Hishiryo consciousness. Beyond thought. We do not need to clear our minds of all thoughts. We do not need to eliminate all conditioned thinking. We do not need to eliminate all of our desires. We do not need to attain any state of mind or any moral standing. We do not need to attain hishiryo consciousness. I write this because I am compelled by my feelings to convey the truth of the delusion and unsatisfactorily of pursuing conditioned states; and the truth and satisfaction of realizing the insubstantiality of form and dwelling in unconditioned consciousness. It is the way.
Personal freedom is hishiryo consciousness. It is a step on the path that we arrive at through our demons. Not by distancing ourself from the world, but by embracing it. Or simply by living it. For we cannot truly distance ourself from the world, from negativity, or from evil. We only imagine that we do. Hishiryo consciousness is the ever present background of our narrow thinking, as it is all that our narrow thinking is. At least for awhile. It itself may be impermanent. But, as we awaken from conditioned being to unconditioned being, we experience hishiryo consciousness as the single quality and reality behind, within, and eventually as the true nature of all conditioned being. I think this realization is quite astonishing to most of us who are so certain of the ability of our desires and reasoning to provide fulfillment and security. It is also quite astonishing in its quality that reveals the utter baselessness and heartlessness of our personal identity: of Carol, Chris, Steve and Marrion. We imagine enlightenment as the eternal bliss and superiority of our individual selves: the never ending sputtering of our inner dialogue. Perhaps there is eternal bliss of some personal being, but there is also the complete abandonment of form and any attachments we have to our mortal selves. There is the void. Stark as this may appear in contrast to our deepest fantasies, it can be quite liberating to one who is tired of the incessant nagging of the worrying mind. One who is a prisoner of the mind and has died enough already to the terrible superficiality of the world and ourselves.
It can be a lot to abandon the sure sure world that we know to the unknowns of the void, but if you are guided wisely, you may come across the truly priceless joy of having genuine emotion and genuine feeling. Of looking out into the world and feeling mystery, change, and sensing that though you are stepping on the Earth, you are also stepping on something else and being carried somewhere else. Of having no principle to stand upon but your own 2 cents, your gut, and your gay determination to do something new and exciting. To be something more than you are now by continuously venturing into the beyond. Hishiryo consciousness.
We do not leave behind the woes of the world, we plunge deeper into them. We enhance our character, our vigor, our meanness and our toughness. We drink in the seas that are the mixed bag of human life. If we are lucky, we find greater and greater balance among the angels and demons. We cultivate warmth and peace; kindness and glee. We may remain blind. We may have spotty vision. Yet we may know with increasing confidence what we are and we are not fearing less and less our mortality. Hishiryo consciousness is not necessarily perfect wisdom and compassion, it is the realization of that nothing needs to be attained.
We have a sense of destination. That someday we will be somewhere where we truly are. It seems that this is the projection of our insecurities into the future. A postponing of facing who and what we really are and what we really know about the world and ourselves. Our deep uncertainty as to the nature of reality and our inability to thwart death. The temporyness of our position. The sand running through our fingers. I feel that the more we can face what is, the more this destination may dissolve. The more we find ourselves with what we currently have and nothing else.
We may personally find hishiryo consciousness through radical acceptance of the present, but this is not necessary. For all is hishiryo consciousness. The experience of not experiencing hishiryo consciousness is hishiryo consciousness. We imagine that fulfillment lies here and not there. From this choice and not from this choice. Hishiryo consciousness permeates all form. It is all form. We imagine that we can step towards ourself or away from ourself. Can we? It is the wind of the winds. Some bitter, some sweet. Some interesting, some dull. Some neglected, some honed and perfected. We think we must take certain action and avoid others. How can we turn away from a God that lives in the left hand as equally as she does in the right? How can we turn away from a light that radiates from all points of space and time? In navigating the world towards the good, our job is not to find the way, but to be apart of the poetry of life. To be the flower and the thistle. The wolf, the lion, the Eagle and a human with all its wisdom and folly. These are not good and bad, but many leaves on a tree. They are empty of guilt and sin, they are equally composed and not to be found without eachother. They have no special meaning or permanent significance. They cannot hold onto you forever, nor do they take you from yourself as you are now.
