REALITY IS BEYOND CONCEIVING AND BELIEVING.
With respect for the Oneness of our wonderful self-nature, here’s yet another attempted wordsmithing on ‘Enlightenment’ with this caveat: one can only use innately dualizing words to point, to help discover not the truth, but perhaps that which is false; it’s up to the individual to dive deeply, directly into one’s inner being – to look beyond belief and to see ‘for yourself’ that which is. Awakening is not some kind of mind-spin, some elegant or clumsy conceptual and imagined weaving of a supposed reality; a ‘reality’ that’s based on the mind, the very source of duality, separation and all mankind’s suffering, including these and any other words, believed. The mind can only compare and contrast, sift, sort and silo data about data, words about words.
Awakening is not an event; the mind-made ‘person’ does not wake up or become something special, different. Waking up is not personal. Not an event or experience with its experiencer. There’s nothing to be done, there being no doer. No belief, no believer. In truth, reality is not a beautiful mind game. One may, with grace, recognize what one Is, – instantly, directly, clearly. That awakening is a simple non-event; a non-personal, non-mental and non-expressable realization that is not in or from or of, the body/mind. In an empty, not-knowing quietude, it gracefully ‘happens,’ and one instantly sees not so much ‘what’ one is, but ‘that‘ one Is; that one actually, factually, in reality, exists. There is no personal identity, but there is a kind of identity in awareness itself. One is always and only this awareness of being aware. Totally. Infinitely. No thing less. That fact may present instantly, as a shock, a surprise and a delight which may be traditionally worded with the term ‘bliss’ – complete sufficiency and contentment, aka, Happiness.
That ‘bliss’ is founded on a simple , immediate and nonmediated recognition that one is not a bundle of ideas and ideals; not in fact an entity, a ‘person’ with a personal identity, name and form. That ‘knowing’ may well present as “I am not this body” and/or “I am not this mind.” No matter how the wordless is worded later, that direct, permanent formless recognition is a sudden shift, a ‘knowing’ that one Is this subtle, out-of-time Immensity that cannot be known – there being no knower, and no thing known.
This non-experience cannot be expressed, shared or invoked by any ‘outside’ authority or ‘influence’ or ‘teacher’ – these loving resources are variously uselful as pointer/guides (as a ‘welcome mat’ as one teacher said) to where not to look; to when to abandon personal efforts, rituals, practices, etc. as soon as one comes to actually see that “truth is a pathless land“. At that point, there’s an ending of reactionary conditioning; one begins to be and act alone and responsibly; to move into one’s essential, inner discovery of who/what one is. If one sincerely insists and persists, opens and allows, one is moved thru and beyond, to the unknown reality of Being.
Enlightment is the simple direct realization of one’s beingness, here and now, so to speak. That ‘seeing’ of that which one is, totally bypasses all conditioned beliefs, all conceptual, personal and imagined renderings; it “surpasses all understanding“. Here, one may find all that one is, is awareness; the Whole of ‘what is’. Life. Whatever that is.. I am. Some call it love. 🙂
