David: The particularity of her experience is asserting itself and the ability to distinguish the different textures or fabrics within experience. Now, isn’t this, or would this not be, if we phrase this in terms of a question, an ironic expression of Non-duality, that experience would become more pristine instead of experience going away as though experience and the world, the field of experience, is inherently problematic, which is really a dumb assertion when you think about it.
How could that into which you are born, that in which you frame the whole discussion of Enlightenment, the body-mind, be some kind of error or something in need of correction or something that needs to be transcended in a literal sense? So, instead of being removed from experience and saying I am free, she’s saying I came deeply into experience and it was beautiful, it was loving, it was peaceful, there was a great satisfaction in it. So, her attention wasn’t completely emptied out, it was just quieted by meditation and the atmosphere that we generate, and then some occurrence happened in her attention. Something occurred to her.
It’s almost as if your senses came alive. Rather than going beyond your senses into some kind of indistinguishable emptiness, your senses came forth to distinguish strands of experience. And it’s not uncommon in spiritual literature, say if you read the writings of Zen teachers and Zen monks, that a bird, the sound of a bird will give birth to the awareness of awakening. Or, say the movement of a brook, a stream flowing over rocks, some natural event will act as a natural stimulant to reveal your own state of freedom, your own state of inherent emptiness.
It’s not just that your serial attention, your linear serial attention is seeing a literal bird, it’s that your attention is beginning to accommodate the existence of these things. They’re happening within you and therefore they’re speaking directly at you, to you, in you, and there’s a different feeling about it. You can see a bird or hear a bird, and then you can see a bird and hear a bird where the reality of that thing has been transformed by your own innocent attention, your state of Being.
Like I said, if you read literature on Zen, for example, you’ll see the Masters talking about a song of a bird came in their meditation and gave them Satori. It wasn’t enough just to sit in silence. It was not enough just to dwell in the emptiness or the formless, but that spontaneous arising of sound in the emptiness produced the actual satori, which is the form within the formless.
See, if you just notice a bird with your linear attention, it’s no big thing. Typically people function in that kind of linearity, that linear consciousness all the time and there’s really nothing else to their consciousness except for that. It’s like putting one step in front of the other. So, it’s linear. One movement happens sequentially after the other movement and people experience life that way. You go to work, you stay in work, you work hour after hour. You have lunch. You work a couple of more hours, you come home and you’re in the grip of serial attention and the kind of concomitant effort that goes along with that kind of functioning.
Yet, what would happen if you experienced in such a way that spontaneous arising became the feature of your experience, the spontaneous nature of arisingness? It would have a different quality altogether. You’d be stepping out of the linear, the sequential, the quantifiable, the ordered, and controlled events of your life and enter into a place where everything is happening at once. Everything is happening spontaneously without force.
In Taoism, there’s a central notion of things arising of themselves. That’s the awareness you have. That’s the kind of satori that you have, that things are arising unforced without any particular reason, but you are part of that play. You are not separate from it looking out at it. You are in it, and therefore you too are arising in that same naturalness.
The key is to just remain innocently in flotation in awareness. Don’t impose anything. Even if there’s conflict, which I hope there is not, but even if there is some minor conflict emotional, mental, even physical give it a big space now, give it a big berth, and feel the spaciousness now happening within Consciousness and beyond Consciousness.
Just take things just very slowly and gently and be innocent. That’s the sequential mind that is worried. That’s the mind of serial attention that’s worried. What’s before this, what’s after this, what’s under this, what’s over there? It gets very curious like that, and then it gets drawn into anxiety, the kind of anxiety that the Buddha called dukkha, suffering, anxiety, disturbance. Dukkha has all those connotations. It’s the particular kind of disturbance that is coexistent with duality itself, a friction or rumble that makes you unhappy.
We’re interested in a life absorbed in the beauty and the Bliss of inner Being, that’s our cosmic peculiarity. That’s what makes us tick. We’re so in adoration of the inner self, knowing that everything is ultimately that or arising in that even in that which appears to be different from us. Our understanding is that for everything to be felt in Oneness is the way in which life should proceed and that duality should be relegated to the background and all the properties of duality.
For example, you have to have some competition in life. You have to have some aggression even to go out and get something to eat. Some kind of aggression is implicit in that. So, it doesn’t mean that we wipe that out, it just means that there’s something much more primary functioning. The unified aspect becomes dominant and the diversified, the dualistic aspect becomes placed in the background. It becomes overshadowed in a beautiful way by that which has no conflict in it. That buffer zone will allow for a reduction in violence on all levels, seventy or eighty or ninety percent. You can reduce aggression radically, but you need inner transformation to do that. You can’t do that even with reading books. You can make some progress reading books, but the final journey will be undertaken in the dimension of meditation in Consciousness, in your Consciousness.
Serial attention is just a narrow bandwidth within attention as a whole, and that serial attention carries particular content. We could be talking about beautiful butterflies or hummingbirds, or we can be talking about something that’s apparently negative, or it really is negative such as poisoning the mind of our youth with our military culture. But, nevertheless, it’s still a stream of information occurring in linear attention to a superficial aspect of the thinking mind. At the same time deep within that is the expanded Consciousness within Being which has its own powerful radiation property. It is radiating up out of itself into even the serial mind. So, the serial mind can engage in anything, and this is why ultimately all of relativity can be enjoyed alongside the Bliss field because all streaming perception, the perception of an objective world is just serial attention. It’s always within that narrow bandwidth. So, the world ultimately is not a problem, or it can become not a problem through sufficient exposure through meditative-based awakening.
