Some chill music for this post
First, when I was younger in the world, I made the classic mistake of thinking things were separate. That there was a separate self, that you exist as I see you, that this table and laptop and coffee actually exist as separate items within an entire universe made up of separate items. It’s an understandable mistake. We literally all make it. It’s the first mistake, the primal distortion, the one that traps us within layers of our own mind.
You know the fantasy novel trope where the plucky young hero casts his first magic spell on a local bully, which tricks him into thinking he is being choked but it’s actually the bully’s hands around his own neck that are doing the choking?
That’s this mistake. That is this illusion. When you can’t see outside the illusion, you can’t see your hands around your own neck.
“Oh, she hurt me, he raped me, she stole from me, he knocked me down!”
No, actually – you just can’t see your own hands around your own neck. Metaphorically and literally speaking.
This is the big one – the one everyone gets stuck on for a period of rebirth that inversely scales with your desire to find reality. This is fundamental, and is perfectly fine. Spend as much time as you need here, there’s no real rush. All the suffering and joy you experience is illusory, really, and doesn’t last. There’s a quick way out of this illusion, which I will write up in a post soon. I am wary of teaching things at this stage, when I’m still developing, so I will think carefully before I post.
The second illusion is one I ran into right after I awoke. There is no self! Joy! We are all one! Technical truths but when I put them into practice, I immediately started building illusions around them too. Why? Because even though I saw the nature of reality, I still had lots of baggage hanging around me including a big one called “MIND”. The entire purpose of Mind is to try and figure out reality so you can navigate your way through it. However, in most cases this necessitates the construction of fabulous illusions like the First one – the illusion of a separate universe – and so, to deal with my new reality, I started doing this again.
The big illusion I built up was a conception of reality that saw reality as a giant gem; each facet was a different viewpoint, a different person / animal / thing. This satisfied my remaining ego need to quantify things and have them “make sense” in a logical way.
The building of illusion comes when mind interacts with ego. Suffering can only result.
I now see through this as an illusion too – because it is a projection of something that I do not know to be true. I cannot know whether the person I sit opposite has a different mind than I… I cannot know whether there are any different viewpoints than my own. Prove to me that you dream. Prove to me that you think. You cannot, anymore than I can prove to you that I am a different mind than you.
As my understanding of impermanence increased, I began to see through this illusion too. As I gradually let go of the need to hold onto logical concepts, to make sense of the world, I began to climb up the Ladder of Divinity towards a simpler understanding. I let go of the need to have any structure to reality, or any viewpoints.
I say the current illusion because I’ve always been in an illusory state all my life, and I don’t believe that this is the end of the line where I can put my toys down and say okay, I know it all, it’s done. We just chip away at the illusions we’ve built up as we go, and expose more and more of reality. The hard part comes when describing things, because we are using human constructs like words and concepts to build a map of reality that can only ever be incomplete.
Right now, thanks to the guru girls over at Liberation Unleashed, I can see that there are no viewpoints necessary; life doesn’t need a viewer to happen, it merely happens itself. Life is a process that is continually unfolding, and I abandon myself to it. Utterly. There is no need to separate “myself” and “an impermanent reality” to have things make sense. There’s merely a reality happening, and a part of it is something that used to be me. It unfolds, does not need a witness, does not need anything but to unfold. There is no delineation between the end of my fingertips and the air and laptop keys as I type.
That’s my end game right now.
Traditionally there have been three stages to enlightenment:
This describes the basics of the Ten Bulls of Zen – being inside the illusion, discovering that it’s an illusion, and then working within but not being defined by the illusion. I suppose that says what I’m trying to say rather succinctly, however it never made sense to me until I read it looking backwards.
Right now I’m feeling a vast peace, there is little that can bother me, and as the days go on the more that peace increases. There is a distinct lack of love, however. The sages who describe “coming back to the marketplace” after awakening report a vast, deep love being the defining factor of their lives. Alan Chapman speaks of a way to “participate as growth” in reality, which I’m looking forward to learning about. The love will come. I’m not quite there yet.
But I will be.