To Stop Is To Go

There is no path to enlightenment. Life is not stagnant, it is constantly moving. So then, how can enlightenment be a static, fixed goal that one is to achieve? If enlightenment entails a unity with life in totality as one, then can it be realized via a static, structured process that is unchanging or immovable? Can there be a path towards something that is nowhere and constantly in motion?  In that sense, is not enlightenment everywhere and nowhere depending on whether one is awake or asleep to its presence? So then what prevents one from waking and experiencing the truth directly?

Emptiness and Thought

What is the color and texture of your hair from the vantage point of your eyes? That is, what do you see beyond the field of your vision? Is it darkness? Is there a color or texture at all? Or is it simply nothing, a space in which the mind creates an imagination that fills the void with a thin film of memory/perception? Is this happening all the time, even as the experiences from the outside fill up the mind space inside? Does that not make a person’s mind a reflection of their sensory experience, and vice versa?

Love and Desire

Desire requires an object to be desired, some thought that takes shape within the mind. A thought which one craves to experience or longs to possess. Desire is about possessing an object. Desire is selfish because it is about satisfying the needs of the individual who has it. It focuses only on satisfying the craving for the image in the mind, and never about what is actually there in its totality. Always filtering the experience by comparing it to the image or idea or what is wanted, desire is inevitably tied to dissatisfaction, jealousy, and hatred. When one compares an experience to an image in the mind, that comparison creates division, which lead to tension and conflict, and results in suffering.

Love is unconditional. It is a feeling that does not require thought to be experienced. Love is universal. It is a blossoming, it is an awakening, it is an opening up and letting go in order to be filled and to embrace fully without judgment. And to be without judgment means to be without a thought, which causes separation and comparison. In order to truly love, one must be like an empty vessel for love to fill, overflowing past the brim. When anything is truly loved, the feeling it creates is immeasurable, incomparable, indescribable. One does not consume love to quench the craving for an image in one’s mind, one is consumed by it. And in order to be consumed, one must completely surrender. Love cannot be controlled or directed, it can only be felt.

Love is not separation, it is unity. Love is Truth. The universe is love, for the universal is all united as one. It is all things joined together as a chorus expressing one verse, love. Love dissolves distinction between lover, loving, and that which is loved. It is an acceptance, a connection, a merging. There cannot be any greed, any jealousy, any hatred, any desire, anything that is focused on satisfying the individual perspective and view of the world. Doing so places conditions upon it, turning love into something that is based on what a person has in their own mind. A perversion created by trying to force something natural to conform to one’s illusory, imagined reality. This is not love, this is psychosis, this is self-delusion, this is self-aggrandization. Like water, the more one tries to hold tight to an idea of love, the more its essence slips through the cracks.

By loosening and discarding what one wants, one expects, and one prefers, a greater space opens up within for love to come into and fill. Although truthfully, love already occupies that space, psychologically, experience of it has been constricted by the mental forms shrouding and distracting the mind from perceiving it. So let go of the intoxicating scent of desire, and instead redirect and transmute it. See for yourself the truth within you shining forth boundlessly.

Knowledge vs Wisdom

Wisdom is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge deals with facts and information comprehended by thought. It is always stuck in the past since it uses the past as reference in determining actions in the present and in the future. Like a house of cards, it builds upon itself over time, with a fragility that can be toppled at any moment. And the use of knowledge will never go beyond the boundaries of that knowledge, constantly layering upon itself, so that even an interpretation of it will still be a seed of the past and will be petrified in that essence going forward. Like an animal tethered to a pole, acting from knowledge only allows freedom within the boundaries of the established knowledge.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is the result of insight occurring within the moment. It does not require knowledge in order to operate and function properly. All that is required is awareness of one’s surroundings without reference to the past, which may cloud one’s vision and ability to make proper decisions and judgment. It is synonymous with commonsense, and commonsense is a faculty shared and accessible to all humans to varying degrees. It does not require a formal education, learning, or directed path and reference to the past to develop and utilize. Instead, it requires using one’s mind to observe what is actually happening around, and within, oneself so one can instantly respond in kind. But, if instead we use our mind to formulate thoughts on how to act, we create roadblocks and illusions. The delay between experience, thought, and response will create actions which no longer fit the changing moment of now. Actions become stuck in the past, built upon a static image. Therefore, one becomes stuck in the past never truly experiencing the dynamic of what’s happening now.

