Inner structures are no longer needed. They were only there to protect the pseudo sense of self. When that goes, the structures go. Structures are made from mental energy and always feel tight. When the mental energy that was once used for protection is used for enjoyment and exploration instead, there is simply relaxation.
This relaxation could be interpreted as being taken over by something—divine guidance or cosmic consciousness—but it’s simply the stark contrast that comes into view. Nothing has been taken in or gained. It’s like the removing of tight shoes scenario: you had forgotten what freedom for the feet felt like.
For me, all the studying, all the therapy and all the self-help books were of limited usefulness. The strange language of non-duality uprooted ignorance once and for all. There was no other tool that had the persistence or strength to do the job.
The thing with non-duality is that it has a life of its own. It’ll throw you around anywhere it pleases. It will take you here; it will take you there. I was so highly structured inside with heroes and villains that any previous attempts at eliminating anxiety and self-doubt were about as effective as low-grade weed killer — they worked on the stem and left the root to produce more viable and live material in the future.
However, there is a curious thing that I have noticed regarding psychology books and theories of self and general human neuroses to which they alert us. When the separate self is seen to be false, there is an openness to appreciating theories of psychological development in greater depth than before. There doesn’t seem to be a version of absolute perfection getting in the way that always used to discount what I would dismiss as the ‘rubbish’ of do-gooders.
I think I was just a tough nut to crack. When there is no me, it is realised there never was a me. Any pain, any suffering, all mental characters, in fact the entire drama of separation can be placed at the feet of Wholeness. Perverse? Maybe. Painful? Yes. A mistake? No!
Whatever it is that does everything, exhausts every single avenue of thought and explanation. When the mind comes up with an answer, it will be off again after a while, sniffing out elements of doubt to throw a spanner in the works and spoil everything you have toiled and worked hard for.
If you have a tough mind, you will go the distance right up to mental breakdown, serious illness or even the cessation of this functioning body. Thought will never outwit nature, though. Nature will always produce a tougher opponent that requires more and more of your mental energy to contain and control.
It seems Wholeness cannot accept that it is already perfect and complete. It tries to fool itself by appearing as things that seem different and separate. It feels the deception is watertight for many, many years and the deception is not questioned. Some lives appear to be very successful with good relationships, lots of money and a strong sense of self-worth. But these qualities you perceive in others are your own fantasies because you refuse to look at yourself. Envy and jealousy appear because your image of perfection is not the perfection of timelessness and Wholeness.
The world of form—from the perspective of the individual—is a world to be conquered and beaten into submission. A sense of control must be maintained to prolong the illusion, and enemies are created for the sake of self-righteousness.
If you have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, you may remember the frequent news updates delivered to the people regarding the progress of wars in far-off lands and the propaganda depicting ‘others’ as being enemies of the state and by association—Big Brother. Enemies created legitimacy and solidarity and staved off uncertainty. Limits and boundaries were created around thought, and if successful, thoughts were eventually controlled from within by a symbolic Big Brother whose eyes see everything.
Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been Orwell’s attempt at hyperbole to shock us out of so-called normality and into reality; novelists of his calibre can speak to us if we have the capacity to decipher allegory. If not, then stories are simply entertaining—something to occupy the mind on a cold, dark, winter’s night. Fiction, parables and spiritual texts can offer us a way out of the prison of separateness—but they do not spoonfeed us. You have been fed this way all your life from highchair to high school. It’s time to mature, put on your battle gear and fight the dragon at the gates of the unknown. You may visit distant lands and face many trials and challenges. If you are lucky you will die and return victorious; unlucky, and you will fight for your life both at home and away for many a year to come.
This feeling of being alone and face to face with oneself is not negative; it is the opposite of conventionality. You’ve looked out into the world all your life searching for scapegoats that let you down, that should have cared for you in your hour of need. Parental figures and other institutions are symbolised internally and at the same time projected out to furnish an otherwise empty world. Some call this socialisation; I call it hypnotism.
Thinking for oneself and questioning reality is seldom undertaken. The hypnotic spell is strong. For me Orwell wasn’t alerting us to the possible outcome of an untethered totalitarian regime—he was pointing to control mechanisms operating already, under the guise of normality and socialisation. Social engineering doesn’t have to be overt as it is in Nineteen Eighty-Four: it can pass as conservatism or liberal ideology, if we are steered towards the right history books and the right so-called scholars. Ideologies can form identities and make strong sticks to beat the unenlightened into subservience and submission. We don’t necessarily feel abused or beaten, we hold up our heads and say, ‘I’m a Social Reformist’ or, ‘I’m a Liberal.’ It’s comforting to know who we are: it makes sense.
Fiction, literature and art often say more than the surface structure reveals. It is this hidden element in all spiritual texts and thought-provoking works that is worth finding, or more likely, stumbling upon.
Breath-taking Stuff!
