize it for it to unfold. The more we recognize and understand True Nature, the more it reveals its possibilities.
So, being seen, being known, being recognized and discerned, invites True Nature to further reveal what it is. It reveals its treasures, its fullness, its perfection. That knowingness liberates, because it helps us to see what we are, what we’re doing, and how things work. That’s what is meant by becoming wise. We are more consistently able to recognize when we are rejecting or interfering with our experience and are more able to stop doing that. We become more and more capable of letting ourselves be who we are and what we are—our True Nature. So in our practice we are learning to be wise. We’re learning wisdom through directly understanding our experience.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Recognizing Learned Ignorance and Direct Knowing
Find a quiet place to consider the world around you. First open yourself to an immediate awareness of reality both outside and inside, with a focus on sensation and perception. Just notice colors, shapes, textures, sensations, and patterns in your experience. Be aware of your usual way of recognizing all the objects in your experience, but refrain from getting involved with the content and stay attuned to your perceptual awareness.
Then consider how your ideas, beliefs, and knowledge about that reality impact your direct experience of it. When you focus on the content of what you are aware of, what happens? Do mental concepts enhance your experience? Do they fill in detail? Do they shape or focus your attention in a particular direction? Do they distance you from the immediacy?
When you stay with the direct perceptual experience, what happens to your knowing and understanding of your experience? Does it disappear without the ideas? Does it manifest in a different way than the knowing in your mind? Consider the difference in quality between your familiar mental knowing (the learned ignorance) and this more direct experiential knowing.
CHAPTER 11
Freedom from the Filters of the Mind
OUR DISCUSSION OF IGNORANCE as the fundamental barrier to being where we are has moved us into new territory that we will now begin to explore more fully. Rather than focusing on the specific ways that we react to our experience, we will be examining the obstacles that are inherent in the way that we experience. These obstacles are not the specific activities of rejection, interference, manipulation, and other secondary manifestations we have observed that comprise our reactions to the main event. Rather, they are misunderstandings or misperceptions of what it is we are actually experiencing—of where we are and who we are and of reality itself. In turning our attention to these obstacles, we shift our focus from the secondary manifestations of our experience to the primary manifestation—how the experience itself is actually arising and being perceived.
Let us review what we have explored so far, so we can see more clearly the transition into this new territory:
We have continually pointed to “not doing anything” and “being where we are.” These are two different ways of saying the same thing. Each one clarifies something about ourselves. “Not doing anything” means not engaging in inner activity of any kind. “Being where we are” points to the fact that the absence of this inner self-centered activity is what we mean by presence, or Being. So, we have seen that if we really learn not to do anything to our own experience, we are simply there. Conversely, if we are really being where we are, we won’t be doing anything to our experience.
We have discussed some of the ways that we meddle with our experience—how we don’t leave it alone, how we try to change it, make it better, improve upon it, judge it, reject it, push it away, pull on it, and so on. It is useful to note here that becoming more aware of how these activities act as barriers or blocks doesn’t mean we are doing something. We are simply developing more discrimination to help us with our practice. We are only learning what it means to really stay where we are—how to be present in the moment and be ourselves.
We have discussed how our learned ignorance, which is what we believe we know, forms the basis for all of our interference. We have seen how our activities and relationships are based on ideas and beliefs and identifications—what we think is true, what we think is reality, what we think will work.
But all of these activities that we have examined are of a certain type. They tend to be more explicit and more easily identifiable—although, as we have seen, they often can be subtle. And they are also secondary manifestations—various reactions to what we perceive our experience to be. But there is another category of interference with our experience that is much more difficult to see. It is interference within and inseparable from the primary manifestation, that is, in the way we perceive what is immediately occurring. It is the second major way that our accumulated knowledge becomes an obstacle to being ourselves—through a much more subtle way that we interfere with our experience by trying, consciously or unconsciously, to direct it, and thus prevent it from emerging spontaneously on its own.
What I am referring to is an implicit, inner activity that we may become aware of as we become increasingly skilled at not going along with the more explicit, grosser inner activities that we have identified. It is the way that
our mind or consciousness influences and molds our experience, just because it is involved in that experience. Let’s take a look now at how this operates.
VEILS OF THE PAST
We can see the movement of projection or judgment. We can hear, feel, sense our hate and our rejection. But this other category of activity cannot be as easily identified. At first, as we engage in it, we will think that we are just being where we are and are not doing anything. But as we notice and observe our reactions in different situations, it becomes possible to begin to see that much of “being where we are” is still the result of interference.
Why is this kind of interference so difficult to perceive? Partly because the more explicit activities of interference occur intermittently, and thus are easier to notice when they arise. This other kind of interference is a more subliminal, sometimes even unconscious, inner activity that occurs all the time. Its usual explicit manifestation is our continuous thinking process, our almost constant inner dialogue. We can sometimes notice it as an agitated, energetic quality inside us, though we may not be clear what is creating it. But whether or not it comes to our attention, it affects our experience, molding it one way or another according to our accumulated knowledge—which is based on our ignorance. Hence our experience is not free to spontaneously manifest exactly what it is, or more accurately, what it can be.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that you are having an interaction with another person. It doesn’t have to be a highly charged situation; any interaction will reveal that you are reenacting a familiar pattern. You see the person in a certain way, you see yourself in a certain way, and you feel a certain way about how the two of you are relating. But even though your experience seems to be simply what is happening—you believe that you are just being where you are with that person—it is really formed by your accumulated knowledge and memories.