In this sense also, wisdom does not arise from knowledge. Wisdom is the result of proper action. Proper action can only come about when one responds to what is actually happening. How is an action proper if it does not fit the situation at hand? How can a person be considered wise if they act in response to the images they are creating with their own thoughts instead of what actually is? Are those knowledge-bound images the Truth, or merely a fanciful interpretation serving as a placeholder in one’s mind for what actually is?

Knowledge is to say, “It is like a finger pointing to the moon”. Wisdom is to simply look at the moon. And so, perhaps through knowledge we can come to know the existence of wisdom; but in order to experience its insight, we must disrobe that very knowledge from our minds and bask in the freedom of naked Truth in all its radiance.

 

 

Zen Thought

People are born accepting life as a birth right and respecting death through fear.

People should also learn to respect life with awe and accept death through love.

Does God exist?

Is there an absolute truth that God as an omniscient being either does or does not exist? To answer that question from the standpoint of our subjective understanding is to create an inherent incongruence where that existence cannot be answered as an absolute.  Experience affects the concept, just as the concept affects the experience. So, as experience and knowledge increases, the question, and paradigms framing the question, will change accordingly. Thus, the language we use, the concepts we hold, and the context by which we perceive will not necessarily remain the same from moment to moment. Nor, is it something that we can predict or answer in a black/white absoluteness due to the lack of knowledge. Therefore, because humans don’t have a totality of knowledge, to postulate the absolute of a system means to also accept that both states can exist simultaneously, in perhaps a form of superposition. Or it might also be something beyond our scope of conventional understanding/awareness. Is it possible to imagine that which we have no inferential basis for imagination?

Forever Never Dies

Totality is beyond death. People die and pass away because they are only an aspect of totality. Being a partiality of the whole allows for the transmutation of form into another like water swirling within a teapot, filling the space differently from moment to moment. To enter into totality is to move beyond death and the shifting of form, the wave melding into oneness with the ocean.

Focusing the lens of existence from the partial to the total allows a person to interact with the world from that vantage point, and affect change in harmony with such a perspective. It is a shift from the separation of the individual as solidified ego towards recognition of ego as only an aspect of our individual connection to something more. To observe death as being different from life is directly related to this incompleteness, as death would only be experienced and recognized as another aspect of change when a person reconnects to the impermanence of causal reality.

Recognize that in each moment you are never the same as you were the moment before. When you look at a picture of yourself as a child, what connects the you of now to the you of the past? Physically, you and the person in the picture are in many ways entirely different. Recognize that what connects you is not the physical form, but the string of experiences transmitting change from moment to moment. Realize that these moments extend beyond you, and only pass through you like ripples in a pond.

This is what connects all things in all moments, past, present, and future. For even the smallest of actions may cascade along the winds of change to shape the nature of experience in the present. The squirrel does not prepare for winter until the leaves change to hues of gold and fire as the days grow shorter with the shifting sun. Notice this process of life with each breath you take, the nuance of form and movement as it creates sensations inside and outside the body, shifting physical and mental states.

The breath is a direct connection of experiential truth which allows a person to recognize and experience the totality, relaxing into the embrace of universal truth. Let go of the preconditions and presuppositions, and open outward from within your center, connecting and bringing a diffused awareness upon the nature of impermanence. Shed the attachment to ego, while still recognizing and accepting its existence, allow fear to dissolve by embracing it with sympathetic joy, and reconnect to the totality of universal truth.

