Knowledge and Religion

Rest and Unrest; You are Free from Opposites

Now we can continue with some more verses from Verses on The Faith Mind, by The 3rd Chinese Zen Patriarch, Sengstau:

Rest and unrest derive from illusion;

When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached.

No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.

Consider movement stationary and the stationary in motion, both movement and rest disappears.

Did you ever see someone who is spiritual, attempting to appear at peace? Although it’s a good act, you start to have a feeling that something is missing. But no, it isn’t that something missing; it’s just that he or she forgot about, the One Mind, the thing the supports the person. Assuming a limited self, the person then tried to impersonate the one mind, which he or she already is.

You don't need an act when you are the real thing
I hope you can learn a lesson from this. Nothing is missing; so in spiritual practice you can just be yourself. When you are yourself life gets very relaxing, and you become very free. It is also easier to see when you bump against limitation; remember seeing without judgment is the first step to freedom. This includes seeing the idea that you have to stand separate and then act spiritual — the feeling that something is missing. It is only when you see things in terms of opposites that you have to put on such an act. Otherwise, when you are tired you can just sleep.

When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Give the gift of enlightenment when you give Making Your Wisdom Come Alive. This book points to the wisdom and joy that you find at your center. Here you can find the light that makes life shine in its full glory. See our fully revised second edition.

For more information go to:Amazon.com

Also now you can read this book on your Kindle or other electronic device. Please go to Amazon Kindle.
_____________________________________________________________________

It is only an illusion that time winds like the hands of a clock. What you measure with a clock isn’t a good indicator of what you actually experience. When you are having a good time with your friends, time seems to speed by. On the other hand when you are in a boring class time slows to a crawl. And then you start to day dream and a whole new world appears. When you ask the people in your dream if they just arrived there, they would reply, “No we’ve been here for centuries. We can tell you about our parents and grandparents etc.”  At that moment the teacher slaps you on the face and you wake up. . . You look at the clock and ten minutes passed by.

Your actual experience is Timeless
But taking this deeper, the reality behind the universe is the One Mind; still, unchanging and timeless. It is from stillness that you become aware of the passage of time. Yes that’s right; if you look deeply into the thing that you really experience you find that it is timeless. In the day dream you were the timeless reality behind the dream. Similarly here in the waking state when you see all things equally, you notice that you are the reality behind all things.

No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.

You do not comprehend the One Mind with your thoughts. You know this with the essence of your being — your own self-nature. The One Mind is a name for your actual direct and immediate experience. If you think that self-knowledge is a matter of thinking the right thoughts, you will draw a blank. That’s because you are a constant causeless relationless light sometimes called the One Mind. If there is no change, there is nothing for the mind to grasp. From another angle you know your mind but your mind doesn’t know you.

You Shine by Your Own Light
But if you need a distinction, here’s one that points right to you. You do not know yourself in the same way that you know an object. Self knowledge is direct experience. You do not have to search for the sun with a flashlight. That’s because the sun is light. A separate light isn’t necessary. In the same way, you are consciousness and do not need a separate light called thoughts to know this consciousness.

The only way to have an adequate introduction to your self is by standing as the self. Pretending to be less than you are will feel limited and fall short. That’s why all of my little comparisons and analogies fall short. At the most they can point to what you are. Then you have to stand there and graze on reality directly. The one taste will reveal itself by itself.

And now for the forth verse:

Consider movement stationary and the stationary in motion, both movement and rest disappear.

This Freedom comes from Your Being; not your Thoughts
Do you consider this verse confusing? It certainly doesn’t fit into your mind as it plods along thought after thought. But do you know that you actually stand outside this thinking process? That’s how you know about your thoughts. You’ll find that this points to a natural place. It is free of the opposites that the mind thinks up. So let the mind be confused as you stand in your natural state where confusion and clarity don’t even exist. The stillness of your being has no opposite, and therefore words cannot adequately describe it.

Asking Question
Here questions about this article or other things going on in your life are always welcome; you can write us at michael@ananya.com. I love questions and try to answer them all in this blog. That’s because when you start to question limitation, you are on the verge of destroying it.

