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11 October 2008
Whatever Will Be, Will Be
Neither Nothing nor Something Exists
Om, shanti, shanti, shanti, om, peace. Greetings and salutations. I welcome you with all my heart. It is good being with you again this beautiful Thursday evening.Many of you come here because you think I know something, and you want a piece of the something that I know. You believe the something will make you become self-realized, perhaps. But in truth I know nothing. Then you come to me because you want a piece of the nothing. And you think if you know nothing you'll become self-realized. But in truth you have to know something to know nothing. It is the something that we'll talk about tonight.
What do you have to be to become nothing? What do you have to know to be nothing? To be nothing is a misnomer, for you make the nothing into some thing. If you're trying to be nothing, then you're trying to be something, aren't you? Because the nothing is something, that you're trying to become. Consequently, you should never strive to be nothing and you should never strive to be something, for they're both erroneous concepts. None of them really exist.
The question therefore is, "If something doesn't exist, and nothing doesn't exist, well what is?" And the answer is silence. Absolute silence. For the human mind and the human thinking, the human thoughts, can never comprehend what silence is. You try to put it into words, and you spoil it. There are no words that can interpret the silence, for when you go into the true silence, you go beyond nothing and something. Yet everyone has experienced this true silence who has gone beyond nothing and something, and appeared to have to first become something and nothing, in order to be silent.
There's something you have to know: No. 1. Nothing is as it appears. You have to feel this deep in your heart. Nothing in this whole universe is as it appears. So do not be fooled by appearances. You do not allow the appearance to get to you, to make you feel this way or that way, no matter what the appearance may be. You are to look at the appearance as you would look at a mirage. And this is scientific, for the appearance will change sooner or later anyway. Therefore when you feel something from an experience, it is subject to change. You'll not be the same again. This is why the average person keeps going up and down like a yo-yo. They respond to a condition, then the condition changes and they respond in a different way to the same condition, and this changes and you respond again to the condition. They keep responding again and again to what they see as a condition.
No. 2. Do not say that the world is maya, for if you say the world is maya, that's a concept you have. And this is a non-duality concept, but nevertheless it's a concept, for you're holding on to the fact that the world is maya. In reality maya does not exist. There is no maya. Therefore everything that appears to come from maya, must also not exist. Do you follow this?
Whatever you think does not exist, is a concept. It becomes a thing, something to hold on to. You go around saying, "Everything is maya, everything is maya, the universe does not exist." But that maya exists, and this is the biggest mistake you're making, for you think maya exists. What is maya? An illusion. To whom comes the illusion? To the one who believes maya as a concept, maya as a thing, a belief. In other words, everything that you believe up to this point is erroneous, and it should be dropped.
The same is true with the words of absolute reality, pure awareness, Brahman, sat-chit-ananda. These things become a safe haven for you, and they keep you back from your full realization, for you are holding on to these beliefs that there is absolute reality, there is sat-chit-ananda, there is nirvana. Where would these things come from except from your own mind? It is you who gave these things names. We have given names to something we do not understand. We call it reality. What is reality? Something that never changes. And the something that never changes, becomes a concept and you hold on to that.
Is it any wonder such few people are self-realized? Is it any wonder that certain people only are liberated, very few people liberated? For we have simply exchanged terms. We say the world does not exist but maya exists. We say everything comes from consciousness, everything comes from the absolute reality. We merely change words, change terms.
There is no absolute reality. There is no sat-chit-ananda. There is no Brahman. It is we who made these terms up, and we feel safe and secure by holding on to them. At one time we used to say, "God is with me." Now we say, "Consciousness is with me," or, "I am the absolute reality." We've just changed the names. That's all we've done.
No. 3 is: you are not even the silence, for as long as you can express the word silence, that's not it. You have to get to the place where you have absolutely nothing to hold on to, nothing to lean against. Even when Buddha said to take refuge in the Buddha, take refuge in the sangha, take refuge in the eight fold path, this again is a mistake. I'm not saying the Buddha made a mistake. What I'm saying is the reason he said this, is because he was speaking to ignorant people who had to hold on to something. But the Buddha realized there's nothing to hold on to. There never was anything to hold on to. Even when you’re told you're total freedom, the word freedom becomes a concept for you. As long as you can lean on to it, as long as you can hold on to it, and you feel good in it, it's a mistake.