When we are blind, we cannot see. This does not mean that the world is any different in the darkness as it is in the light. It means that in the dark we cannot judge what form may lie in front of our eyes. Thus it is impossible to know the truth in the dark. What we claim to see in the dark is not the truth, it is fiction. We claim that there is this and there is that, that there is good and there is bad. This is spoken from the dark. This is fiction. There is only Hishiryo consciousness. All possible choices are many limbs on a tree. They are all equally apart of the tree. We see quite a variety of choices varying in their merit, feeling and design. Hishiryo consciousness shows us that these choices are not as different as we may think. In fact, we cannot choose between them. We find that they are all the same and we are all of them at once extending into the limits of time and space. We are hishiryo consciousness.
We may not be able to make a distinction between the choices in our lives, but our passions may still move us to choose. And if we live in greater darkness, we cannot see that no choice is better than another. The point is not to stop choosing or to always see the choicelessness of experience, but to know that we do not need to be any way at all. Whether we rise or fall is irrelevant. It's not a question of attaining.
We confuse our attempt to survive and better ourselves with the truth. We think truth is confined to the realm of striving and obtaining, and because of this we continue striving and obtaining to find the truth. In striving to obtain, our minds are clouded by our passionate desire which holds us in ignorance. When we are wanting enlightenment, we are seeing it as an object that we are blindly and passionately attached to. This seeing is egoic seeing, it is the universe divided in perception. We see enlightenment as something we personally attain and I think it is hard for most people to see it otherwise. We see everything through the filter of our separate feeling egoic object desiring mind. We have to get past this filter to see hishiryo consciousness. Truth is limited to the scope of this egoic filter. We think enlightenment is bound to our personal success and/or failure. Enlightenment is not bound to your personal successes or failures. Fulfillment is not limited to personal success. Enlightnement and hishiryo consciousness is life as it is now regardless of your state of being. Enlightenment transcends the egoic mode of person attaining objects and person being individual separate person. It transcends success and failure. It transcends you. It's not a question of your searching, it is your searching. You must step outside of yourself to find hishiryo consciousness.
But this is not important. Because you are hishiryo consciousness. Life is hishiryo consciousness, everything is hishiryo consciousness. Our desires provide fulfillment for the organism and the ego, but they do not provide fulfillment for the self. I think fulfillment may be a passing dream. We contort truth into our narrow personal perceptions. It becomes things like fulfillment and principles that uphold the good. We often miss the truth behind these signs and they become useless. I think in the end they are entirely useless. Fulfillment of the self is not fulfillment of the self. It is fulfillment of the self story, the self dream. It's about having things and being things. It is not the fulfillment of unfettered perception. It is limited to personal experience. Total liberation isn't a fairy tale, it's a mechanical unwinding of a jack-in-the-box. In seeking fairy tails of liberation and attainment, we seek dreams, we miss the point, we walk on a tight rope over flames and daggers. To find sense is to wake up from the dream and realize that personal attainment is very very limited and a joke. To find sense is to have nothing and be nothing.
We see everything in terms of egoic striving. We contort the truths of the world into this mindframe. In this way we are insane. We think the answers of life are egoic and they are not. We think the universe is egoic and it is not. We think everything is egoic and it is not. We think that we will reach fulfillment through striving and this will not happen. It will not happen because fulfillment will end before we find it. We think that our egoic strivings are the work required to bring about the fulfillment of our desires. We are mistaken. We think the way we do things will get us what we want. We think we need to toil, that we need to work. That we need to worry, or dress a certain way, be a certain way. This is all ritual. It is convention. It is not grounded in real sense. The truth is resplendent in itself and does not depend on anything in particular.
So much of what we do is made up. It is social rules to help us survive better. It is not necessary by its innate value, but by the value it brings by being apart of a collection of co-existing guidelines. As a whole they help us survive. Individually they are meaningless. We assign meaning to them. Much of this meaning is arbitrary and no longer meaningful. No longer prudent. This is where laws become obstacles rather than bowling alley bumpers. This is where people pile up and get really angry. Where mental dishealth blossoms ungracefully. This is cancer and self-canabalism. This is suicide and the living dead. Not that these are absolutely bad things or unnatural things. Or that they are separate from anything great or good.
