TRANSCENDANCE

[Guest guest]

This letter was originally posted to Advaita-Ashram

 

Please refer all replies or comments to the above list. Your

contributions will be very much appreciated.

 

<<Dear Friends,

 

Based on my own experience allow me the following.

 

Non-duality is not created and sustained by thought. It may include

thought when thought is present, but is based as an unfathomable,

centreless sense of being, inherently not interested in objectifying

itself as verbal definition and description. Not having its source in

thought, no amount of thinking can reveal the truth of the

non-fragmented disposition we refer to as non-duality.

 

We can say then that any thought we may believe we hold 'about'

non-duality is of necessity an illusion. Such a thought is created

and sustained by thought itself, which we have seen to be not the

thing itself.

 

So whether we think about non-duality or not, or whether we believe

that our thinking about non-duality has any reference whatsoever with

the actual living reality of centreless being, is totally besides the

point. It stands 'besides the point' as something categorically

different to the genuine article. Thought is about, and 'about' is

not the living reality of the thing itself.

 

This realisation, and by realisation I do not mean any form of mental

clarity, intellectual argument, thought-created certainty, but rather

the revelation as living reality, is not generally our disposition

when we start out on the path of self-enquiry. We start out as

thought constructs called 'I', conditioning, psychological problems

and complexities, unresolved emotional issues, fear and so on. In

other words we start out as seekers for freedom from our perceived

problems. If we were all happy, fulfilled human be-ings, would we

feel the need to enter into this absurdity called the spiritual path?

We won't, because the path itself is a measure of our unhappiness and

insanity. The free, sane person has no need for such absurdities as

sitting quietly for hours practicing meditation, counting his breath,

trying to become quiet, relax out of contracted states of emotion and

thought, or try to appear clever by writing about all the highest

truths obtained from books and scriptures.

 

So it is perfectly clear to me, and this much my practice has revealed

to me, that despite all the very clever arguments my thinking could

conjure up over the years relating to concepts of wholeness and the

obvious non-dual quality of experience and so on, behind even these

most clear and insightful thoughts, lurked the separate one. All

these thoughts appeared to 'me'. So although profoundly clear about

all the arguments presented by my own enquiry and intellectual

endeavour (including deep insights during profoundly quiet times of

meditative practice) about the non-dual 'nature' of myself, and

everything else, over time it became clear to me that I was still

separate and unwhole. The most reasonable deduction that could be

made from this was that perhaps I was using the wrong instrument to

reveal the wholeness to me.

 

It became clear to me that thought can ask questions it simply cannot

answer. Also it can make statements about things it has absolutely no

ability to get 'in touch' with. Or to become one with. My thoughts

about non-duality were as empty as the religious mind's thoughts about

metaphysical projections. It became clear then that although I could

reasonably pin down a great many (if not all) of my problems to

thought, thought itself had no ability to bring the answers which

would be living reality rather than just another opposite thought

pojected to counter the presumed 'cause' of the original problem.

 

This was a watershed realisation in my own practice. When it became

clear that thought cannot answer the problems of'I' consciousness, and

other such disturbances in the field of consciousness it has created.

Any attempt by thought to bring freedom from these many disturbing

aspects of being, was now seen as more of the same thing. Thought

cannot wash away thought. It can only try to suppress it with some

presumed 'higher thought', or counter a fondly held argument with some

more refined argument. But in either case thought is still the

active principle, and cannot relieve itself of itself by itself. And

as it is with this thought with which we are so profoundly identified,

no freedom is possible within thought.

 

But this is a profound insight. It has to reveal itself through

meticulous introspection. So that it does not just become again the

truth of another being taken by thought and projected as a liberating

principle or delusiory opposite. In this way,( Dan), the wheel has to

be re-invented each one for h/herself. There are as many paths as

there are practitioners or enquirers. But what has to be revealed as

a fundamental interim truth and reality by such enquiry, is that

thought is not the thing. The talk about non-duality, the thinking

about non-duality is false. Not because the thinking process itself

is false, but because thought can only project its own version (mental

creation) of these matters. And it becomes a double lie if we

propagate these illusiory, conceptually created, projections as having

anything whatsoever to do with the living reality of the

non-fragmented being. This is what I have once described in a post

on as the Advaitist's dream.

 

And because very few know the way from here, partially because the

latter-day Advaitist guru's proclaim that the thought IS the thing,

and so the idea ABOUT the non-dual state IS the thing itself, and so

we are ALREADY 'THERE' so no work needs to be done, the enquiry has

become stultified and this stultification has taken on the epidemic

proportions so-called Western Advaita is suffering, unknowingly, from.

This dream has now become reality. And this dream is being repeated,

and has now become 'conventional wisdom' or ' perfectly obvious' to

all.

 

It is only obvious as a thought. Nothing else. Not unlike the

existence of god being obvious to the religious mentality. There is

absolutely nothing obvious about non-duality or non-doing. It is just

thought presenting clever arguments to itself, and then believes its

own arguments to be the thing itself, or ralating to the thing itself.

 

Ignorance is nothing other than thought mistaking its own creations

for reality. It is what keeps the dream of subjectivity alive.

Because despite all the procrastinations form all the

pseudo-advaitists on these lists, theytill suffer the very same thing

they are pretending to one another to have left behind somewhere in

the dungeons of their own minds. Nothing has been left behind. The

'I' is still there, with each and every futile explanation towards

this conceptually created madness called non-dualism. It is the very

essense of dualism.

 

Once this problem of the monkey chasing its own tail has been seen as

the very principle of delusion, we may start to enquire whether there

may be something that could be done, which does not perpetuate the

very thing we are trying to get away from. Before that, any

proposition that there is no-where to go, nothing to do, no-doer from

the start, and so on, is always, already part of the fragmented

being's desparate attempt at pretending it is not real, and does not

exist. But both its pretence and its existence remain in tact as its

existence. Mind on mind. Concept on concept. Delusion on delusion.

 

The dream continues unabated. And with it, human suffering.

 

Love, Moller.>>