ILLUSIONEERING: Inventing our problems
We live in a kind of “underlife” in the shadows of what
neuroscience recognizes as six basic emotions: anger,
disgust, fear, sadness,surprise. Oh yes, and joy! That’s the
one that keeps the other five from totally overwhelming us!
It makes for an occasionally agreeable deception, doesn’t
it? But not often, and never for long. As Wendell Berry puts
it in his “ The Unsettling of America”:
“ An American is
probably the most unhappy citizen in the history of the
world…he suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as
other people’s. He wishes that he’d been born sooner, or
later. He does not know why his children are the way they
are…he does not care much and does not know why he does not
care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants.
Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him
suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all
his possessions are under threat of pillage…And for these
anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts who, in
turn,consult certified experts about their anxieties.”
Now here’s
the rub: there is only happiness! What you are is nothing
that you think you are, nothing that you feel is true. From
early childhood, we are transfixed by our own mind, by our
own opinions, by our own imagination, by our own knowledge
of an agreed and interpreted reality. In short, “you” and
“me” and all the individual and collective
mind/culture/conditioning we experience and call our “own”,
is the product of what we’ll label, to use a cool high tech
term, Illusioneering.
The hook
about illusioneering is that, one way or another, in some
form or another, our concepts of our self (good or bad,
right or wrong) seem to be real and they gain that reality
from virtually everyone and everything that we accept as
influences around us. We perceive only what we are
programmed to perceive; we think exclusively from what our
mind tells us is true and false. We laugh, cry, get angry or
disgusted, afraid, saddened, surprised and even joyful
because our conditioned emotions dictate what is funny and
not so funny! The cause of it all – and the Cosmic Joke of
it all – is that, from birth to death, all we want to do is
be happy. By “happy” I do not mean anything other than
simply “content”. Content like a child is. For truly, a
child is contentment non-personified. There is no person who
is content; there is purely “contentment with content” i.e.
Selfness. So instead of a childs’ me-less state of
awareness, there appears, as Stephen Jourdain puts it: “ our
usual state of consciousness: me degrading into a thought of
me”. And the thought of me is contained in what Eckhart
Tolle calls “the pain body”, that limited, sensual and
conceptual burden we call our self.
The hard –
drive for all this illusioneering is Memory. It stores,
sorts data in binary “this or that” files, and determines
our personal “reality”. Of course, the thoughts about me
don’t seem all that personal, but in truth, they are as much
an image of what is real as these words are representations
of what is real. All thought is virtual. Thought is a
reflection of what appears true –not truth itself. So if
some of all this rings true to you, if in fact, all you want
really is to be happy, to be free, the question naturally
arises: “ What should I do?” It ‘s not a question of doing,
but seeing. I’m going to quote Jean Klein here, as one of
the best summations of our human condition: “ We are in
constant search for freedom…to transcend insecurity. This
feeling of fear is itself the motive to go beyond it…Note
that in attaining a desired object, there may be a momentary
freedom from fear, but the desired object is not really the
cause of this. The security experienced at such times has no
place for an image of an object or a someone who obtains it.
There is only happiness. “After you leave this happiness,
the ego wants to attribute it to some cause. “I was happy
because..I met this person…because I heard that music…etc.”
When you investigate, you discover, in the end, you are this
happiness. In reality, there is no cause and effect, for
happiness is cause-less.”
So there’s
nothing to do, but be. Allow. Allow that awareness that you
are to see what is always true. That Awareness of the
mind-dream state called “me” means awareness has something
to be aware of. And that something is itself. From this
Self, which is what you are, you will recognize, gradually
or in a flash, all that you are not. And you will come to
rest in the vastness of the unknown, unborn and undying “I
am.”
I’m reminded
here of one of my favorite songs by Neil Diamond: “Take your
song out, it’s a newborn afternoon. And if you can’t recall
the singer, can you still recall the tune? Come, dry your
eyes.”
The comfort of Ideas.
