Are you dead right now? Are you just a machine, or a corpse?
Obviously not. Aliveness, awareness, consciousness, whatever you
want to call it... is utterly undeniable. You can't say you are
unconscious, or you are dead, because you are not 6 feet under in
the cemetery, but you are in front of your computer reading these
words right now. Yet this is just logic, just inference.... check
your experience. Can you deny your own livingness and awareness?
The answer from your direct experience is a definite no! Pause your
thoughts for a moment, aren't you still aware, perceiving, hearing,
seeing, etc? Isn't consciousness instantly obvious without a
second-thought, or without even a moment of pondering necessary?
Imagine if you were a baby without a single word or idea in your
head, wouldn't aliveness still be obvious and present? Isn't this
what babies 'do': simply living in a state of wonder of
aliveness?
Aliveness is seamless presence awareness without subject object
division. Right now, you are alive and present. But is aliveness
confined anywhere? Is it only located in the body? This is an
assumption, an assumption that aliveness is confined only to 'my'
body, in contrast to other experiences or objects. Yes, undeniably,
your body is a field of aliveness, and the skin covering the body
is a sensitive organ capable of allowing the perception and feeling
(not that it is in and of itself a 'feeler') of the air, the wind
blowing on the skin, the warmth and heat, the sensations on the
fingertips now touching the keyboard, the sensation of your back
leaning against the chair, the feet on the floor, etc... but
ultimately it is not the body that feels, the eyes that sees, the
ears that hears. Why? A corpse cannot feel even though it has skin,
a corpse cannot see though it has eyes, a corpse cannot hear though
it has ears. What is lacking in the corpse? Aliveness!
Consciousness!
But it is not that 'aliveness' is 'located in my body'...
rather, it is that 'aliveness' is currently expressing through and
as this body-mind, while this body is still alive. When the body
goes through death, consciousness gradually stops expressing
through and as this body-mind. And according to Buddhism, rebirth
takes place (if you are not liberated): which means dependent on
the wholesome and unwholesome karma of the 'individual', a new
birth of consciousness takes place in and as another body-mind. But
not so much on this now... my point of this paragraph is this: The
body is not the feeler, the eyes are not the seer, the ears is not
the hearer. You are not the eyes looking outwards, the ears hearing
outwards, etc... rather, sights and sounds manifest through
consciousness, and not only 'through' consciousness but those
sights and sounds precisely IS aliveness, awareness,
consciousness... there is no duality. The bodily organ is simply
one of the conditions for a particular manifestation of aliveness,
but there is no separate feeler located behind the sense organ,
rather, there is only direct experience/consciousness, there is
only aliveness vividly manifesting everywhere without a
subject/object dichotomy present! (more on that later) Our entire
field of experience is just one seamless field of consciousness
with no divisions whatsoever.
As I was saying, the body is a field of aliveness. However,
aliveness is not just confined to bodily sensations. And it is not
just a sense of aliveness or existence confined to a space behind
everything. Initially, aliveness may appear to be this background
sense of existence, livingness, knowing... but notice when a sound
suddenly arises in the field of consciousness... what is it? Pure
consciousness, pure aliveness too! Utterly present and undeniable
and vivid. There is no other. There is this sense that
aliveness/consciousness/awareness has infinite potentiality and has
no fixed forms/formlessness - whatever arises is another form and
expression of aliveness. Aliveness is this dynamic
manifestation.... and there is no center, no boundary, no
circumference to aliveness... whatever arises IS aliveness.
Consciousness is without any (fixed, inherent) traits, essence,
attributes... but precisely because there is no fixed traits and
attributes, aliveness manifests as literally everything - in all
kinds of manifestations with all kinds of (apparent) traits. What
I'm getting to is this: aliveness is nothing static at all - it is
dynamic and ungraspable: luminosity is ever-present and can never
be lost, and yet is unique and fresh in expression every single
moment. And being dynamic, there is no place to abide in - there is
no static place of consciousness for you to abide in, for
consciousness is this momentary, flowing luminous reflection. This
is why the Buddha taught mindfulness instead of sustaining any
particular meditative state of absorption – mindfulness being an
ingenious way of being intimate with our moment-to-moment
experience, to experience the mirror-like clarity in all
manifestation. Any sense of a self, a centerpoint, simply dissolves
into the luminous mirror bright clarity shining in all directions
without a border.
