Right View Part 3 “Non-Duality”

The entire practice of any Buddhist navel gazing is aiming toward one thing IMHO: the realizing of non-self or “emptiness” (emptiness meaning empty of an independent, lasting, fully autonomous self or center.) And the "awakenened" thought and behavior based on the realization of "emptiness." 

 

Warning: this might start to sound a little goofy, bear with me. This is nothing but the truth of subjective experience.

 

One way of becoming aware of “emptiness” is through “Non-dual” pointers:

 

-Ask “who am I?”

-Try not to answer, sit with the question a little bit as if you are listening for an answer.

-Ask “what am I?”

-Try not to answer, sit with the question a little bit as if you are listening for an answer.

-Ask “what is this?”

-Try not to answer, sit with the question a little bit as if you are listening for an answer.

-Ask “what is in awareness?”

-Try not to answer, sit with the question a little bit as if you are listening for an answer.

-By now you may be experiencing a wide open feeling. Good. If not, that is also good, please continue.

-Stop everything if you haven’t already… take a deep breath, ask yourself: what would it be like if there were no problems to solve and everything were to be perfectly okay…  don’t think about it, feel it… let what it would be like to sink in for a couple of minutes.

 

-Notice that what you call  “you” is not a thing but more like a process, everything is within your conciousness, YOU can’t be a thing because the things within consciousness are things… tables, chairs, TVs, cars, other people, anything out there is a “thing” and NOT you because it’s all within YOUR consciousness. That conscious space that includes everything equally.

-Notice that everything happening is just the pair-wise knowing and what is known, the six senses plus their sense objects (what are being known) are what we call awareness (if we count “mind” as a sense, and regard the 20-something other senses discovered since the Buddha’s time as part of “mind”: proprioception, balance etc…). There is no “you” in any experience, even a mirror is over there and your body is an object in awareness!

-The knowing is the background the “is-ness,” the space of where “you” are that doesn’t really exist apart from what is knowing and known.

-The "you" you usually think of yourself as is just another object in conciousness, its a thought that doesn't exist, and this is where freedom from your illusuory "self" lies.

-The thing you call “you” is a fabrication of imagination based on what you think you are and what you remember of yourself in the mirror being, as well as distortions, biases, mostly negative thinking, attached to this empty feeling body (which itself is just another object in consciousness) with a strange spaceless space that includes everything that exists floating above it.

 

-Drop away everything that “you” think you are and the resulting problems created by “you”  because everything you think is a fabrication within this open space of consciousness and not the real thing, not the real “you.”

 

-What “you” are is much larger and fascinating than what you originally thought “you” were. Much, much larger and fascinating.

-Now I ask you to suspend disbelief and open your mind a little bit, things are about to get crazy and counterintuitive:

-What you really are is the universe itself, a reflection in it, part and parcel of it as well as the whole thing, its complex process of causes and conditions that resulted in life since the Big Bang—you’re a wave in the sea of life, with breathing that happens on its own, a heart pumping blood on its own, thoughts that happen on their own, behaviors happening on their own (happening on their own, that is, apart from your will). From a biological perspective this is 100% true. There is no little man or woman in your brain that is not made of gooey neuronal brain-stuff (perhaps made of rubber bands and gears), thinking and acting independent of natural causes and conditions. Your conditioned thoughts just appear in the empty space of mind and are believed, ignored or followed based on if they are pleasant or not. Your movement masks irritation and pain. You are driven to fulfill an urge either right now or you have the urge to wait to fulfill it later is based on the current environment and past causes and conditions that lead up until now. Your beliefs are confirmed because they feel good. Future action is contingent on what information is available, both the thousands of things in the environment being processed subconsciously and the little information that comes floating up in the mind. 

 

-In the same way you don’t ascribe free will to animals, you yourself as a human animal are just as predictable but a little more intelligent and also lacking any free will. Intelligence is the innate ability to navigate the world, this is just to say it doesn't indicate free will or superiority, some are born with it some aren't. Same goes for physical attractiveness and personality.

-You are like a bicycle, your consciousness, personality and self are the process of peddling, once the bicycle stops, where do “you” go?

-You are like constellations of stars in the night sky, the fact that they form constellations is due to purposeful illusion: you picked them out to form a constellation when they are just independent stars in the night sky.

