by A H Almaas
The same process can happen as we reify doing, making it something to reject or judge. Even more subtle than that—we can reify nondoing, such that nondoing becomes an object, a thing we can value or cultivate. The truth is that nondoing is really nothing. No such thing exists that is called nondoing. Nondoing is the nonexistence of doing, but we make it something to aspire to, which can become a subtle obstacle. Something similar can happen to those who work exclusively with a nondual perspective about reality: at some point, they begin to reify nonduality, and it becomes for them an objective to aspire to and reach.
So, as you see, the tendency of the mind to reify in order to create stability, a fixed center, or a particular orientation is unlimited. The mind, then, is a mixed blessing, a double-edged sword. And that is the condition of humanity: Our intelligence, our mind, can liberate us but it can also ensnare us. Our learning, our maturation, and even our realization and enlightenment, require the capacity for discernment, for clear discrimination, of what is true and what is not true. But it is this capacity for discernment that also becomes the basis for reification. Reification cannot begin without the recognition of something, without discriminating it as distinct from everything else.
When we recognize something, we usually encapsulate it, we make it into an object, reify it, remember it, and then project it onto the present—all of which excludes the immediacy of our experience. We are, as a result, perceiving our experience through the reifications. No longer are we recognizing reality freshly. When we first recognize something—before the reification happens—the recognition is immediate. It is a felt, full sense of experiential knowing of what is. This immediate discernment is alive and unmediated by past experience. Meeting reality in this way is necessary in order to be a full human being; without it, our potentialities will become limited. We will continue to perceive our experience based on a reified reality that cuts us off from the direct knowing of life.
But it is actually possible not to get ensnared in reification and identification and all the things that go along with them, such as judgment, rejection, hatred, division, and attachment. What makes this possible? True Nature itself. Because True Nature is what is—it is reality and it is independent of the mind. Whether we reify it or not, True Nature is itself. We may reify it, and thereby distance ourselves from it, but nothing alters it from what it is. Nothing ever happens to it.
PERCEPTUAL VERSUS COGNITIVE AWARENESS
So True Nature is beyond mind. And it is the facet beyond mind, a dimension we have not yet explored, that allows us not to get caught in the conceptual trap of learned ignorance.
When we were discussing the different kinds of ignorance earlier in this book, we saw that at the beginning of our development as human beings, our conceptual knowingness—which we also call our cognitive capacity or our discriminating ability—is rudimentary, almost nonexistent. It develops gradually until we are able to recognize concrete objects, and then we are able to move into more abstract activity—into thinking and mental conceptualization. But even before we have that cognitive capacity, True Nature has an awareness. Animals have awareness, and it is that awareness that causes them to respond. And the fact that we human beings have awareness even as infants tells us that True Nature has a capacity to be aware that is more fundamental than our capacity to know.
This capacity is what I call perceptual, or pure, awareness, in contrast to knowing awareness or cognitive awareness. From the time we are born, we perceive. We might not know that we perceive, but we definitely have perception. We don’t have the cognitive awareness that develops later, but we have the perceptual awareness.
As the cognitive components of awareness develop, some beginning quite early in life, we gradually lose touch with or forget about the purely perceptual awareness. We get accustomed to our awareness always being a knowing awareness, a cognitive awareness. You see an object and either you know what it is or you don’t. If you have never seen a light bulb and then you come across one, you recognize that something is there, but you know that you don’t know what it is—you don’t have a name for it—because you have never seen one. This is different from the perception of a human infant or a bird that sees that same light bulb; it sees the bulb, and it doesn’t know what it is either, but it doesn’t know that it doesn’t know what it is.
As human beings, we have the capacity to perceive without knowing and that is never lost. This capacity is the ground of cognitive knowing, because our knowing awareness developed as a facet of our original consciousness, our primordial awareness. But as the cognitive capacity develops its reifying capacity, we lose touch with the pure, perceptual awareness—the sensitivity itself without the cognitive knowing. We don’t know it exists because the perception and the knowing seem to happen at the same time, and we can’t separate them. We perceive something and right away our cognitive capacity registers that we either know or we don’t know what it is.
Actually, it seems to us that perception and knowing occur simultaneously, but the fact is that first we perceive, and knowledge about what we perceive follows. When we see somebody walking, it registers as either “I know this person” or “I don’t know this person.” You don’t see somebody and immediately think, “What is that?” You at least know, because of your cognitive capacity, that it is a person. We don’t have the kind of baby mind that can see something and perceive it with a complete freshness and immediacy. Actually we do have that kind of mind, but it has been obscured, absorbed into the knowing mind.
