Reality is Nowhere, January 5, 2010

The reason why we meditate is just to hear the noise and to observe how it dissipates, without any internal motion. We don’t have a pure self in back of it all that wipes things away and fixes our mind and makes us clean. Every mind within is a small mind. There’s no “big” mind. “Big” mind is an act of the imagination, created to describe what cannot be seen or understood with thought. So, “big” mind is, in fact, merely a metaphor; a metaphor for the inexpressible.

When we meditate, we do not attain anything. We don’t seek for anything in back of the mind, in back of thought. We just let thought reveal itself. Thought has the ability to reveal what it occurs in. Now prepositions such as “in” or “under” can be very problematic when we talking about interiority; I just want to point that out.

When you just let the noise go away, when you let thought extricate itself, when you see what thought is, not what’s in back of it, it apparently descends to an unknowable location. It has the feeling of descending, vertically descending, from the top of your so called “mind” to some empty immeasurable place that is not a place, that is not in a location… and just pops there, just like a little bubble pops in the air, the ones that you blow; they pop and they’re just not there any more. They haven’t gone anywhere, they haven’t revealed anything about the nature of air. They simply were and then they were not.

Meditation, when really thoroughly understood, provides this kind of experience. Of course, most seekers and aspirants are looking for a heaven within. They believe there is a place sacrosanct and inviolable, where you find liberation. So what they’ve done essentially is turn all their outer hopes, in terms of wanting to possess material things and go to material places, physical places, etc. They’ve turned that game into an internal game called self-realization; turning the Self into the ultimate subjective object. It’s still the object based intelligence at work; don’t be fooled. First it chases at the butterfly that it can never get outside; then it chases after the image of the butterfly in the mind and it can’t get it there either. So it’s let down in both directions. It does not find what it is seeking either without or within. So in that way the mind can learn that reality, what’s called reality; this tremendous metaphor we created with our human minds, with a capital “R,” is nowhere. It’s not in the order of inside or outside. It’s non-dual. It’s a-dual, pre-dual, and this forms the basis of a very mature understanding then about what this so called “topic of enlightenment” is; an enlightenment in which no subject is enlightened.

So the lived space in which you exist, is neither inside nor outside. You’re not on the inside of a world, nor will you find reality on the inside of yourself, nor are you looking out into an objective world. These are all false notions; destructive notions from a genuine spiritual point of view. This literalness, this tendency of the mind to be literal within it’s concepts and to believe in exactly what it thinks its says and thinks, is itself a destruction of the beauty and bliss of the Real Reality that is the living space in which you move, in which you have being, in which you function, in which you sleep. Something that can never be attained, slips right through the fingers of attainment.

And somehow, it’s simply by hearing this sort of wisdom, that something transfixes the attention and places it in another category altogether; not another category away from the category of normal living, but simply another peek through, into what is called experience.

Aside from all that intellectual stuff, there is a molten lava flowing in the depths of Being, hot and churning; an ocean of fire and nectar at the core of Being. If this is not on the inside and it’s not on the outside, then it’s both on the inside and on the outside. It’s the very structure or condition of life itself. There’s no “within” to realize such a thing nor is there a “within” to block the existence of such a reality. So “within” itself is just another concept and it’s our fixation on the random accumulation of internal concepts that the mind beholds, that constitutes what we call ignorance or non-knowing of the Ultimate Reality. Once that habit pattern is broken and you simply abide in the natural nothingness of your being, then you begin to have the recognition of this Churning Ocean of Nectar, Energy, Feeling and Bliss. You begin to feel and know It as Existence Itself.

This goes way beyond enlightenment talk and what enlightenment talk is destined to fail, at describing. Enlightenment talk is just the chatter of the ignorant. It’s the rumor of someone who has just moved into town who no one has seen or has any evidence to believe has actually moved into town and yet there’s massive discussion about this person. Such is the discussion of God and Reality. So waking up means waking up out of the chatter. How is that done? Through just a little meditation, or a lot of meditation. It amounts to the same thing. One minute of pure meditation is like an ocean of lifetimes of meditation. There’s no distinction. Meditation doesn’t happen in time, its actually retreating back into the Essence which I am describing as being full of Being, Consciousness, Bliss, Ecstasy, Churning Nectar, Waves of Delight and Aridity of No Arising.