But don't take my word for it! My words if taken for granted as
'the truth' will ultimately become utterly useless and fail to
deliver it's intended purpose, instead, you must make a perceptual
shift in your direct experience via contemplation. To challenge the
subject-object division, the sense of a center, border and
circumference to awareness, always ask yourself these questions
with regards to whatever you are experiencing, and contemplate, 'Is
there anything other [than awareness/being the forms of
awareness]?', 'What is this?', 'Where does Awareness end and
manifestation begin?' And always go by direct experience, not some
insignificant thought or concept (no matter how clever or
convincing the theory may sound - they are ultimately a bunch of
words without any substance) that pops up in your head! Having a
contemplation practice is very important. But more on that later
on.*
Sound arising, sight, sensations on the skin, the smells
perceived through the nose, the taste of ice cream, thoughts
manifesting, isn't it a whole seamless field of aliveness not
separable in terms of subject and object? Are you something in your
body, in your head, looking outwards through your eyes, or is
everything simply self-present as consciousness not dividable in
terms of inside and outside? Doesn't everything have a single taste
of pure luminosity and emptiness? Yet aren't they also the various
variety of 'forms' of aliveness, a sound being radically different
from say, a smell? Aren't these various forms of aliveness
different in variations and forms, and yet having the same
intensity and quality of livingness and perceivingness?
Isn't it all Pure Consciousness itself? The pure sense of a
background presence and pure beingness, apparently solidifying the
position of a Subject... now collapses into seamlessness without a
subject and object. It is not Aliveness or Presence (I use these
words synonymously, some may have distinguished meanings for each)
that is denied, it is the denial of a border, a center, a
confinement, a location, an inside or an outside/subject-object
separation to Consciousness... what remains is a field of seamless
consciousness manifesting in various forms.
Lastly... isn't the full intensity of Consciousness already
shining in plain sight effortlessly, with the only apparent
obscuration being our constant 'ignoring' and blocking out
Wholeness by dualizing and attaching (to a particular point of
view, including the attachment to a sense of self) and rejecting
(the other points of views*)?
*Points of view: any particular sensation, thought, feeling,
etc. Any particular constituents of the field of experience.
*On contemplation practices: Some neo-advaitin teachers
emphasize on 'description' instead of 'prescription', but I say,
this is useless and will be incapable of bringing about a real
shift in perception in the seeker, because the descriptions simply
become more concepts that the seeker collects and stores it
somewhere, without any real direct experiential insight of what the
pointers point to. It's like giving verbal descriptions of the moon
to a person without curing the person's blindness, even if that
person can memorize the description, it is utterly useless. What's
the use of saying things like 'all there is is consciousness' when
that person doesn't even know with direct realization what
'Consciousness' is? Both 'description' and 'prescription' are
necessary, in particular the 'prescription' (the contemplation on
your part). The 'prescription', the type of contemplation, also
differs depending on what insight you want to arise: for example
for an initial glimpse and realization of I AMness, I recommend
investigating 'Who am I?' instead. As Thusness wrote before:
Therefore we must understand in Zen tradition, different koans
were meant for different purposes. The experience derived from the
koan “before birth who are you?” only allows an initial glimpse of
our nature. It is not the same as the Hakuin’s koan of “what is the
sound of one hand clapping?” The five categories of koan in Zen
ranges from hosshin that give practitioner the first glimpse of
ultimate reality to five-ranks that aims to awaken practitioner the
spontaneous unity of relative and absolute (non-duality). The
'description' is also necessary as a guide which otherwise you will
be totally blind to what you'll be looking for, the 'description'
being what I call the 'view'.
On View ('description') and Meditation ('prescription', aka
contemplation, investigation):
When one meditates with this view
It is like a garuda soaring through space
Untroubled by fear or doubt.
One who meditates without this view
Is like a blind man wandering the plains.
One who holds this view but does not meditate
Is like a rich man tethered by stinginess
Who cannot bring fruition to himself or others.
Joining the view with meditation is the holy
tradition.
~ Lodro Thaye, a great Mahamudra master of the eighteenth
century
