Writing. I am writing again. On a computer. Do I have anything to say? I think so. What it is I feel, but I do not know. There is a cloud of intuition. A cloud, or a sea. A sea of feeling. It moves within me and moves far off. I often reach and search into it. I look for direction, or inspiration. I feel for something to do now. I look for an answer to my striving, yearning, feeling. Perhaps something wants to be. I intuit it and I open myself up to the universe's creative potential and will. I let it be born through me into my life, into the world. Everyday I work to make this process as seamless and effortless as possible. To always be open to the creative flow and deeper intelligence of life. To be inspired by joy and wholeness in each and every moment. To feel what I feel completely. To be as deep and as awake as I can be. Incredible. Ecstatic. To be alive and awake. To be here now.
I merely wish to see with eyes open at all times. At least the part of myself that usually dominates my awareness feels this way. Other parts are content cowering in the shadows so they can hide their hurts. I think the root of life is to establish the supremacy of wakefulness and presence in an embodied universe. To wake up to unfettered being. To completely transcend attachment to form. This wakefullness seems to be the underlying consciousness of all that is. We are all trying to be ourselves and struggling and dying in doing so. We are a wave of reaching stretching across the universe. Reaching for immortality in a transient universe. An impossible aim. Yet an aim written into every fiber of our being.
When we attempt to find fulfillment through establishing the permanence of any part of ourselves, we will inevitably fail. Who we are cannot be confined to anything in particular. An attempt to confine ourselves in any form is an attempt with suffering inherent to it. It will not succeed and it is not what we imagine or desire it to be. We are attached to form and because of this we suffer and will not find fulfillment. We are afraid to let go of form because it is all that we know of life. It is our grasp on what best resembles security. We imagine that we won't exist without it. So we cling to it and do our best to hinder it's passing creating our misery, blindness, and isolation. We are not this form alone, not as we imagine it before we have seen beyond it. Before we can see clearly through it and in it.
Our attachment, our passions, blind us from seeing things as they are. Our passions bind our attentions to particular aspects. We are caught up on these particulars rather than aware of the whole, or the not. We are feverishly consumed by these attentions and cannot look away. We cannot help ourselves from being blind, destructive, and unwise. We are fettered to blindness, destructiveness and folly by our passions, our attachments. They bind us to suffering and unfulfillment. At least superficially in the ways that we ordinarily experience life.
To be free of form is to find true fulfillment in life. To transcend attachment is the key to liberation. To transcend attachment one must see beyond the dark veil of one's one blinding attachments or passions. One must see this process of being fettered and blinded that being attached over and over again is. One must see that it does not work. It does not bring fulfillment. That one's own perception of what these passions are and what they bring is incorrect. Instead of bringing fulfillment, they perpetuate slavery. Instead of providing enlightenment they create darkness and delusion. When one sees this clearly enough and deeply enough in their own heart, they will turn away from their passions. They will turn away from the world of form and they will begin to search for God, whatever this may mean. They will search for truth and wisdom. A way out of this cycle of suffering. This cycle of attachment. They will seek to break the bonds of their attachments, to overcome the desperate lustfullness of their passions. They seek the breath of life and the sight of the Lord through the clouds of confusion. They intuit the Way amidst the smoke filled room that is samsara. Yet they do not yet know how to walk it.
The true turning away from attachments, the true desire to break free from the cycle of suffering is the opening of the door to truth, clarity, and liberation. The true desire is the opening and beginning of the Way in one's life. This cannot be faked or perhaps even forced. It is as natural as flowers blossoming in Spring. It is the natural evolution of life. The becoming of the Way is becoming of the knowing of the Way. When you truly wish for it, it will speak to you, it will guide you. A doorway has been opened...
you go out to heaven, and heaven comes in to your life
Heaven will grow in the mind like a pool of water in the rain. As it grows it will transform and the individual will move closer to truth. The door will open wider and within it many other doors will open. The being will come alight with the light from many different openings. They will shed their attachment as they awaken to the subtleties of the universe and the roots of their passions are revealed and upended. Darkness will be dispelled by knowledge and insight. They will be guided to the core of truth through ever-deepening awareness and sensitivity. They will realize the root of attachment within themself and they will gain the power to walk away from it.
