During this time the fabric of the separate, inside self became clear and with it the so-called separate, outside world. The separate self was revealed as a dense and intricate network of resisting, fearing, avoiding, seeking and conceptualising. In other words, it became clear that the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that appears in Consciousness.
The title of my first book, The Transparency of Things, came to me as a way of trying to indicate that all our so-called objective experience – the body, the world, things and others – is made out of the same transparent, open, empty, luminous substance as the Consciousness in which it appears.
Any teaching that mechanically asserts and reasserts the same absolute truth as a blanket answer to all questions is at best dogmatic and at worst dubious. The true non-dual understanding is like an explosion – it cannot be contained in any form. It is always uprooting any attempt of the mind to catch it, tie it down, package it or control it. This explosion may be fierce, but it may just as well be a gentle, almost imperceptible dissolving.
Everything that is known or experienced is known by or through our self, aware Presence. In time, this Presence is understood to be the only substance present in experiencing. Our self, Presence, is the most intimate fact of experience. It pervades all experience. It is what we refer to as ‘I’.
Our being is not known by something or someone other than itself. It is known by itself. The ‘I’ that I am is also the ‘I’ that knows that I am. However, ‘I’ does not know itself as something, as an object. It is the knowing of itself. It knows itself simply by being itself. Presence, Consciousness, Awareness, our own being, is the primal and essential ingredient of experience. It is that which makes all experience possible and knowable. In time we discover that this Presence is the only ingredient of experience; it is not itself an ingredient, something that experience is made of, but rather it simply is experience, all alone.
Knowledge And Love Are One
What is it that fails to notice this? Our self cannot fail to know itself, just as the sun cannot fail to illumine itself. It is only a thought that imagines that our self is not known and that something else – like a body, mind or world – is known. With this thought alone, our self seems to contract inside the body and mind, and objects, others and the world seem to be projected outside. As a result, intimacy is veiled, love is lost and seeking begins.
The more we notice our self, the more its qualities are revealed in our experience. The mind, body and world, which once seemed to veil it, are now seen to shine with its light. We give to our self the attention we used to give to the world, and the objects that once seemed to limit or obscure it are now seen only to reveal or express it. Just as in a physical object, at a relative level, all we see is the reflected light of the sun, so in reality all that is experienced is made only of our self, aware Presence. The only difference is that the sun’s light is seen by something other than itself whilst it is our self that experiences itself in all experience. It is not known by any other light.
This dissolution is known as the experience of love. It is the falling away of the apparent boundaries that seem to keep an object, other, person or world at a distance or separate. Love and knowledge are thus one and the same.
The Innocence Of Experience
Conventional wisdom suggests that whatever it is that knows any experience is distinct from the existence of whatever it is that is known. It postulates a separate ‘I’ that knows and a separate object, other or world that is known.
Peace, happiness and love are simply the names we give to the dissolution of the apparent distinction between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object.
When we say, ‘I fell in love’, we literally mean that we fell out of the conceptual straightjacket in which we had previously resided, into love. We never actually fall out of anything because we were never truly located as a separate, inside self or entity in something, such as a body, in the first place. The separate entity is simply the prisoner of thought. When we fall in love, or indeed when we love, we simply recognise our self to be and to have always been this transparent Presence in which there is no room for an object or other.
The experience of beauty is the same. It is the dissolution of the apparent separation between the object or world and our self, or rather the recognition that there has never been any such separation.
Awareness is our primary, ever-present experience. Before we know anything else, we know ‘I am’. And what is it that is aware of ‘I am’? Only that which is both present and aware could be aware of anything. It is this presence of Awareness that I am that knows itself. That is our most ordinary and intimate experience. It is never not known.
Awareness is simultaneously their substance and their knowing, the being of them and the knowing of them.
First, the pure ‘I’ of Awareness, which pervades all experience intimately and equally, is subtly contracted into the witnessing ‘I’, which is conceived to be at a distance and separate from the mind, body and world. This witnessing ‘I’ is then further reduced in the imagination into the thinker, apparently located in a mind. That is, it is conceived as ‘I, the thinker’, ‘I, the mind’. Finally it is imagined that the mind is located inside the body, and with this belief Awareness is imagined to reside inside, in fact to become the body, ‘I, the feeler’, ‘I, the doer’.