If you are trying to get something from this book or any others attempting to describe the indescribable, nothing I have said so far will be much good. True, you might say to a fellow seeker, ‘Have you read that new book by that Bates fellow, the locksmith? It’s worth a look.’ I guarantee it will soon be forgotten for the latest book from someone else or the latest YouTube incarnation. Seeking is a bit of a paradox because it means losing an identity, and this isn’t always what people want. Seeking is comforting in a perverse way. However, when not finding is finding and not knowing is knowing, you will find and you will know. Unfortunately, the guy or girl who you thought would be ecstatic at the discovery has actually done a bunk. S/he has missed the fireworks, the ceremony, and the certificate. This is not a bad thing: s/he was a terrible drain on your resources anyway.
Good riddance!
Allegory and Storytelling
A Google search tells me that allegory is a literary device that uses narrative which appears normal and straightforward at first glance, only to be steeped in deeper meaning and social import if we look under the surface structure. You could place, I suppose, Jesus’ parables as allegory. Think of the farmer sowing his seeds as spiritual teaching. Seeds that fall on various conditions are analogous to the hearing or rejection of the message: some seeds flourish and other remain dormant and unchanged by poor environmental conditions.
In a sense, all stories do this to some extent, even the text on the tube of children’s toothpaste explaining the importance and supervision of caring for your child’s little toothy pegs. It assumes the incompetence of a minor and positions you as a teacher to ensure a regular personal hygiene regime. In a subtle way, text found on something as innocuous as a tube of toothpaste sets up and reinforces patterns to guide us to life-saving skills and correct action.
But order and so-called knowledge have a knack of eroding the mystery and magic in life. It positions us in a social jigsaw puzzle to create a version of reality recognisable to ourselves, our friends, and also our enemies—we are given our script. A sense of order and
belonging is a serious matter when we are young. Think of anyone from your school days who was a little different from the norm. There may have been differences in their dress sense, their body shape or father’s profession. You will remember what a tough time they probably had. Was that you?
Stories, though, are not the problem. Believing them to be a final version of reality strangles creativity, fosters misery and depression and dampens down the flame of ‘not knowing’. But I guess there is a kind of comfort in making sense of things: it aids in the predictability that characterises thought. Correctly identifying the shadow of a predator based on memory can leave you to fight another day and spread your genes around to ensure continuity as well as change.
Stories, I would say, are a device to point to something else: they point to timeless, immovable infinity and beingness. You appear as all your stories and all your scenes. You shape and contort yourself into infinite disguises. I love the original meaning of ‘person’. Its root is ‘persona’ which refers to the mask actors wore on stage in antiquity. The ‘sona’ part of the word points to the mouth piece that projects the voice, the dialogue or song. Nowadays, the concept of a persona is more recognised as independence and separation.
We are all unique and each has a different story to tell and life to embellish. But uniqueness is not separate, underneath or inside anything. All stories are Wholeness and unchanging intimate Being. Timelessness and Wholeness are appearing as apparent time and apparent fragmentation. This is why life’s jagged edge and irregular shapes are just as spiritual as cushion sitting and mantra chanting. Stillness and movement define each other.
I have just come back from the cinema with my son as these words are appearing, and whilst I was losing myself in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. I also managed to look around at the cinema and at the audience who were spending their time in the same way I was. What I noticed is that the dots and dashes of the cinema screen that flashed on and off in rapid succession were the same sparkles that appeared in the form of other people sitting in the cinema house. One picture we take as fiction and make believe, while to the other one we give much more credibility. There isn’t really any difference in the credibility. We get lost in both appearances. The difference we try to maintain is that we feel we walk away from the drama at the pictures and back to the daily grind of work, shopping and making ends meet. Both are fiction; both are fantasy.
True, we can’t seem to dodge bullet after bullet and never get a bruise from a scuffle with a scoundrel, but notice the effortlessness of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. Who the hell’s doing all that? Where is it coming from? The same place the cinema picture I suggest—from a projector. In our case the mind performs this function, but unlike the cinema it never runs out of film: it gets threaded sideways, upside down and back to front on a continuous loop. The picture always looks different but the same pixels just change location from time to time.
The Message That Floats Your Boat
There’s another unfathomable aspect of this. Why should a message that points to the same thing as a hundred other books and teachings strike a chord, and yet others do not? Is there a ripeness to hear? Have you crossed over the threshold and now walk where masters have walked? The simple answer is, I don’t know. All I will say is that words both written and spoken, when put into certain combinations, seem to transmit something above and beyond the raw data. There is something that rings a bell. It might be the same book or the same dreary old meeting listening to question after question of the seeking mind that this time appears to uproot ignorance and everyday normality. You can hear yourself saying: ‘Why didn’t I see this before? How could I have missed something so obvious and simple?’ That, I’m afraid, is not up for grabs. Wholeness sees when it sees and that’s that. It pulls that veil so tight it’s a wonder any light can get in at all.
