buddha
Ramana: that which is…without concepts
The subject (the Witness/ Awareness/ Pure Consciousness) is an inference
All we know are objects. The existence of a subject (eg. the witness or consciousness/awareness) is an inference, a belief.
Some versed in advaita-speak then counter by asking ‘Who/what is it that knows this?’. The problem is that the very question ‘who knows’ is based on the belief that there must be a subject, a knower.
It’s similar to an argument for the existence of God in which people say look at all this marvelous creation, who is the creator? Of course, the assumption is there must be a creator, a subject who creates, and this is a false assumption (ie. it is based on false logic).
Inference does not always work as a way of understanding and knowing things, as it is only as good as the logic that underpins it. We could go on with other examples of this faulty logic in which the notions of a subject is unnecessarily believed in: Who blows the wind? Who quakes the earth? Who grows the trees?
Now strictly speaking, we are not saying there is no subject, just as we are not saying there is no God. We are just saying there is no evidence for either of these, and therefore no need to believe one way or the other in a subject.
What we are left with is ‘what is’ or ‘life’ or ‘experience’. It all just happens. It’s already happening. Everything is a part of IT.
So simple, direct, and already fully known (seen), but in essence it is mysterious and uncapturable by words.
There is a great freedom in seeing this.
❤
So, what happens when you die?
Q. So, what happens when you die?
How can you know what happens when you die? No matter how you justify it, no matter how many psychic intuitions or spiritual experiences you have, the truth is that you don’t know for sure what happens after death. This question may perhaps be answered by science in the future, but we are not there yet.
Think of a time when you were utterly convinced something was true, but now you look back and realise how wrong you were. Knowledge also comes and goes. Perspectives change as we grow and mature and experience different things.
Enlightenment is beyond knowledge. Enlightenment does not depend on knowledge or the mind. Unlike knowledge and states of mind, Enlightenment cannot be attained – it is already here.
The above is an extract from the following post: Who cares about freedom?
At some point all these teachings are seen to be ridiculous…
And the winner for the Best Spiritual Practice 2017 is…
And the winner for Best Spiritual Practice 2017 is….
I got news for you: there are many ways to THIS.
Some people may need a path, a practice or a teacher, others may not.
The way that worked/is working for you may not be the way for everyone.
At the end of it all, you are right where you began: ‘here’.
But with a difference: now you know.
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In seeing truth, love is
In Freedom, you don’t care about love, or any other projected ideal.
You don’t try to be more ethical. Maybe you are more loving, maybe you are not.
That’s why this automatically tends towards love – because there is no motive, because the ego is not at play. It may go against intuition but love does not care about love.
Love just is when things are seen for what they are.
To put it more poetically, in seeing truth (of no-self), love is.
The above is an excerpt from the article Love, Happiness and Non-duality
Problems with utilising conceptual tools
Continued from 2 previous posts:
Problems with utilising conceptual tools
Generally speaking, the more you believe in the concept, the better it works, but conversely the harder it is to throw it away once the task at hand (rooting out the ego/’I am the body’ notion) has been completed.
Other problems with believing in the concepts is that it sets you against other traditions and teachings that either utilise other concepts, thus breeding division and sectarianism, and also it can lead to some unintended consequences, some of which can be quite unpleasant.
These include spiritual bypassing, which is where emotional and psychological issues are not dealt with properly as ‘I am not the body-mind so I have no issues’ or where the body is neglected and not properly respected as it is deemed to be ‘insentient, inert and not me’.
Another problem with utilising concepts is that the ego is perpetuated and can even be strengthened during this part of the teaching. Eventually it can be seen that all teachings are also subtle ways of continuing/perpetuating the egoic process which is itself based on the illusion of being a separate doer-entity. Until then, these conceptual teachings and practices based upon these concepts may be useful, but eventually we see that all teachings are potential obstacles. Why? Because Freedom is already fully present, and on a subtle level all teachings assume that Freedom is not already here and reinforce the notion that this moment is deficient in some way.
You can probably think of other negatives of this approach yourself, and perhaps have seen spiritual seekers on this journey fall into one of these traps.
To be continued in a future post: Practicing knowledge
Why seeing/understanding alone may not be enough
This post follows on from my previous 3 posts relating to the body:
- Do you know for certain that you are the body?
- Are you or are you not the body?
- Why does understanding the body matter?
Seeing this is not always enough
However, for many people simply seeing there is no doer is not enough. Why? Well we have lived our lives for many years with the deeply ingrained belief that we are doers, with the belief that we are the creator of our thoughts and instigators of our actions. This habitual belief is not so easily washed away, and even when seen, it can continue to operate and cause us to suffer.
In vedanta a common methodology used to counteract this is to utilise a concept that opposes and counteracts the ignorance:
‘I am not the body’ is a tool by which one can weed out the ‘I am the body’ notion.
Practice of the knowledge ‘I am not the body’ is a conceptual tool by which one can weed out the belief in ‘I am the body’ concept.
Note that ‘I am not the body’ is a concept. If believed in, ie. if considered to be genuinely true, it would be a belief. You do not have to believe a concept is true in order to benefit from it. You can use the concept either way, whether you believe in it or not.
To be continued in my next post: Integrating the understanding of no-doer
Are you or are you not the body?
This follows on from my previous post.
It is an observable fact that our direct experience alone does not provide us with sufficient evidence to say whether or not objects in the world arise solely from consciousness (ie. philosophical idealism), or whether consciousness is a product of the material word (eg. the human brain) which in turn perceives an image of that material world (ie. philosophical realism).
Not that these are the only two possibilities – there other theories that could also account for our present experience, and perhaps other explanations that our limited human minds are incapable of understanding – but for the purposes of this article we will not go into this.
The point is, from our direct experience alone, we do not know if what we call the body is solely an image that arises in our consciousness, or if that image is a representation of a real body somewhere outside our consciousness which in turn gives rise to consciousness.
To be continued here: Why does understanding the body matter?
Tom Das 