[ finding your self apparently, without further delay, dept. ]
A LITTLE BOOK ON AWARE LIVING, AS IT HAPPENS. 🙂
~ Introduction: Perhaps these days are a good time to really get close. To look inside a little closer and longer at what we’ve been conditioned to believe, and to allow our self to wonder if all that is necessary. In truth, what is necessary, after all? Well, the best tip on that eternal question may well be apparently from Nisargadatta: “It is necessary to grow. It is necessary to outgrow.” That’s getting close, yes 🙂
~Living’s an open book: Aware living is kinda like opening up a new book every day – it’s about life’s constant turning to new, mostly blank pages in every moment. It’s a book that somehow functions as a necessarily vague but serviceable, map. This book does not provide an opined overview of life – an established and accrued knowledge base. Indeed, in aware living, you never know; it offers neither a past nor a future. Not even much of a story. In reality, the book of life has little to no time for stories. It’s only content is a nowness that’s keen to reveal facts, not fantasies.
Aware living is a candid, intimate, loving engagement Self-to-self that’s as breezy as any summer day, as brisk as any windy Fall evening; as penetrating as any cold winter wind and as delightful as any newborn spring. It’s about living life in season, in harmony, rain or shine, as it happens.
It’s a wholly lived book about everyday happenings, about love, beauty and destruction aka creation…moment-to-moment, so to speak; there’s a freshly emerging new rhythm, a harmonic, richly toned pattern, but (usually) not a plan. There’s some apparent ‘future’ details written in as ‘planed’ here and there, but always and only they’re sketched proposals about the territory and subject to constant revisions according to the situations on the ground, the real terrain.
A LIVING BOOK WRITES ITSELF.
So, let’s play a little with this book theme just to see what happens 🙂 I’m thinking of titling it something catchy, yet abstract as life, say:
‘THREE SQUIRRELS AND A CAT…
Nothing to know, Everything to be.’
That sounds about right, but it could change…it’s a title that’s immediately inspired by what I’m watching now out my window, as these critters are eating assorted seeds for breakfast on a cloth beneath a massive black oak; there’s a sense of contentment, of enough, of plenty; all four seem quite collegial.. Anyway, The book would be more like a pamphlet – very thin.. spare and brief. There’s say, two parts to it, with headings, that may or may not spawn numerous nameless chapters:
Part One: Discovering what we’re not.
Part Two: Uncovering what we are.
Here’s Part One:
DISCOVERING WHAT WE’RE NOT.
WE DO NOT -CAN NEVER ‘HAVE’- ANY ‘KNOWLEDGE’ ABOUT THIS THAT WE ARE; ALL KNOWING IS A LABELING THAT BELONGS TO THOUGHTS THAT ARE BELIEVED TO BE ACTUALLY REAL – FACTUALLY ‘TRUE’. WE’LL CALL IT ‘BOOK KNOWLEDGE’ – THE STUFF OF MIND THAT’S FUNCTIONALLY USEFUL FOR TECHNICAL MATTERS. AND THE ORIGIN OF MOST OF OUR SUFFERING.
THOUGHTS ARE CONCEPTUAL, SYMBOLIC, MIND-MADE, MEMORY-STORED REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT OUR LIVE, DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF THINGS AND EVENTS – THEY’RE WORDED, FRACTIONAL DESCRIPTIONS AND FEELINGS ‘ABOUT’ REALITY.
AWARENESS, HERE AND NOW, IS THE UNCHANGING ALERTNESS THAT’S READING THESE NOTIONS ABOUT WHAT CHANGING THOUGHT IS CURRENTLY THINKING. THOUGHTS ARE VIBRATIONS THAT GIVE US A MINDFUL INTERPRETATION OF WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING, HERE AND NOW. THE KNOWING OF THIS AWARENESS IS NOT MENTAL, NOT IMAGINED, NOT ENVISIONED – NOT AN EXPERIENCE. IT’S A NON-KNOWING THAT IS NONE THE LESS, FULLY, FACTUALLY, ‘KNOWN’.
THIS DOUBT-FREE, NON-KNOWING IS WHAT WE ARE – AWARENESS – IN BOTH ITS MANIFESTED FINITE FORM AND ITS UNMANIFESTED INFINITE FORMLESSNESS. THIS AWARENESS IS CHOCK FULL OF PARADOX, BUT NEVER CONTRADICTION, WHICH IS THE DOMAIN OF THE BINARY MIND. THIS ‘KNOWING’ HAS NO KNOWER AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT IS ‘KNOWN’. IT’S A NON-SENTIENT UNKNOWING THAT KNOWS ONLY ITSELF…BY ITSELF. TO KNOW IT IS TO BE IT.
THAT UNKNOWING INCLUDES ALL THAT WE THINK AND FEEL AND BELIEVE WE KNOW. ALL THE MIND’S MOVEMENTS: THOUGHTS, PERCEPTIONS AND SENSATIONS. ALL THAT’S FINITE IS BEHELD BY THE INFINITE. OF COURSE, ALL THAT’S POINTED TO HERE WITH WORDS IS SUBJECT TO DEEPENING OUR OWN UNDERSTANDING, TO OUR WILLINGNESS TO ‘POP THE HOOD’ AND HAVE A GOOD LOOK INSIDE AT THE MACHINATIONS OF THE MIND. IN THAT LOOKING, IN THAT FULL SEEING, WE MAY COME TO RECOGNIZE – AT LEAST PROVISIONALLY – WHO OR WHAT WE ARE NOT.
WELL, WHAT ARE WE THEN?
That’s Part Two: ‘UNCOVERING WHAT WE ARE.’
That gets written only by a new, non-attached character formerly thought of as ‘you.’ A whole being that’s no longer fragmented and personal. That’s no longer conflicted with former personal desires and fears. That’s open, fearless and free to simply be, to let all things pass before its loving gaze.
The writing of Part Two happens only here and now; it might be – it will be – whatever happens, like sipping tea, or getting up to go to the kitchen, or maybe for a walk, – indeed, in aware living, you never know what you’re going to ‘do’; you find out as you go, so to speak. Aware living is spontaneous, without motive. As Papaji used to say as he walked around with friends, turning and returning, now left, now right: “I don’t have a reason for anything I do.”
Indeed, in the natural flow of aware living, there’s not much call for motives and ambitions; not much interest in pre-determining. There’s just a simple abiding, a living-in this abundant here/now. A watching and acting in an appropriate accordance with the demands of the moment. A in-dwelling that’s always unknown, always fresh, always beginning. There’s a gentle curiosity mixed with wonder and delight. Indeed, this Book of Living writes itself.
That’s the beauty of it all; aware living is not so much like DIY ‘Do It Yourself’.. more accurately described as a LIBD – a relaxed ‘Letting It Be Done’.. there’s no doer and, what’s more, the doing is an engaged following of a perfume that’s fragrantly full of the Unknown, of timeless subtle surprises way beyond imagining.. there’s no Secret, no requirements, rituals and preconditions; drop all knowing, all beliefs that separate, and this whole universe instantly or perhaps gradually, will reveal its Self to its Self. To be what you are, is to simply see that you are already aware of awareness. And there’s no telling of the wonders of that endless mystery – only the living of it.
Love and Enjoy your Self 🙂
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