Monday, April 5, 2010

Pointers

Truth cannot be practiced.


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You can temporarily put any unanswered questions about consciousness aside, if you like. For after recognizing awareness proper, your comprehension of the former (which is mainly your varying states of alertness) will be quite clear.


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See the
immediate Reality to which Buddha, Christ, Shankara, and Nisargadatta were pointing. At bottom, this isn't a conceptual or pedagogical matter. It is truth itself.


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The mind cannot be "emptied" of thoughts. The mind is just another name
for a thought. When there is no thought, there is no mind. Further, thoughts arise and disappear within this sheer and cognitizing emptiness, which is nothing less than our fundamental nature.


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What Lao-Tzu said of the Tao can just as easily be said of awareness: Its "True fullness seems empty, / yet it is fully present."


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Presence doesn't need to be cultivated. See through any notions that awareness is not already in full evidence. You are not seeing this bare and blessed fact because, in considerable measure, of your attempt to understand this on a conceptual level. This is done out of habit, mainly. After reading some nondual pointer or listening to someone speak directly and clearly about all this, you often are off to the next related thought or theory in a mere second. But it is a second nonetheless, a pause of infinite depth and significance. It is That from which you never, ever move.


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Not to belabor the obvious, but you can't "meditate" your way to enlightenment. From the very beginning, meditation is based on the utterly false premises that there is an individual meditator, and that there is something to attain. The recognition of your natural state is all about seeing and understanding what is
presently within and before you.


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There is no permanent happiness. If you are looking for that--either through meditation or nonduality--you aren't going to find it. However, you
can discover a peace that passes all understanding. It is limitless, eternal, and vividly-present.


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The body, senses, mind, feelings, and consciousness all change. Thus, none of them can possibly be your fundamental nature. So what is left? What exactly remains?


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Though your natural state is subtle, it is self-liminous and ever-before you. Any method or practice "toward" it is an immediate move "away" from it (in so much as one
can move from it). Even any attempted forms of surrender won't work because there is someone trying do the deed. True surrender is effortless. It is a sudden seeing or understanding that Presence is a felt and living reality. Take a moment to discover it for yourself. Trust me when I say this: Absolutely nothing could be simpler.

1 comment:

No One In Particular said...

It seems the "I" or the ego is so afraid of having things taken away from it, not least its own identity. However, it's possible to just have grief, and it not be reviled as the worst thing ever. Everything is bearable. Without grief, without sorrow, there is no joy.