 

-Traditionally the self is made up of five aggregates: the first one is form or everything in contact with the five senses, this is usually compared to foam because of its insubstantiality. The next three aggregates are mental, they are: perception, feeling tone, and volitional thought (and implicitly speech and action). Perception is what makes sense of the world even before it is consciously recognized or named, the sound of a car for instance. Perception is compared to a mirage, it is subject to individual minds and it arises and fades away. Feeling tone is the bare pleasant, unpleasant or neutrality of a physical or mental object. Feeling tones are compared to bubbles floating down the river, ceaselessly arising and popping. There is always a feeling tone present. Volitional thought or thought that brings about speech and action is compared to a banana plant. You can peel and peel but you will never get to the heartwood or the center. Thoughts and actions are empty of a discernible center, The last aggregate is what holds everything and that is consciousness. If you pay attention consciousness is like a magic trick, making things appear that don’t exist, like a coherent “self.” Consciousness also contracts or expands depending on what’s happening, or is colored by mood. The “self” is just these five rivers flowing on, dependent of their surroundings and other factors, creating the illusion of a coherent, independent “self.” These are flowing through the pairwise sense and sense object of the six senses (mind being the sixth sense).

-Who you see yourself to be in reality and who you feel and imagine yourself to be are two completely different things. The reality is is unsatisfactory, selfless, and impermanent.

-Just as you can’t will yourself to believe two plus two doesn’t equal four, or go out and murder the next stranger you see (for you’re not a psychopath), or completely stop breathing based on willpower alone, or quit your job if you love it, you are not in control of yourself. You didn’t will yourself into a fairytale- otherwise you’d be perfectly healthy and beautiful, living the American dream, an ageless millionaire sleeping with a different supermodel every night, you’d be a John Wayne or James Bond if male, perfectly beautiful if female, or have some sort of perfectly happy family, have a perfect roof over your head with the perfect car in the garage, you’d have kept up with the Jones’s, or you’d just be plain blissfully happy all the time, disease free etc... 

-This fairytale existence is not experiencing the pain and suffering of reality. No pain, no suffering, no ugliness, no aging, no death, no jealousy, no envy, no greed, no clinging, no aversion, no anger, no hatred, no violence, no being born with a capacity not to work as well as others, no being born in a poor country living on $1.50 US per day forced to work the farm morning until night, no being born in a North Korean labor camp, no being born in a war torn country, no being born neurotic, no abusive family members, no being born with a low IQ, etc... in other words, any contingency that every little pain and suffering is based on. Contingencies that determine lives. 

-We know it’s a human desire to live in a fairytale world as a fairytale self and when this fairytale is believed and not met, that is when suffering begins. Seeing through the permanent, completely satisfactory, and independent self cuts through this fairytale. There is no freedom from pain and suffering but we don’t have to add more insult to injury with an illusory self that doesn’t live up to the world’s fairytale expectations.

-To see through the self and live it is to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and disenchanted with the fairytale. The fact that these three “dis” words have negative connotations is telling. Becoming disillusioned is literally to remove illusion, dispassion is to be equanimous and at peace, and disenchanted is when the enchantment lifts revealing reality (or the end of every fairytale).

-The more we see reality as it is: it is unsatisfactory to grasp on to things (either pleasant or painful) because permanence is an illusion, and the reality that nothing exists independently in a vacuum (there is no hard border between us and other people and the environment), the more in touch with reality we become and the more in touch we are the more we have a realistic view, and with realism comes equanimity, compassion and freedom from the suffering of a fabricated, independent, free self. 

-On a conventional level it is helpful to sometimes think you are in control--namely, of your considered judgements, beliefs, opinions and the decision to act or not--for it feels so. 

-I’d argue that most of the time it is wise to open yourself to the universe, drop the egotistical clinging and let go, relax, enjoy, lighten up, feel a little compassion, gratitude, love, renunciation and giving, less greed and clinging, a little forgiveness, or less of the pushing away of what is annoying (inconvenient facts of poverty, war, disease etc...), feel sympathy and equanimity.

-If you don’t understand now, you may on your death bed when everything you thought you were drops away, and the experience of no-self and the glorious truths of love, giving, and equanimity takes its place. 

-Or to paraphrase what some Soto Zen folks say: fake it till you make it, until you feel in your bones that everything is whole and complete, like One Bright Pearl. That you are the universe dancing, and the universe is dancing you. Then having experienced it, let’s clean up the dog shit and make the world a little more beautiful place to live in.

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Some of you are probably thinking “that’s all or nothing thinking and I have control over SOME things”—the problem is that assumes some sort of entity outside of cause and effect or reality. It feels like free will, that doesn’t mean it is free will, we are subject to many cognitive illusions, biases and distortions.

That is my spiel… If you could follow any of my rambling and believed it, congratulations, you are now a little more “woke.”

PS don't read this as an invitation to quit everything and play the didgeridoo on the corner, of course you want to be who you are and fight the good fight, not become some passive hippy... I'm guessing you couldn't do that anyways, no matter how hard you try. I AM NOT excusing bad behavior and I think the precepts are to be followed. It’s a paradox, I know.