In this way the intimacy and seamlessness of experiencing is divided into two apparent things – an experiencer and an experienced, a subject and an object.
This separation between the knower and the known, the experiencer and the experienced, the thinker and the thought, the feeler and the felt, the doer and the deed, never actually occurs. It is imagined with the thought that thinks it.
What is sometimes known as self-enquiry proceeds in the opposite direction. It starts with the apparently separate self that we think and feel ourself to be and simply stays with it. In this way the self is gradually, in most cases, relieved of all the progressive layers of superimposition with which the mind has seemingly wrapped it.
Presence ‘puts on’ the mind, which appears to project a world outside itself. But the mind is itself made out of the Presence from which it seems to be separated. The world is separate from Presence in the same way that the sky is separate from space, that is, in no way at all.
See clearly that when our eyes are closed, the so-called body is simply a cluster of amorphous sensations appearing in unlimited, aware Presence. These sensations are not identical to Presence; they appear in it.
We realise that all this commotion is simply a play on the screen, not in ourself. Simultaneously we realise that what are considered to be time, space and causality for the characters in the movie are, for the screen, simply its own ever-presence.
As soon as we forget our true identity as Awareness and become exclusively identified with a part of the totality of whatever is appearing, separate entities and the world are simultaneously born, and with them their first offspring, time and space.
Likewise, when we return to our self, which we have never in reality for a moment left, when we awaken to our self, the person and the world fall asleep. They disappear as such. We stand eternally motionless and silent, watching our self taking the shape of every minute detail of life, utterly and intimately one with each, fully giving our substance in love to every appearance.
We Never Lose A Friend
With this understanding the question of purpose or meaning in life loses its validity. In order to conceive of meaning or purpose we must first imagine ourself to be separate and independent from Awareness. Meaning and purpose are only for that imagined one. And, of course, that one is only a real entity from its own imagined point of view.
If we take our stand knowingly as Awareness, we know our self as the one immutable, substantial reality in all experience, ever-present, consistent, homogeneous, without beginning or end.
This Presence is the substance of all relationship. In fact, it is the absence of relationship. There are not two things, two people, to be related with each other. There is only knowing in identity. There is only Presence knowing itself from moment to moment. It is known as love. We never lose a friend.
Presence never moves, does or becomes anything other than itself. If we take our stand as aware Presence, knowingly, we truly feel that we do nothing and go nowhere. All doing and going are for the mind alone. For Presence, which simply means in our actual experience, there is no time, just timeless Presence in the same placeless place, the ever-present, timeless now. But it is not aloof, remote, static – it gives itself intimately and utterly to every appearance of the mind, the body and the world.
There is no true object of devotion, because all objects are intermittent. Only Awareness is ever-present, and therefore only Awareness merits true devotion. And what could give Awareness this devotion? Obviously an intermittent object such as a body or a mind cannot render devotion to something that is present when it itself is not. Therefore, only Awareness is able to impart this devotion to itself.
However, Awareness does not love and is not loved. It is love. So the highest form of love or devotion is simply to abide as Awareness, knowingly.
‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’
Even that formulation is not quite right: only something that is not the source could dissolve in its source. The mind has no other substance than Awareness, so there is nothing there to be dissolved. The idea of the dissolution of the mind in its source is part and parcel of the mind’s belief that it is something other than its source. The existence of a source from which something emerges is a dualistic idea which itself dissolves upon understanding that there is no independent entity, mind or object.
The Arch Impersonator
The ‘I’ thought is like a filler that the mind comes to rest upon when it is not occupied with creative, loving, enquiring or practical thoughts. As soon as such thoughts are finished, the mind creates a pseudo-self, a pseudo-doer, thinker, feeler, who claims the credit for the previous activities. This imagined separate self becomes the default position for the mind, like the screen saver on a computer screen, which is there to obscure the apparent dullness of the blank screen when no other documents are open. The screen is considered to be dull only from the point of view of the images, because it is the complete absence of everything they know, that is, the complete absence of objects.
As our exploration of the nature of experience deepens, it becomes more and more obvious that the pseudo-self is not the permanent background of experience but rather one of the innumerable changing faces of experience itself. It is seen clearly that the screen saver is not the background and substance of all the documents, but simply another image.