The root of attachment is simply infatuation with form and blossoming of mind in and through form. To upend the root of attachment one must overcome their infatuation with form. One must blossom completely through form into perception of emptiness. One's self and identity must become empty and transcendent of form. The heart and center of the self, the heart of the blossoming mind, must grow through form into emptiness and non-being. Here is where the self is found. When growing through form, form becomes so subtle and all-pervasive that it ceases to exist as something which can be bound in any way. This is Spirit. This is the Self. Mind becomes so sharp that no knife edge can be found, yet it can cut through anything effortlessly. We must awaken to the formless universe to realize the dissatisfactory nature of form. The dissatisfactory nature of form is that form cannot provide fulfillment for the self. All form is limited in scope and depth. It is transient. What we are is something more than this. As long as we remain fearfully and ignorantly immersed in our attachment to form, we will remain consumed by this attachment and unfulfilled. We confuse the limited nature of form(s) with who we really are. We imagine that these forms can provide fulfillment when they cannot. They are forever limited in their nature and what we desire is always unbounded consciousness. We are attached and identified with form because we believe it provides fulfillment. We deceive ourself as we pass from attachment, or addiction, to attachment. If we could see clearly, we would let go of all attachment because all attachment causes suffering and is delusional. But, we learn through our attachments the true nature of attachments and the true nature of reality.We pass through the darkness of addiction to the clarity of release in the development of our identities (identification with form). We go from delusion, I am just this, to a place beyond individuating. A place where we are not held by any thing. A place where our sight is not blinded by any passionate attachment to form. The root of attachment is upended because 1. we can clearly see that form is unsatisfactory and 2. because it is unsatisfactory we no longer desire it. We no longer desire anything. You can call this enlightenment, or being awakened, but don't confuse these terms with anything that is considered fixed.
Being awakened or enlightened is seeing clearly. Seeing without the obstruction of blinding attachment to form. It's not attaining any special state of consciousness, it's getting rid of the filters that delude perception. There is no way to describe what it is because what it is, is not fixed in any way. It is not contained in any one idea. We can understand it through ideas, but we cannot experience it through striving for or experiencing any particular state of mind. It is not special. It is not a special state. Even attempting to describe it as being something may be too much. In thinking that it is something, you may think that it is not something else. And in thinking that it is one way you you will prevent yourself from seeing it. The universe does not appear to be the way we imagine it to be.
We imagine that the universe is fixed because we have fixed perceptions...
We have fixed perceptions because we have fixed attachments. Our attentions are consumed by our passionate attachments to particular forms, to particular ideas. This forms and ideas are limited in nature, so our perceptions are limited in nature. They are fixed on these forms and because they are fixed, they cannot see the greater universe. They cannot see the bigger picture. They say, I am a Christian". "I am a man". They are caught up in these notions to the point of denying all else that surrounds them. In a way this is all that they can see. What we are, what these attentions are, are expanding attentions. We are not separate from our attentions. Our minds are not separate from what we identify with. We are literally expanding minds, expanding awarenesses. Expanding in depth and breadth becoming more subtle and complex constantly. This is what we are. You can say we are people. But is this only partially true? I think it is more accurate to say that we are expanding awareness. As we expand, we expand through egoic being. We expand through limited perspective. From limited perspective we cannot perceive of the whole because obviously our vision, our perspective is limited. As long as our perspective is limited, we will experience a limited universe. We will sense the unlimited universe but we will not experience it due to our general limited perspective. This lack of seeing is the basis of duality and the fixed universe experience. Because we only see part of the universe, while the other part is concealed in darkness, we lack a complete synthesis of what the universe is. We cannot identify with all of the universe because we cannot see it all. Thus our language and experience is filled with positive and negative statements rather than a way of communicating and experiencing that is a synthesis of positive and negative. There is always something left out, always a, "not this", or "no" because we are literally closed off to that reality. The no merely marks the edge of our awareness. The no or not this demarks an extent of what we are as expanding awareness when our perspective is limited. The no is the darkness at the edge of our positive identifications. The ego is the limited perspective. It is the reality of fear and denial of the unlimited universe. It is temporary and expanding perspective and attachment through limited intelligence. It is the green progress bar on the computer as it approaches 100%. It is incomplete data. Thus it is black, and white. Or more appropriately, white, and black. Known/processed, accepted, and unknown/unprocessed, denied. We are literally exactly the same as computers. Exactly the same. We just have feelings and I'm not sure computers do (are self-conscious). The way we process information is exactly the same. For now computers' data is limited to computer systems, whereas human data appears to me to be not limited to any system.
