Our trouble starts when we privilege thinking over direct experience. When this becomes an ingrained habit of relating to the world and ourselves even the suggestion to drop out of the mind and into the non-conceptual being can be violently resisted.
But for the sake of our peace and freedom we must learn to let go. Attachment to views, not just specific views but views as such, is our bane. Conditioned grasping to mental artefacts hijacks attention from the richness and wholeness that is being itself.
We’re frightened that if we let go of our orienting notions and nominal identities we’ll have no support to our existence, and that a plunge into no-thing-ness is necessarily a plunge into oblivion. The truth is the very opposite. Releasing our grasping to the conceptual releases unnecessary tension and contraction and allows attention to fully partake of its nature as unbounded awareness. We find there’s no need to cling to a fixed identity, identity becomes little more than dress-up in light of one’s realized Self-nature.
So find out where you’re stuck. What ideas and notions are you attached to? Approach them, explore them. Learn to soften the grasping tension you find there. Learn to ‘let go’ basically. Release the ‘muscle’ of energetic tension, practice softening and opening in your field of felt experiencing. Gently explore the feelings around your strongly held notions.
Because insisting that the world be just as we conceive it, when frankly ‘it’ doesn’t give a shit what we want or think, is insane and futile. Not only do we suffer it but we compound our own ineffectiveness in the face of inevitable and unremitting universal change. Our conceptions are our suffering.
From one perspective we are nodal expressions of universal intelligence, inseparable from the whole. Driven to act like waves are driven by the ocean. Our sense of separation born only from limited conceptions. Partiality of mind seems to disconnect us from our living source.
We must see mind for what it is: smoke and mirrors, insubstantial, passing, impermanent. Else we suffer the misapprehension of the apparent for the real, the transient for the essential. Take away the conceptual layer and what remains? Not even take it away, just notice it as an emergent phenomena not as self-nature. That which notices and knows is Self, is awareness, the being that you are before any conceiving occurs.
Awakening is the recognition of the holistic and singular flow of experiencing; the entirely inclusive and fundamentally unified nature of what is; the nominal subject and object recognized as such – separate in name only.
Existence is pre-conceptual, the thing-in-itself without ‘adornment’; the Uncarved Block, Zen-mind, thusness.
Know That.
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