Please Tell Your Friends
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

Best Wishes,

Michael Gluckman

You are what you seek

Now we can continue with the next three verses from Verses on The Faith Mind,by The 3rd Chinese Zen Patriarch, Sengstau.

The wise man strives to no goals but the foolish man fetters himself.

There is one Dharma, not many; distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant.

To seek Mind with the mind is the greatest of all mistakes.

Goals mean defining happiness as connected with your goals and then striving for them. All the while you don’t recognize that happiness comes from you, the place where you actually experience happiness, not from reaching your objectives. When you give up striving for happiness in the things that you see, you notice what’s actually here right now. Some people call this being present.

Find happiness where it really exists _____________________________________________________________________________________

Give the gift of enlightenment when you give Making Your Wisdom Come Alive. This book points to the wisdom and joy that you find at your center. Here you can find the light that makes life shine in its full glory. See our fully revised second edition.

For more information go to:Amazon.com

Also now you can read this book on your Kindle or other electronic device. Please go to Amazon Kindle.
_____________________________________________________________________
Of course you can still write a book or attempt to accomplish things in the world. But when you demand that these things give you happiness and fulfillment, you get bound by the things you want. The reason you fetter yourself to your goals is because you are asking things to give you the happiness that they just don’t have. You are running after an illusion that just can’t deliver what it promises. So the more you run towards your goals, the more the fulfillment that you expect seems to recede and run away.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t find happiness. You are not eternally damned to suffering.  But you have to look in the place where happiness comes from. Otherwise you will have the feeling that you never quite arrive. When people first recognize that things are not going to deliver on their promise, they can get frustrated or depressed; they sometimes feel as if life loses its meaning. If these people would only notice that they are the thing that they want, life would take on greater meaning than they could ever imagine. And they would never feel bound by their goals again.

The second verse here follows this up:

There is one Dharma, not many; distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant.

Originally dharma was a Sanskrit word that meant your duties or obligations to society. To get a sense of what this means fill in the blank: I’m a__________. Is it a doctor, lawyer, carpenter, minister or rabbi? Is it husband, wife, son or daughter? In the traditional sense whatever you fill in here, that’s your dharma.

But if you notice I write this dharma with a small “d”. The real purpose of life is the same for everyone. That is to find the source of happiness and fulfillment. Ignorance is being unaware of this source and striving to find happiness in the objects that you see. If you strive to find happiness in goals and objects, you will soon find that objects are too confining and limited; that’s why they cause suffering. But if you can learn from this wisdom, you will keep from running into dead ends.

You are not an Object
If you wonder what too limited means, the only thing that isn’t an object is what you are. That is the real subject, the you that’s really you. Even your body and mind are just things that you see; bodies get old, sick and die. Minds are in constant motion and can also be affected by old age, disease, and death. Finding the nameless Consciousness and Being that you really are is the real aim of life – your real Dharma.  This is the source of happiness. In reality you are the One Mind. Although you can’t see the One Mind you know it as your very essence.

You are more than a thought
This leads nicely into the third verse of this trilogy:

To seek Mind with the mind is the greatest of all mistakes.

If you think that you are limited to the thoughts in your mind , you should know that you are much more than a thought. The thing that really makes your mind come alive is the light that shines on your thoughts.

Even the imposture called “I” is not the real you; it is just another thought. The proof: even though this thought comes and goes, it doesn’t feel as if you are coming and going, does it? The stable light behind the shifting mind is the real you. You do not find this light by banishing your thoughts or by doing anything else with them. The “I” thought, attempting to arrange other thoughts is a fruitless practice that will never come to an end. Only by noticing where you stand even now, can you find the real nature of your mind. You will then find that your mind is the One Mind, the source of our real connection and joy.

Asking Question
Here questions about this article or other things going on in your life are always welcome; you can write us at michael@ananya.com. I love questions and try to answer them all in this blog. That’s because when you start to question limitation, you are on the verge of destroying it.