The default position now becomes the screen itself, not the screen saver. That is, our default position becomes Awareness rather than the separate self. It becomes more and more natural for the mind simply to come to rest in its own source than to manufacture a separate, inside self in between its activities of thinking, sensing and perceiving.
The Apparent Forgetting Of Our Own Being
The doer – and, while we are talking about it, the thinker, the feeler, the chooser, the lover, the decider, the enjoyer, the sufferer and so on – is considered to be this little separate entity that thought has artificially created within the totality and divided from it. This doer is not an entity. It has no separate reality of its own. It is simply a thought that has exclusively associated our self, Awareness, with a little cluster of sensations. Our experience is one seamless whole. It is not composed of separate parts, one part acting on another, one part giving and the other receiving, one loving and the other loved, one part dictating and the other part dictated to. So the conflict between ‘me’ as the doer versus the non-doer is an artificial one.
Once the mind and body are no longer presided over by the apparent separate self, they gradually return to their natural state of openness, transparency, sensitivity, availability and love.
Our True Security
You give the example of the mirage in the desert. Another example is the dream state. During a dream our experience seems to have the same reality as that of the waking state, but upon waking we discover that its apparent reality was illusory. How then, as you imply, do we know that the current experience of the mind, body and world are not also illusory? We don’t! So what can we be absolutely certain of? In order to answer this question we have to first understand what it is that qualifies an experience as being illusory.
Likewise, whatever it is that is real in every experience cannot change, in the sense that water is ‘more real’ than its changing forms of ice or steam. A simple look at our experience tells us this. The reality of experience is ever-present, although the apparently changing forms of experience are always disappearing. Whatever is real in any experience cannot appear or be born, because that from which it would appear or be born (which must also be present and inseparable from it at the time of its birth) would be more real than it, in the sense that gold is ‘more real’ than an ornament. Similarly, whatever is real in our experience must know or illumine itself, for if it were known or illumined by something other than itself, that ‘something’ (which would have to be present at the same time as the experience that was known or illumined) would be more real than itself.
In order to know that element of our experience that is worthy of trust, all that is needed is to abide as the aware Presence that we always already are. This simple knowing of our own being is the irreducible and indestructible reality of our experience. That is the only certainty, our true security.
The Recognition Of Being
Is thinking a barrier to the realisation of one’s true nature? It is not necessary to be without thought, because what we are is present both when thoughts are appearing and when they are not. Think of thoughts just as you think of the changing weather – they make no difference to your self at all. Just let them float by while you remain your self. Changing or getting rid of thoughts makes no difference to our self, just as the changing weather makes no difference to you sitting peacefully on the sofa. Our self, aware Presence, is always sitting peacefully on its sofa!
The adventure of being a person, the whole human adventure, all takes place in the mind. And what is mind made of? Consciousness. It is the mind, in the shape of the apparently inside self, that sets off, ‘into a far-off, country’ outside its own kingdom, away from home. It wanders around, as this apparently inside self in the apparent world, looking for peace in situations, happiness in objects and love in relationships. The whole adventure is created and enacted within the mind. And while the mind is doing its thing, searching, achieving, failing,
hoping, fearing, doing, thinking, choosing and so on, Consciousness, our self, is just lying peacefully in its bed. That is, it is just abiding in and as itself. It is true that the mind is ultimately made of Consciousness, but it is the mind that takes the adventure, not Consciousness. The screen does not undertake the adventure that is enacted in the film, although the film is made only of the screen.
IS THIS THE FINAL UNDERSTANDING?
Nisargadatta said, ‘For you, you appear in the world. For me, the world appears in me’ This is one of those statements that, if one gets it, it is the end of story. There is nothing further to get.
There is still a subtle dualism in this statement between the world that arises, albeit within myself as Awareness, and Awareness itself, just as, relatively speaking, there is a distinction between the objects that appear in a room and the space of the room in which they appear. Further and deeper contemplation of experience reveals that objects, as such, do not arise or appear within Awareness. Where would an object arise from, out of what would it be made and where would it go when it disappeared? The ‘world’, as we know it, is simply the belief that there is something other than Awareness. If we look for such a world, for something that arises or appears, we do not find it. Our experience, whether we recognise it or not, is always only of one ever-present, homogeneous, changeless substance, which is both aware and present.