So, we cannot know without perception, and we have become accustomed to the belief that knowing is always part of perception. But if that were the case, what happened to the kind of perception we had before we were able to recognize what things are? We have become so used to the dominance of our cognitive capacity that we may not even realize that True Nature inherently has a perceptual awareness independent of cognitive knowing. Our knowing, our cognitive capacity, develops and matures through our human experience, and yet we actually do not lose the original pure awareness. It simply becomes invisible to us, for we are almost always perceiving through the window of knowing.
BEYOND DISCRIMINATION
How do these understandings relate to our practice of inquiry? In the inner investigation we do while just sitting—not engaging the content of the mind and not going along with its reactions—we begin at some point to recognize certain tendencies. We see our tendency to recognize things in our experience and to want to know what they are. We see our tendency to want to label everything: “Is this a feeling or a thought? Is this feeling anger or anxiety? Is it a pain in the butt, a projection, a suppressed memory, a revelation of essential truth?” At the beginning of the journey of inquiry, those kinds of questions are useful, as we know, because they help us to be aware of things we might not have known were there. And that is why some meditation practices suggest that you label the content of your experience: because labeling can clarify what is there.
But the labeling also becomes the ground upon which reification can be built and regardless of how smart and aware you are, your mind works so fast that it will reify things before you are aware of it. Before you know it, you are encapsulated in the reification. It’s as though you had been shrink-wrapped by one of those machines that seal up objects. You are sitting there wrapped in cellophane that has a label with your name on it! Labeling is only useful in clarifying our experience up to a point because it is so closely linked with reification and objectification.
As we begin to recognize how knowing and labeling can both help and entrap us, we can experience the underlying ground of more immediate and direct knowing, which occurs prior to labeling and reification. Our knowingness can shift from the discursive kind of reified knowing into a more immediate knowing in which we recognize that knowingness is part of what we are. If we become more secure in this implicit knowingness, we don’t need to name things because the knowingness is inherent by now; the cognitive potential of the awareness has been actualized.
It is not only the labeling that becomes unnecessary; the recognition itself at some point might not be necessary—at least not always. After sitting and meditating for a while, when we are quiet, in presence and in clarity, there is no need to label and no need to know anything in particular. We can be in a place where we don’t recognize anything in particular, but still we have clarity, we have bright, clear, transparent awareness. It is very crisp, very sharp and clean, without our focusing on anything in particular or defining, “This is this” or “This is that.” We go back to our original, primordial condition before the cognitive capacity developed and took over.
But it is not a going back in time, it is a “going back” ontologically, in the moment, in the sense that we have let go of one layer and now are perceiving from the underlying layer of perceptual awareness. And that layer has been and always is there; otherwise we could not perceive.
PURE AWARENESS
We can eventually become quiet enough or secure enough in our knowingness that we no longer need to hold on to our knowing. Or perhaps through our inquiring, we have come to recognize what knowingness can and cannot do—we have seen its capacity completely, and so we don’t need to reify the knowing as something to hold on to. Either way, something falls off. The need to hold on to that knowing falls away, and there is just the luminosity of Being, on its own. And our True Nature continues to be our True Nature—because it is timeless, eternal. It was there before we started to know and it continues to be there.
Through our experience of living, we have developed the potential of True Nature to know, but True Nature is itself beyond that; it is pre-knowing, more primordial than knowing. It is just the “simply being there”—the awareness of being there without the awareness of being there meaning anything. The experience is: “I am aware of being here, but there is nothing in the mind that says I am aware of being here. There is no recognition of being here; I am just being here.”
Sometimes you see this in babies who are looking at you in a certain way. They are very present, but you can tell that they are not reflecting on themselves; they are not thinking that they are being there or that they are looking at you. Although they have a very present, focused attention, there is no thinking about themselves or recognizing anything—only bare awareness. When that happens, there is no responding, no reacting on their part; they are just there perceiving. And that happens usually when they are in a state of relaxation or satisfaction. The same is true with animals. When they are satisfied or relaxed, and no threat is present, there is just the bare awareness of and sensitivity to, what is.
These observations show us that the capacity of pure perception is a potential of our True Nature. Our True Nature has in it this dimension of pure awareness, which is actually presence. But usually presence has a cognitive capacity; it knows that it is. What we are talking about here is a presence that doesn’t know that it is—just as it operates in a baby. In that state, you don’t experience the fact of not knowing as a feeling of something missing. What you recognize is: “I am complete. I am so much myself that I don’t need to know. Anyway, I already know True Nature, so why do I have to think about it? I know it, and it is me—continuously. I understand that the mind has done its job. It has brought me to the place where I can recognize True Nature and see it for what it is. And now I can sit in it with confidence and know that it is not something I can lose—or gain.”