The other day my friend quipped: “ I love an adventure, as
long as I know where I’m going!” Ain’t that the truth? Well,
the whole truth of the matter is that an adventure both
repels us and attracts us. In either case- repulsion or
attraction, there’s always this underlying reluctance –let’s
call it what it is –fear. Fear is always about the future
and the unknown. It’s something vague but definitely there.
Something intangible but really...felt. We could call this
apprehension the spirit of adventure, but it’s really the
fear of it! How often have we said, or heard it said, that
“life is an adventure?” Well, live long enough, and
experience enough personal 9/11’s, and all our sense of
adventure gets worn thin as our relationships. And one day
we come to the crossroads.
Looking back,
down the roads we think we’ve travelled, we see mostly pot
holes, smoke and rubble, and ahead, we smell more of the
same! All the ideas and ideals that we thought would bring
us a kind of comfort, no longer please, no longer ease. And
in those quiet, reflective moments, our knowledge, our core
concepts, are seen for what they are: the pitted surface map
of a scorched territory, but not the territory itself.
Fortunately, (and we might add, gracefully) it dawns on us
that nothing real is lost with that usually painful
recognition that something really, intensely, important, has
gone missing! In fact, we’ve finally found our built-in GPS!
Our navigation system is this inherent Truth. Not our
concepts about it, but the thing itself. Beyond words – even
those beautifully sacred four - letter words that ring
“True” for us, like “Hope” and “Love”.Way, way beyond! To,
and directly through, “Fear”. We step, fall and are pushed (
often with some kicking and screaming! ) into that clear,
open space of Unknowing everything. There is then nothing to
believe in, no road to take, or side to take; no person to
be, no person to become.
Being now fearless and personless, we lose all our
connections with the man or woman we thought we were. We’re
rendered “I”less. How “I” feel, what “I” think about what’s
happening, even what was revered as “Good”, is now seen and
known to be simply irrelevant.
We discover that the only place we were ever comfortable, is
in fidelity to the truth of this impersonal being. The
personal fortress of our beliefs, begins to come down all
around us. Those miles of perimeter fencing our ego erected
to protect its territory, are breached by the cold hard wire
cutting shears of Reality. And those impenetrable, towering
inner walls surrounded by deep moats? They’re simply
overflown by Love! And now we take comfort in being what we
always are- fully, intimately, human and divine. Both are
seen and recognized as One. It’s a kind of not-twoness
that’s hard to describe, but plainly obvious. For instance,
let’s take this old Indian saying Ramana Maharshi used in
1939: “Dog seen, stone is not seen.Stone seen, dog is not
seen.”
This saying was commonly mis-understood and thought to mean:
“whenever I see that mangy dog, I can’t find a stone to
throw at it!” And vice versa! But what the saying really
means relates to a story about two stone dogs guarding a
doorway. They’re carved and painted so exceptionally well
that they look like they are real dogs with sharp teeth;
that is until you see the stone they’re made of – then the
vicious “dogs” are no longer seen!
Well, it’s
kinda like that with us! We’re both human and divine, and
when we focus on one aspect only we lose sight of the other!
Similarly, with our ideas; when we believe them and take
them to be real and true, rather than representations of
what is real and true, we lose sight of the actual reality.
Our believed thoughts isolate and seemingly create a
separate and distinct “Me” from “You”, when in truth, there
is no such critter, stone or otherwise!
In reality,
the stone dogs in our mind, have no bark and no bite. Or as
they might say in the South: “ them dogs won’t hunt!” It’s
our ideas about them that create the fear. All ideas that
comfort are grounded in fear; they themselves have no
foundation, no base, in reality, except to speculate,
ruminate and recreate our false world-views. That which
knows what is true is not this bundle of ideas that are
strung together to produce this “I “called “me”. That which
knows without knowing, is what we are – all one fearless
Self. And that Self, ultimately, is an immense comfort –a
wordless joy!
www.nondualityliving.com
