acceptance, duality, noise

[Guest guest]

A member of advaitajnana, whose name I apologize for not being able to

find, recommends that we "accept the situation".

 

 

 

Tony O'Clery says that we lose Ego (duality) by expanding into Universality

(non-duality).

 

 

 

"the noise I am" says that "Reality is Silence, the universe its noise."

 

 

 

 

 

I find these comments either unnecessarily paradoxical, ambiguous, or even

mistaken. We can heal these deficiencies by awakening to the experiential

moment, which is samsara, our constantly changing conscious experience. In

the experiential moment we find somatic feeling, which gives the

experiential moment its positive affective tone (makes it enjoyable,

satisfying). We also find thoughts about individual things, which include a

self, and we locate those objects of thought in the immediate or more remote

past and in the impending or more remote future (our thoughts never refer to

the immediate present, strictly speaking). Elements of samsara are distinct

individual things, including selves. They and their relationship to one

another are constantly changing. To distinguish among them is not to fall

into any sort of duality that causes suffering or noise. The Duality to be

avoided is to identify with, or fixate on, any particular thought about

samsara. Samsara is not itself noisy. Just as suddenly stepping on brakes

causes tires to squeal, so do we cause noise by identifying with or fixating

on (clinging to) a particular experiential moment. To do so is to try to

accomplish the impossible: create something fixed out of samsara. This

fighting against the stream of experiential moments is what creates noise.

Silence is not found outside samsara, but in our non-clinging relationship

to it. To look for Silence in some Absolute apart from Samsara is yet

another futile attempt to find a fixed reality through thinking.

 

 

 

This is what I take to be the meaning of the passage that adi_shakthi16

graciously shared with us:

 

 

 

Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow.

Whatever is rigid and blocked will atrophy and die.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching

 

 

 

Gary Schouborg

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