Speaking to Consciousness

Where does consciousness come from? It almost seems to pop into physical existence for each individual at the point of conception. Do things really exist outside of our perception of their existence? Interactions are able to be observed even if we only see the start and end points of the interaction, and not its actual occurrence. Would this mean there is an objective reality outside of consciousness in which things occur whether we exist or not? Or is the “objective reality” sustained as a result of a collective connection, which utilizes each conscious perspective as a node within a network? So even if one node is removed, the objective reality is still maintained by the other nodes. If all the nodes are removed, does the objective reality cease to be? Perhaps there are other types of consciousness serving as nodes to also sustain the objective reality. Would this reflect itself in the observable, historical record that humans have been able to discern via empirical/theoretical evidence in the various fields of science and inquiry? Then what is consciousness? Is it possible that everything is consciousness, even the objective reality? That all things, even the elements informing the physical qualities of the universe, are conscious on some level, thus serving as a node? If everything is consciousness, is an individual able to communicate and have a dialogue with all components of the physical universe? If so, it may be possible to reassemble the components of the universe as a reflection of this interaction of consciousness. So then what is energy? Is it mutually exclusive, wholly interchangeable, or some measure inbetween with consciousness? If all components are an aspect of consciousness, I would suspect that energy is too. So if consciousness is energy, and energy is consciousness, then consciousness is no longer bound by space-time. And if consciousness is no longer bound by space-time, then it is neither bound by the physical form. And if the physical form is also made of energy, being formed by the components making up the physical universe, then it can also be directed and shaped through consciousness communication. The degree of such direction and shaping would only be limited by the interference distorting or circumventing the channel of communication and dialogue. By clearing up those obstructions, in the processing of communication between forms of consciousness, it would seem imaginable for alterations in the formation of both the physical body and physical reality to be more directly translatable and observable in positive correlation.

A drop in an Ocean

Your life is but a drop within the ocean of space and time. Like a single droplet of rain falling into waters of immeasurable breadth and depth, so to do our lives enter into this reality. Through our actions, each of us becomes an impact sending ripples across the visible surface. A crescendo of energy, unique in circumstances, affecting, influencing, and relating with its surroundings. And yet, when we let go of our singularity and embrace the unfathomable, what was once a drop has now become an ocean, delving into a vastness beyond the surface.

Through the ripples and waves of causality, our essence becomes a quiet movement that envelopes, pervades, and extends outside our own. The ripples becoming waves becoming currents, a constant flux within the stillness of totality. In connecting with this, each drop embodies the ocean, becoming the movements and expressions of the infinite; a manifestation reverberating through each drop, each ripple.

But, remember still, do not yearn to be the ocean. For just like the rain cannot be the sea, yet both are of water, so too is this ocean already contained within you.  Likewise, remember to appreciate the preciousness and beauty of each drop of life. For without a single drop, it is impossible to have an ocean. Each drop has meaning, each drop has a purpose, each drop has an impact, each drop adds value.

As one drop finds its way into joining with the ocean, so too does the oceans depths and breadth increase by one drop. As one ripple coalesces and affects another, so too does one drop’s ripples become the ocean waves and current.  And despite what drops may fall and what ripples may form, all things fade back into the calm, quiet depths from which they were born, only to be born again.

Empty Your Mind

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” -Bruce Lee

Through deep meditation, contemplation, and application, I find that these words resonate within me as a core understanding of how life is meant to be lived. Based on Daoism, it teaches one to live life in the moment. The past has already occurred and cannot be changed, and the future is yet to be realized. The current moment is what is of relevance, and our consciousness should feel and experience it fully without judgment or hesitation.

Too often, we become overly focused on regrets of the past, and hopes and thoughts of the future, that we forget to live in the moment. Life is our linear interpretation of these moments. They are future possibilities occurring in the now, while instantaneously becoming memories of the past. Like water, these moments flow and take shape based on our interpretations, experiences, and choices. Because the mind filters and creates our experience of reality, living life fully means to live in the moment with a mind unrestricted from judgment.

It is judgment that limits the full understanding of an experience by placing our own limiting beliefs upon it. By accepting every facet of an experience as part of a whole, we are able to remove judgment and live life unrestricted and in harmony. Like a hand enclosing itself on water, the greater you aim to control life, the more it slips through your fingers. When the mind is unrestricted, it becomes like the water it aimed to control. It gains clarity free from the sediments of judgment and doubt, enabling it to make choices that align the abilities of both the conscious and unconscious minds. Our reality becomes malleable and full of life. It becomes driven by our core values, whether conscious or unconscious, which strive towards personal fulfillment and happiness. This allows us to realize our potential and what we refer to as passion and drive.

As Bruce Lee also once stated, life is like a finger pointing away to the moon. If you concentrate on the finger you will miss all that heavenly glory. Likewise, if we become enwrapped in our own thought processes, we will forget to instinctually experience the beauty that is life. By remembering to live in the moment, in full harmony and understanding of one’s self, we gain a key towards unlocking the door to true happiness and serenity.