The concept of our self, ‘I’, Awareness, is the first to arise and the last to go. There is good reason for this: it is the only ‘thing’ that is ‘real’ and therefore the only thing that truly merits conceptualisation.
Awareness has no name but is called by all names.
So, thought imagines that its very own creation is not its very own creation but rather that it exists independently of its being thought about. At that moment imagination seems to become reality and reality itself seems, as a result, to become lost or veiled. Imagination and reality change places: imagination seems to become reality, and reality is considered at best imagined and at worst non-existent.
This forgetting of the reality of experience is known as ignorance. It is the ignoring of the direct, immediate and intimate nature of our experience. The ignoring of reality is synonymous with imagining the separate, inside self and the separate, outside world, that is, the subject and the object.
There is no true forgetting. The strength of our remembering, that is, the strength of Awareness’s knowing of its own being, is never really obscured, even by the most apparently ignorant thought. This bemusement is the experience we know as suffering or unhappiness. It is a conflict between the deep intuition of happiness that resides at the heart of all experience and the beliefs that thought has superimposed upon it.
That ultimate answer is not just one more construct of thought. It is the dissolution of thought in its own substance.
The experience of enlightenment is the end of the belief in the separate self and thus brings one chapter of our life to a close. However, it is only the beginning of true self-realisation, which involves the dissolution of the sense of separation in our feelings – that is, in the body – rather than simply in our beliefs. The experience of enlightenment is the biggest trap for many people in contemporary non-dual circles. Having discovered that there is no separate self, the still prevalent feelings of separation are met with the partial understanding that they appear to no one. In this way, by far the larger aspect of separation, the feeling of separation, remains intact in most cases, and any further investigation of our experience is curtailed by the superficial understanding that all seeking is undertaken by the non-existent separate self.
DOES LIFE HAVE A PURPOSE?
Does Consciousness have a purpose or plan for all this manifestation? The idea of a purpose or plan is for thought, not for Consciousness. For the separate, inside self that thought imagines, the ultimate purpose of life is love, peace and happiness. That is why everyone seeks them, not realising that the apparently inside self and its inevitable search veils the very love, peace and happiness for which it is in search.
For Consciousness there is no purpose or plan. For the apparently separate self there is a purpose or a plan – in fact, the apparent self doesn’t have a plan; it is a plan. The apparent self is the search for happiness. Our true self, aware Presence or Consciousness, is the happiness it is searching for. How could happiness have a plan? It is already that for which all plans are made.
Offering Everything To Presence
What is normally described as enlightenment is the experiential understanding that our self is ever-present, unlimited Awareness. This realisation may seem to come at the end of a long process of preparation, or it may seem to come unexpectedly and unsolicited. In either case, the patterns of the body and mind that have been rehearsed, in most cases, over many years, do not disappear immediately but continue to appear, out of habit, for some time. However, they are no longer fuelled by the apparently separate, inside self that was previously at their origin. They are simply old habits running on momentum. They are, as it were, empty, with no real entity at their source. How long these habits take to run down varies from case to case. It is a common misunderstanding to think that after this so-called enlightenment everything will be perfect, and as a result we sometimes lose heart when the old habits appear. Enlightenment is the end of one process – the process of thinking and feeling ourself to be a separate and limited inside self – but the beginning of another. It is the beginning of the realignment of the body, mind and world with our new experiential understanding.
No longer dulled by the sense of separation, the body and mind return to their natural condition – open, sensitive and loving. In response to a situation they become instruments of love and understanding in action. Left to themselves, without the need to respond to a particular situation, they quietly get on with life, celebrating their origin at every moment.
As William Blake said, ‘All things possible to be believed are an image of truth.’
It is this freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of all true artistic expression. The mind cannot touch reality and yet it is saturated in it. It is for this reason that Blake also said, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ For this reason, there is no end to an artist’s work. If reality were in the mind, there would be an end of art, an end of creativity. There would be something to find, somewhere at which to arrive, the final statement. But there is not. The ‘productions of time’ flow timelessly from eternity, the ever-present now, simultaneously exploring, celebrating and sharing their own substance, a dance of love and beauty that has no purpose other than celebrating itself. All true art is for art’s sake alone. It has no other purpose or destination.