You are so relaxed that you don’t even think about it. That kind of presence is natural—“first nature,” not even second nature. And it comes with a sense of innocence, the fresh awareness that reveals everything as though you were seeing it for the first time. Whenever we know what something is, we can associate it with another time when we saw the same thing. But if we look at it with pure awareness, it is as though we had never seen it before. It is fresh and new—everything is glistening, just being born. Everything is clean, transparent, light, crisp—it is just as it is—because the mind is not doing anything to it. And the mind is not doing anything because it is simply not there. Mind enters with knowing, but this is before knowing, when there is just pure perception.
BEYOND THE DISCERNING MIND
At some point in the development of our capacity to discern, the cognitive capacity can take itself to its own limits. And that is really what the inner work is about: taking the discerning capacity to its ultimate limit, where reality itself is beyond cognition. Our cognitive capacity knows and knows and knows, until it begins to approach a reality that it cannot know. And the reason it cannot know it is not because our cognitive capacity is not developed, or because there is something wrong with it, or even because there is an obscuration, but because the reality it is now encountering has nothing to do with knowing—it is beyond knowing. When the mind recognizes that to be the case, it basically bows down and bows out.
In some sense, the mind has been wanting to do that for a long time because it has been doing the difficult job of inquiry for so long and it needs to rest. It wants to go to sleep. It wants the world to run without it because it has been feeling that it has had to be in charge of everything.
So, we find out that one of the dimensions of our True Nature is that it is nonconceptual. We discover that we can be without the discernment, discrimination, and knowing of mind because presence and awareness are ultimately, primordially, nonconceptual. Reality exists without concepts, regardless of knowing or not knowing.
How do we make this discovery? As we learn more and more how to be where we are, and as we follow our personal thread, at some point the meaning of what is happening at any moment becomes nonconceptual. We are in the presence—we are presence—without the concept of presence; we are being here without thinking, “I am here.” Now that is not to be confused with being distracted. You can be “not here,” in the sense of being disconnected, and if someone points it out to you, you will recognize that you were somewhere far away. What I am talking about here is when you are quite aware of what is going on, but you are not self-reflecting in that place, not discriminating. And it is not that you don’t have the capacity to discriminate; it is just that sometimes it is not necessary to do so. In the presence of that ground of nonconceptual being, reification simply does not happen; it actually can’t happen because reification requires some kind of cognition. Any knowingness—even immediate knowingness, such as when we know the strength quality of presence by being it—has a conceptual component to it. But the strength essence can also appear without the cognitive capacity labeling it. The strength and the feeling of capacity and the inner heat are there, but your mind is not saying, “strength,” “capacity,” or “heat.” Your mind is not saying anything. You just are strength. And, it is not lifeless or pale; it is alive, and it is glistening.
It is important to recognize that what we mean by “nonconceptual” here is not what most people, including philosophers, mean by this term. Usually, nonconceptual describes something that is not mental, but is rather immediate experience, like a feeling or sensation. So the scent of a flower will be seen as nonconceptual, the texture of the orange is nonconceptual. I refer to this level of experience as basic knowing, not as nonconceptual perception. In the way I am discussing things here, these experiences and perceptions are still conceptual, because there is knowing in them, and knowing always involves concepts, even when the concepts are those of gnosis—that is, spiritual immediate knowing.
What I am calling nonconceptual here is beyond immediate and nonrepresentational knowing. It is beyond basic knowing or gnosis. It is not a knowing at all, and there is no recognition of anything; it is total innocence of mind, perceiving but not recognizing what we are perceiving.
So, we see that we have the possibility of being where we are—to be in such nakedness, such purity, that we just are and that is that. And we don’t even say “we” and “are”—everything just is as it is. The terminology used by those in the Eastern traditions is very good for indicating this, because it is just a pointing. You can ask, “What is it?” and they will say, “It is that.” Or “What is reality?” and the answer will be, “It is just thus.”
No explanation is possible because there is nothing to explain, because there is nothing to discern—or, the discerning capacity does not function at that level. Awareness has gone deeper than discernment can go. It has reached the totally nonconceptual depth of True Nature, the noncognitive depth of reality. Thus we recognize that True Nature—the nature of everything—is fundamentally nonconceptual, beyond mind. And, the fact that awareness is beyond the mind means that we can be free of the mind.
FREEDOM FROM MIND
We cannot be free of the mind if there is only mind. If we have just the conceptual mind, there is no freedom. But the fact that awareness is beyond that conceptual mind, and we are that awareness, means that we are fundamentally free. It is just that we are almost always identified with the mind, so we remain in bondage to it.
If we can be without the mind even for a little while, many of the subtle obstacles and identifications, as well as the conceptualizations underlying our reifications, can be exposed. We can see the discrimination, the labeling, and how all of these activities are the natural activities of the mind—necessary for navigating our practical life but not necessary for us to be ourselves. To be who we are, we don’t need these things. To be what we are—just to be, just to be alive—we don’t need them.