We assume that the best we can do is reach this plateau of personal bliss where all our problems will vanish. Where all our suffering will vanish. More so we assume that this bliss is the remedy for the suffering in our lives. I don't think we can solve the problem of suffering as long as we believe we separate from the world. Even if we are in heaven. The answer isn't egoic. And it's not an answer that needs to eliminate suffering from our lives.
The answer isn't to eliminate suffering completely from our lives, but to realize through insight that this isn't necessary. That their is nothing wrong with suffering. This is not apathy or immaturity: it is a realization of the emptiness of the self, or ego. The problem of our lives is not suffering itself, but the suffering that is the suffering of feeling separate from the world. Feeling torn, isolated, deprived, repressed, blind in constant anxiety. Why do we feel this way? This feeling is what we wish to remedy. We attach so many puffed up ideas to this feeling that deflate when we closely inspect them. Deflate and disappear. Heaven so on and so forth. Again, it isn't necessary to remedy this feeling, it is simply that this feeling is what truly bothers us, everything else is unnecessary. The solution is the awakening of transcendence through egoic consciousness, which happens as effortlessly as flowers blossom in the Spring. We assume the answer is through egoic effort for the egoic person. The answer is the slow death of the egoic mind and the gradual birth of transpersonal consciousness from the ashes and bones of the ego in a space perhaps impossible to describe.
We don't need to eliminate suffering from our lives because in a way it doesn't matter whether we are suffering or not. Suffering is bad when we cannot accept it in our lives: when we feel that it is negative, wrong and in opposition to who we are and what we deem important. If it is inseparable from everything we cherish and apart of what we love and something we do not need to be afraid of, it isn't so bad. If we see it as identical to joy and as the very substance of life, we may not recognize it at all. If striving has greatly diminished in our lives we may not hear it at all.
We are attached to "things" in our lives and often fully immersed in our relationship to these things. People, things, ideas. We are attached to these things to the point that they are who we sense to be ourselves. We are a collection of these attachments. Not only do we sense that these things and relationships are ourselves, we believe they are in our minds. When our relationship with these things is compromised while we are positively identified with them, we suffer. When we don't get what we want, when our personal relationships aren't how we wish them to be we suffer. I think we feel threatened when what we are personally attached to is compromised. We feel like we need them to be ok even if we may be completely fine without them. Here's the kicker. We suffer because we imagine that we won't be ok. We think, to some degree/on some level, that we need these attachments. We believe that we need to end suffering because we are attached to the idea that we are a separate individual that can die and we feel threatened by what we perceive as weaknesses of this separate self. We are also attached to the idea that living in bliss forever is good. We are attached to all sorts of ideas concerning the notion of the separate self. It is our attachment to these ideas and the world of objects that interplay in them that cause us suffering. As we are attached to these beliefs of our self, we will suffer when something comes in between us and our beliefs. There can be ease in suffering when "we" realize that we are something other than these beliefs that we are something other than the separate perceiving egoic consciousness. But the idea that we need to ease suffering is also a nonsense idea of the separate self. Their is suffering, their is ego, their is no one who is truly threatened by these. Their is no absolute truth that we need to eliminate suffering. We may truly wish to eliminate it within ourselves, but we do not need to, nor do we need to pursue the elimination of suffering even if it is impossible to do so.
The human mind finds "fulfillment" not when an individual has achieved some lofty moral or spiritual aim, but when the mind of that individual has penetrated through the darkness that is consciousness wholly consumed by dualistic perception. The mind wholly immersed in and attachment to the perceived universe of separate forms. Nirvana is liberation from a mind of opposites. It is liberation from and transcendence of the imagining and fantasizing mind which is lost in form and the imagination of form. It is absolutely independent of anything at all. Religions may ring with eternal truth, but it is unnecessary to follow them absolutely.
As the mind wakes up, it becomes clearer and clearer how the story of the individual who is such and such, does such and such, and needs such and such is empty of absolute importance. This is to say, that the attention does not need to dwell on the individual. In fact, nothing is of absolute importance and the mind does not need to dwell on anything at all. This is true because the life and world of the individual person with all their unique importances is in fact unneccessary, insignificant, and largely if not entirely a fiction. The self is important in the fact that it is. We are. This is. This is what importance is, the mere fact of being anything at all.
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