Let us explore this experientially. How do the idea and apparent feeling of objectness and solidity arise? There is Consciousness, transparent, formless, full only of the knowing of itself – pure knowing and being. This Consciousness, having no form, has the capacity to appear as all forms. Consciousness gives itself to all apparent forms but loses itself to none of them. In order to appear as form, Consciousness takes the shape of what we call mind, in the broadest sense of the word. That is, Consciousness takes the shape of sensing, perceiving and thinking. This is meant in the same sense as it could be said that a screen takes the shape of the image that appears on it, such as a landscape. The screen doesn’t actually become anything other than itself, such as a landscape, but only seems to.
If we go deeply into the experience of sensing/perceiving that we call ‘the chair’, we find nothing dense, solid or inert there. Density, solidity and inertia are simply concepts superimposed onto the reality of our experience by the dualising mind. These concepts dull the living, sensitive, vibrating, intimate quality of all experience – which is naturally infused with enjoyment, enthusiasm and love – and reduce it to matter, objects and others.
Addiction And Non-Duality
I have heard many stories of all sorts of so-called sages, holy men and enlightened gurus who rationalise inappropriate sexual behaviour under a veneer of spiritual truth. How dowe, as spiritual seekers, avoid this tragic pitfall, especially when we have a deep understanding that this is a path of acceptance and not avoidance? Your honesty and clarity already point to the freedom in yourself that you seek. Addiction of any sort, be it to inappropriate sexual behaviour, alcohol, drugs, smoking or any milder form of behaviour, almost always has its origin in the belief and, more importantly, the feeling of being a separate, limited, located self. The most common form in which this belief and feeling of separation manifests is the subtle or not-so-subtle rejection of the current situation, that is, the ‘I don’t like what is going on’ and the ‘I want something other than what is going on’.
To begin with, this fear and seeking manifest in innocuous forms of behaviour, the most common of which is unnecessary thinking, the almost constant mental chatter or commentary that most of us are familiar with. This running commentary is the simplest form of the resistance to what is. It is the repetitive background chatter that
ensures that attention is almost always diverted away from the immediacy, intimacy and simplicity of what is. This is the primal addiction. What is, is deemed too boring, plain and uneventful to be worthy of attention, and thinking provides an alternative dream world into which to escape from the dullness or discomfort of the moment. One honest look at our thinking will show that the majority of it serves no practical, intelligent or creative purpose but is simply a sort of filler. The vast majority of our thoughts about the past and future serve only to legitimise and perpetuate the imaginary self that resides at their heart. However, precisely because this type of thinking is deemed innocuous (in the sense that it has no harmful effect on the body or on society) it passes, for the most part, unnoticed and is indeed encouraged by our culture in general. It is the most common and effective form of addiction, in which almost everyone is engaged, for the most part unknowingly. Therein lies its efficiency in keeping the sense of separation alive; it is the perfect refuge for the apparently separate self.
As we grow up, this subtle thinking is no longer sufficient to keep the anxiety, unease and discomfort of the sense of separation at bay, and we begin to turn to stronger forms of avoidance. These are the common forms of addiction with which we are familiar: excessive working, eating or activity, or addiction to alcohol, smoking, drugs, pornography and so on. All these forms of addiction are simply strategies of avoidance of what is, avoidance of ‘this’, avoidance of ‘now’. They are the familiar refuges of the sense of being a separate self.
In your case you have seen clearly and honestly that addiction, in this case to pornography, is a symptom of a deeper and subtler malaise, that of the separate self. You have seen that the mind’s attempts to justify this behaviour with convincing and seemingly watertight non-dual arguments are not expressions of true understanding, but rather the mind’s attempts to manipulate and appropriate the non-dual teaching to validate its own belief systems. This is one of the main identities of the spiritual ego in our era.
I would also suggest one simple practical approach: every time you feel the impulse to watch porn, just pause. Even if, to begin with, it is only for half a minute, put a little space between yourself and the fulfilment of the impulse. As time goes on, this period of time can be extended until you find yourself always as this space.