(53) LIVING HERE: Remembering facts, forgetting opinions
Hi,
Is there any need to awaken mankind?
Thank you
Regards, C.
—–
Hi C, thanks for the note; there’s many perspectives invoked by your question, but today I’ll take a perspective founded on a simple truth I’ve been savoring, as expressed by one of my teachers, Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Forget opinions, remember facts”
Exploring facts – life as it is without our conditioned mind-interpretations, indicates that mankind does not need to awaken; indeed, mankind is already awake, but mostly unaware of its nature as awareness ie. in function, delusional. In the moving epoch of time, mankind seems to be slowly, painfully, evolving, now advancing, now retreating. In absolute fact, there is only one thing going on in time and space – consciousness. Its entire nature is movement, change, ebb and flow, birth/death/birth/death. All factually, actually and only happening now.
Limits of conscious experience.
By that I mean, when we look closely at our conscious nature, we may see that there are six functions by and through which we experience consciousness in the now: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, thinking. All of these are experienced sensations arising in a “consciousness” which is not ours, not factually personal. (Indeed, in time, we learned as children to attach personal labels ie. ideas, to these impersonal arisings. This labeling is generated initially by the conditioning of the babies brain which is the last organ to mature and come ‘online’ in infancy to produce our human, seemingly personal, experience..)
The nature of experience.
In exploring the facts of this body/mind based consciousness, we can see that all experiences are fleeting, they come and they go; they are not real, not permanent, not abiding. What abides is the ground or field of all experience – the impersonal awareness or suchness behind this sensed experience called “consciousness”.
This awareness-of- consciousness seems to be growing in humanity in relationship to the perhaps unsurpassed global suffering we’re experiencing ie. there’s an estimated 65 million displaced people on the planet according to the UN. And all this suffering is based on one missed-understanding: the assumption, based on ignorance, that labelled experience creates a “me” and a “you”…that we are separate entities.
This is a six-sense-based opinion; the facts are non-differentiating: we are one conscious beingness in multiple expressions. Or, in Sufi-speak, all the vessels are made by one potter from the same clay.
I’ll stop here C, and close with this: To the degree we live our lives free of opinions, and in direct relationship to facts, we will rest in our natural, inherited peace, love and goodness. This impersonal love will and must, radiate and affect mankind.
The joy and beauty of Reality dawns with the rising sun of non-personal awareness.
Love, and be well!
James
