Could it be that the most profound shift that will happen in your life is the shift that lands you precisely in the muck, mire, normality and commonality of being for real, here and now, unconditional to your physical, psychological or spiritual condition?
The body moves, but THAT is never moving.
Could it be that no experience of awakening or enlightenment could ever define you? For sure, these kind of experiences, in which the boundaries of our minds and hearts blast open, have tremendous value, but what are they, except a happening relative to the prior state of inner imprisonment that activates the nervous system, mind, and emotions with a rush of excitement?
Can any experience – a happening – already only an imprint in memory – really have authority over the morning after, or the years after, or those days when some obnoxious driver curses you in a rainstorm and the bank manager makes a private call to warn you that the overdraft has outworn its limits?
Can any experience be absolute when it is held in memory and memory – a function of the brain – will decompose and fragment in old age – indeed, when it will die even in its present unreliable, amorphous form, together with the one who believes herself enlightened?
Memory is beautiful, but memory is memory.
THAT is unchanged, through childhood, adulthood and old age.
There is a lot of magic in memory, which we will explore in a coming post. But it is really important to recognize that all experience is memory – an imprint on our mental, emotional and physical form. It is an effect of something else – something that has such a fine vibration, we can hardly grasp it with our dense fingers, thoughts and forms of imagination.
We’re not underrating the value of experience, or the nurturing power of certain perspectives. These perspective have one foot out of habitual layers of entanglement with form, but they are not end-points, and to take them as such is to begin a whole new cycle of identification and states of being – cycles which deflect us from the authentic source of every possible perspective.
It is wonderful, for example, to have a way to move to Stillness. To be able to release the thinking mind, and to become conscious of consciousness to a degree that the mental limitation of form is lost, or at least loosened. It is beautiful to be able dis-attach from dense feelings in our hearts and to stay present in a pure atmosphere of Being – unconditional to the driving rain and the bank manager.
These are great perspectives to serve us in the art of living, but are they end points? Do we need to identify with these positions as absolute? They can serve our processes of healing, but are they really bringing unity?
These are questions that need to be asked internally, in the intimate chambers of our inner landscape. Are we truly free? Or are remembered ways to ‘Stillness’ or ‘Being’ exploited as a winning strategy in the art of living – until like every drug – they outlive their purpose and fail to create the effect we are seeking? Are these so called spiritual “attainments” falling into the secret collective agenda of separation, superiority, evasion and grandiosity?
THAT
At the depth of who you are is ONE that never needed to be enlightened. This one has always been there, through thick and thin, through childhood and through every happening – the good, the bad and the ugly.
This one is there when we sleep, it is even there when we are unconscious. This one is there when we are entangled in violence, or lost in emotion. It is there when we experience the greatest expansion in meditation, and it is also there when we curse as we stub our toe on the pavement. It never changes.
This one – this continuum – is so close to home that we can think there’s ‘nothing’ in it. No light shows – no uncommon spiritual explosions, no personal profit.
Yet here you are – at source, unconditional to the freedom of consciousness, or the expansion of awareness.
It is here when you are disillusioned and it is here when you are broken. It will be here in the moment of your death, as it was here in the moment of your birth. It has always been here.
It’s the source of the finest emanations of strength, peace and love. Yet nothing effects it.
Alone or among friends, THAT is unaffected.
Don’t search for the elated experience through the expansion of consciousness or awareness – these are just the effects of That – that continuum which is always there behind and unconditional to the pulsations of light. When we cling to the effects, we are identifying our perception and breaking the channel of that which is at cause, and which at the same time exists independently to causing anything.
Don’t look to teachers to show you this – it is almost impossible to describe. THAT is identical in them as it is at the source of you, irrespective of their freedom of consciousness or the liberation of their awareness.
THAT is in the trees, in the ocean, and in the infinite night sky. It is in the rotting food at the bottom of the fridge. We can only put words, thoughts or feeling to what it is not.
THAT – source of it all – is so commonplace, yet so defiant of all that can be seen, felt or experienced. Because all that which can be thought, felt or experienced is not That one, out of which all those effects arise. Don’t l0ok for anything in particular, because THAT doesn’t need a seeker. It will be wherever your eyes fall, and also when your eyes are closed. THAT is both the seeker and that which is sought. It is behind, within, before, and beyond all we could ever find.
THAT is the core of you which is not an effect of anything. Nothing defines it. Yet it is a cause. The more we allow That, the more we can notice the effect of being that – and some effects can be so strong that for a while we forget we are THAT. This is the direct home-coming – to That which is so common, so blindingly obvious, that we simply forgot it was there.
Consciousness is a mirror. It is a mirror composed of the universal mind which reflects the light emanating from That. As such, consciousness is an effect of THAT source, as is awareness. Every effect can also be a cause, and it is in the realm of causing effect after effect that we suffer within illusion after illusion of false identity. How many apparent selves we move through in a life time! And the only continuum is this awesome, ignored, THAT, which is beyond even perception itself.
Irrespective of our state of being or our state of mind, THAT is always here.
THAT is here, right now, regardless of whether you create light-shows of activity and entanglement. It is anyway here. There is no escape. It is at that core of you where there is no identification necessary. Identification is withdrawn – and although the mirror of consciousness is dark – we are still thoughtlessly here – as we always were. All that could be felt is not THAT, although THAT is there in every thought, every feeling, every moment of consciousness and sweep of awareness.
We cannot perceive THAT, we can only dive into it. We can only be THAT. Inquiry out of THAT turns inside out, as the whole manifest world of perception becomes revealed as an effect of THAT which we cannot perceive, as we are IT.
Take the feeling of peace, for example. This feeling, it’s not peace. It is the effect of the primal peace arising out of THAT, arising from beyond perception. The feeling of peace (we tend to call peace) is an effect on our physical, psychological and mental form. It is a feeling or release, of slowing down, of relaxation, of quietening. These feelings are effects of a PEACE which is so finely attuned as it emanates from the source of who we are that it cannot be “felt”. We can only feel the effect of it. Yet when we disentangle from the “effect” and surrender to THAT out of which peace is emanating, how much more free is the movement of peace.
THAT which never abandons, never betrays, never confuses and which never can be lost.
Next time you have an elevated or expanded spiritual experience, drop it. Just for once. Try to drop it, and be THAT one – at the core of you – that remains. THAT is never abandoned, never not here, you can trust it to the end of time and beyond. And allowing THAT is the start of a whole new journey into the incredible, miraculous service of being human and being here in stillness, freedom mand unity.
This is the process of authenticity, and possibly the source referred to by Nisargadatta – the masterkey to the purity of nonduality which could be better called Unity.
“In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there, you are at home everywhere.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Keywords for being THAT:
Normal; Commonplace; Obvious; Continuous; Unconditional; Imperceivable; Self-identical; Unchanging; Unending; Unconstrained; Undivided. Inescapable, indestructible.