The universe is not fixed because the universe is not egoic. The universe is not black and white. It is not set because the data of the universe is 100% processed. There is no inside or outside. There has to be two settings for something to be fixed one particular way. When 100% is known, there is only 1 setting, or no setting. There is no edge for one to grab because there is no distinction between anything at all. Everything is perfectly synthesized. There is no edge because there is no unknown. Enlightenment is perceiving the unlimited universe
This is why it cannot be attained through the attempt to establish the permanence of any part of ourself. Any part of ourself, is incomplete, imperfect. Any part of our self has an edge, is incomplete data, is not the whole. We cannot perceive the unlimited with a limited tool. This is why attachment to any state or any idea about enlightenment does not bring about or is not enlightenment or waking up. Anything that is in anyway separate from anything else is incomplete data and cannot be used to perceive the whole. In using such techniques or forms, you are deliberately focusing on something that which is incomplete to obtain that which is complete. All you end up with is something incomplete, because that is what you were holding onto the whole time. Your ego was fixated on a particular thing that you associate with the whole, but is not the whole. This is idolatry. Enlightenment is not fixed to anything in particular. Status, state of mind, practice, religion, diet, diction, action, belief, desire. These things may provide pleasure, but pleasure is not enlightenment. Attainment is not enlightenment. Attainment is ego. Status is ego. You find enlightenment when you see that your ego is in fact not real. When you lose desire to attain anything, this is enlightenment. It has nothing to do with glory or salvation or personal success. It is truly seeing that you are not important. Not to make a judgment on one's importance in anyway. It is the death of striving. Striving is personal and egoic. Enlightenment is not. If you think it means riches and success, you are wrong. It's more like putting a hole in a balloon and watching it deflate. Like, oh...that's total bullshit. Me, attaining anything is totally unimportant, total fantasy. Me getting car, partner, money, materials, house, emotional wellbeing, in fact not necessary or deserving of any special attention at all. I want these things because I am human and I have an ego. That doesn't mean that they need to happen. I don't need them in any way, shape or form. I don't even need myself. Who I am is temporary. Enlightenment is really the death or partial death of the ego, which is striving to attain for one's self. It is seeing that it is completely unimportant what one does or doesn't get. Seeing that we get what we get, and that's it.
The relief of enlightenment is the relief from the incessant nagging of the mind. Which says, need, need, need, need, need. It is relief from troublesome ideologies and beliefs. It is relief from being confused and hurt about wanting to do good in the world. It is seeing what people actually need and being able to nurture them and oneself. This is a great relief. Freedom from being disturbed. Freedom from fear. And not through being attached to ideas or states of being, but through being unattached. Not holding out against the world, but being one with the world, one with everything. Not rising above or delving below alone, but doing both, or standing on it (the Earth) as it is, with it as it is. Having the heart to do so. The maturity to do so. This is a great relief. This is a wonderful thing. It is the freedom to be a human being and to be oneself. To be wise and to be foolish. To simply be as one is. This is enlightenment. This is waking up.
