Tuesday 3 September 2013

What Remains?

     Just for a moment - remember what it is like to wake up in the morning. When you first awaken is there anything there? Anything other than what could be labelled as consciousness or being-ness? Next moment in pops memory - you remember who you are, or a worry comes to mind and you are back. Have you ever had this experience? If not then look out for it.

What would death be like? Forget physical death for now, what about psychological and/or emotional death? In other words what would remain if you had no conditioning? What if you returned to being like a little baby?

The baby, first born and for some short time thereafter, lies in its cot gurgling away quite content with simply being (apart from when it has to communicate hunger or a soiled nappy or perhaps pain etc) - and there is nothing more; just a physical body, the still mind and consciousness/being-ness unfolding.

As an adult, for that once content baby, everything is different. What is? What has changed? Something has been added. The baby has grown up, as it must - yes, and in the process the baby becomes conditioned. The add on is conditioning. But there's more. With age/development for the body/mind organism also comes experience. Are they one and the same?

To simply be in the moment is not something that the person can do. The person is the condition. The person is a separate identity to consciousness/being. Being is what simply is. The conditioned person is what is worried. The person is happy one moment and unhappy the next, and the person believes it is real.

Ironically the person, the personality, the sense of me, myself, I is the illusion. There is no reality in it whatsoever. It is a lie. It is the lie of the gathered past. It is a cloak or mask of pretense that, bit by tiny bit, sticks to the authentic being/nature and takes possession of it until it . . .  you - believe the lie.

The baby is in an impossible position - unable to defend itself from the predator that is taking possession of its very nature and suffocating the life out of it moment by moment, day by day - and it is also surrounded by other conditioned beings whom know not what they are, or what they do.

Freedom? Ha! The person, the conditioned personality thinks that there is some kind of personal freedom to be had, but there is not. Every personal freedom glimpsed is simply another shard of the broken prism-prison that is the mask of ignorance being worn by freedom itself, the original pristine state of consciousness you already are.

Did you get that? You are freedom, it is the very nature of consciousness or being or quite simply the unfolding. Put more clearly - there is no You. There is only the original clarity of being; the unfolding.

The unfolding wears no mask. The only freedom is in simply being . . . but there is nothing that you can do to attain this freedom, how can one attain being? Being is what is right now. Simultaneously you believe you are your mask, your cloak - the gathered past- which is everything you believe yourself to be. Another word for it might well be attachment. You are attached to what you believe in, attached to your opinions, attached to personality as much as it is attached to you; they are one and the same - the cloak/mask and the wearer.

The word is not the thing. The words used here are only a way of helping one to identify what needs to be discovered, identified and transcended. Not that anyone can do that, certainly not the person, not the conditioned personality - there's no hope for that, it can't possibly defeat itself now, can it?

There is no hope. There is no hope for the personality, for all it believes in and is attached to notionally. Notionally? It has no idea! Well it does actually, and that's its problem - the conditioned person is full of attitudes, beliefs and opinions gathered as a fictitious past, which it accepts as real, and it then lives through them here in existence. It's all complete and utter nonsense, but hey - well we all have to believe in something, don't we?



No. No, not at all. What remains when all you believe in has gone?