For myself, I was so engrossed in my inadequate life and the attempts through therapy and psychology to fix the damn thing that considering This was not on the menu. When I met Lynn at the gym, even though she never overtly tried to change me in any way at all, something had started to shift and stir. Our conversations were normal and everyday generally, but a non-verbal, invisible to the naked eye resonance seemed to be operating. That’s the best I can do, because to be honest, I don’t know and I don’t care. Forty odd years of timeless time had to occur before the spell lifted. It is a shame Rich was not able to see it. I guess it comes with the territory. Never mind, he was getting on my nerves anyway.
I have heard stories of people being drunk and disorderly spending another night slumped in a doorway somewhere with a guy pissing on their head for fun, with the vomit getting washed away with the stream of urine, and something is seen. They sober up, join a group and come back to life.
There is no book or satsang for this guy—that is far too tame and sensible. You wake when you wake and not before. That is why it is so frustrating at times I guess. But nothing needs to happen to be what you are. It is just that you only see that after awakening or at liberation. I told you this stuff sucks.
But maybe gobbledygook is better than perfect prose. Maybe the ordering and grammar of our sentences keeps us from ‘the secret’. It makes me wonder if this is why poetry can touch us so deeply: it does not try and spell it out for us; we have to do some work with it and make it our own. We have so many chances to listen to others, whether live or from recordings. We create celebrities from our favourite speakers and get hooked on what they say. But like a weaning young animal, the mother gradually retreats to let the creature fend for himself, to explore for himself and to kill and destroy for himself. She may teach a few survival skills but the execution is all ours.
This message is not new; it doesn’t belong just in the twenty-first century. Of course there is no twenty-first century, but if we enter into fantasy for a while, we can see that there have been many that have tried to transmit this message, some overtly and some covertly. Either way, you can see non-duality and Wholeness in texts stretching back for millennia. They are there for you to read when you’ve ‘grown-up’ somewhat and relinquished those ideas that were passed on in good faith and with little malice. When you see the trick and deception, there is no anger and resentment for what you have been through, though. There is just being, being, being.
Fantasy/Reality
Fantasy is what films are good at. Giant gorillas hanging from skyscrapers and Japanese plastic models stomping around screeching and wreaking havoc in our cities are great examples. We can enjoy this kind of thing and know where one world ends and another begins.
We tend to treat the ideas, beliefs and hypotheses the mind manufactures as faithful representations of what is actually happening out there in the real world of jobs, families and all human relationships. We certainly do not give the cinema screen activity the same credence as our own analyses and opinions. We base our judgments on a rationality and logic that are the hallmark of sanity and credibility in the world that is presented to us from the teachings we grew up with. We are certain we see what we see, and if someone else cannot see this obviousness, we can become silent, get angry, attack, and even kill to get our point across. We are so close to the thought that we believe it and create an identity out of a system that has worked once or twice in the past when the wind was blowing in the right direction and the crows were nesting high.
Thought and belief do enable us to function in this world of appearances and dramatic nuance and, to be fair, we manage quite well. Deals are struck and people do relax in each other’s company. People marry and arguments do not last forever. Fantasy is amusing at times and allows some freezing over of consensus reality. It is fun to imagine an obnoxious and grumpy old boss sitting on the toilet with his trousers around his ankles to regain the certitude that human beings are all born equal, in some respects at least. In fact fantasy can be creative and illuminating; Albert Einstein said that the gift of fantasy meant more to him than hi
s talent for absorbing knowledge.
But if we want to place fantasy above reality or reality above fantasy, it becomes troublesome and complex. Where is the benchmark and who decides? If I say I am walking into town to buy a loaf of bread, I am actually creating row after row of imaginary objects that I have labelled as real and out there. Yes, there seems to be a loaf of bread in my hand and not a shotgun, but this labelling is very restrictive and uncomfortable. A loaf of bread has many ingredients and has appeared through process and activity. Language can imprison the user and the appearance, close off channels of mystery and awe, and package the world for consumption in the future. Everything that appears to happen is simply arising out of nothing and nowhere. There is only this, only Wholeness, which can appear as anything, even loaves of bread. You cannot grasp or capture time and place because they are not here. Fantasy creates a sense of permanence the same way the model maker or make-up artist creates a monster to terrorise a neighbourhood or rampage through a school.
Fantasy in the guise of permanence allows you to leave your house in the morning and talk to your work colleagues about how dreadfully the builders are converting your attic. Language enables words to stand for apparent existing entities. Words and phrases like ‘shoddy workmanship’ or ‘flooded kitchen’ stand in for what you believe to be real tangible things or entities in the world. But if you are at your desk drinking your coffee and chatting to Betty in accounts, then that is reality. Your builders, your house and flooded kitchen are non-existent. You could pop home, I suppose, in your lunch break to confirm you are not imagining things, but you would still only see the contents of your own mind projected out to replicate the calamity this morning.
The World is My Mirror Page 10