Please Tell Your Friends
Please tell you friends. Although we don’t have an advertising budget, we hope that everyone who wants to can find out about and wake up to this wisdom.

Best Wishes,

Michael Gluckman

 

Your Experience is Richer than Words can Convey

Now we can continue with the next three verses from Verses on The Faith Mind, by The 3rd Chinese Zen Patriarch, Sengstau:

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality.

The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth.

Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

Where does reality come from?  When you start looking into what you actually experience as opposed to what you are supposed to experience this becomes an interesting question.  For most of us, we use the evidence of our senses and declare that the objects are real. After all our senses are designed to sense and respond to the objects in the world. If you strike a hard object your hand will hurt; if you touch a hot stove you will pull your hand back and yell ouch! Objects and our senses seem inextricably connected.

But when you look a little deeper like we did in the blog: “Oneness is Your Natural State” you begin to recognize that, like in a dream, you actually experience the world in your mind. At this point you may feel that the world is unreal.  But wouldn’t this deny the sense of reality that the world seems to have?

Experience is much richer than words can convey _____________________________________________________________________________________

Give the gift of enlightenment when you give Making Your Wisdom Come Alive. This book points to the wisdom and joy that you find at your center. Here you can find the light that makes life shine in its full glory. See our fully revised second edition.

For more information go to:Amazon.com

Also now you can read this book on your Kindle or other electronic device. Please go to Amazon Kindle.
_____________________________________________________________________
Here’s the reason that this may seem confusing: your actual experience is much richer than words and thoughts can convey.  When you take your experience to be limited to words and thoughts, you miss the subtle richness of your actual experience.  This means that you have more choices than just real and unreal.

Another way of looking at this is that your sense of reality comes from you, not from the things that you see. That’s why if while reading this blog you begin to day dream, a whole new world appears; but you don’t feel as if reality went away. And then when the waking world comes back you don’t feel as if reality just returned.

Be centered in your natural state of reality

There is no need to put your Thoughts in Order

Now let’s continue with Faith Mind, by Sengstau, the third Buddhist Patriarch in China:

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity.

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and passivity, assertion and denial.

We can now take a look and see what these verses mean. Along with limitation comes the person who attempts to get out of limitation. That’s because limitation never feels right. But if you look closely at the criteria for oneness, it has to be free from the limitation of separate objects, and it has to last. After all oneness that comes and goes is not oneness at all. It is just separate objects that occasionally morph into oneness and then separate again. What we are saying here is that oneness is freedom from the limitations of space and time. This is a fair description of infinity, isn’t it?

But there is one problem: a limited person doing a limited action will never get to infinity. This means that when you posit yourself as limited, the fulfillment that you are looking for will be just around the corner, but you will never quite arrive. You may think, Maybe it will come when I graduate from school; perhaps when I get the right job and get married. Maybe when our children grow up and leave the house. Will I finally find fulfillment when we retire? And then you pass away with the disappointment that you never quite arrived.

Activity or no activity, still no oneness
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Give the gift of enlightenment when you give Making Your Wisdom Come Alive. This book points to the wisdom and joy that you find at your center. Here you can find the light that makes life shine in its full glory. See our fully revised second edition.

For more information go to:Amazon.com

Also now you can read this book on your Kindle or other electronic device. Please go to Amazon Kindle.
_____________________________________________________________________

Eventually you realize that activity will not lead to oneness. You may think, So I’ll just stop my activity and sit all day in meditation. But you will quickly find that even if you can eliminate thoughts and abide in emptiness for a short time, in the end thoughts will come back. And do you know which thoughts will fly in? Just the thoughts that you wanted to get rid of. So you will quickly find out that a limited person refraining from activity will not get to infinity either.

And so you might try following the second verse:

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other you will never know Oneness.

You attempt to establish the right percentages: 50% activity and 50% meditation. And then what happens? When you are active you will be thinking about sitting down in meditation, and when you are meditating you will be anxious to get up and be active again. It seems like finding oneness is an impossible task, doesn’t it?

What is the single way?