Again, this is the reason so few people are self-realized. You're holding on to something. You're attached to something. Whether it's a teaching, or a person, or a satsang, or a sangha, you can never become free while you're attached to something.
So the question is, what shall I do? You do exactly what you're doing now, but do not think about it. This is the important point. Do not try to find some new profound teaching, that will give you new words, or new methods, or new rules and regulations. You merely do what you're doing now and you do not think about it, you do not attempt to analyze it, you do not think this teaching is higher than any other teaching. You leave yourself alone. When you learn to leave yourself alone, in body and in mind, you have arrived. Do not ask, "Where have I arrived? To what have I arrived?"
This spoils the whole thing. That's what I'm trying to explain to you. Do not look at something that I say, and attempt to analyze it, tear it apart, try to make something out of it, or take refuge in it. Just be. Be neither this nor that.
If you were only able to do what I tell you, you would immediately feel a tremendous happiness, a tremendous bliss inside of you. You would feel a tremendous joy welling up within yourself. This happiness, this bliss and this joy is your very nature. It has nothing to do with words, places or things. It is what you are when you let go of everything that you've been holding on to.
Some of us have formed so many habits of holding on to something, that we do not know we're holding on to it. You may be holding on to a belief that has become totally integrated in your thinking, in your thoughts, in your body, in your mind, and you don't even know you're holding on to it. You may be holding on to some type of concepts that you've had for many years, you're not aware of, because it is integrated within you.
So how can you deal with this? How do you deal with this? You just remain as you are. You remain exactly as you are. This is why when you meet a liberated person they appear to be just like you. For there's nothing to get rid of. There's really nothing to drop. Remember, when you try to get rid of something, when you try to drop something, you believe in yourself there’s something that you've got to drop. Do you see what I'm saying? You believe there's something there, that has to be gotten rid of, and this keeps you back. There never was anything that you have to get rid of. There never was anything that has been interfering with your freedom.
I suppose you can only feel this, what I'm saying to you, when you're living in the moment, when you learn to be spontaneous, in the moment. Always remember this truth. When you try to change yourself, when you try practicing sadhanas, or you try to get rid of a feeling or an emotion, you are really saying to yourself, "I've got this something that's interfering in my spiritual life and I have to get rid of it." Where did this something come from, that you have to get rid of it? The truth is you never had it in the first place. There never was anything that overwhelmed you, that caused you pain, that made you think that you're not enlightened, or not good enough. These things never existed for you to begin with. Consequently why would you have to get rid of something that doesn't exist? Why would you spend years upon years of working on yourself, trying to get rid of something that doesn't exist, trying to improve yourself when there's nothing to improve. There's only that, and that doesn't exist.
So where are we? Nowhere. We're absolutely nowhere. And that's exactly where we should be. Nowhere, knowing nothing. This is total emptiness. Remember all of your beliefs, all of your concepts, all of your ideas, all of your dogmas, all of your religious training, comes from false imagination. You have imagined that karma has put you here, in a relative plane on this earth, and then you have to get rid of your karma, and you spend many years working on yourself to get rid of the karma that you never had to begin with.
Think back in retrospect in your life. See all the things that you've been playing with all these years, the things you've been trying to remove from yourself, trying to attain something, trying to get rid of a bad habit. Both are erroneous.
There’s no realization, there’s no liberation, there’s no bondage. There’s no false imagination. So you have nothing. And then I tell you, there's no nothing. So where are you? Where are you? Exactly where you are supposed to be. Here. Doing nothing. Isn't that wonderful? To know that you’re in your right place. There never was a time when you were in the wrong place. You are here means that you’re nowhere. You're neither here nor there. You're neither up nor down. You're neither forward nor backward.
What I have done is I've pulled away all of your crutches, and everything you've been holding onto or leaning against. Now you're absolutely free. But again there's nobody to become free. So you go back to the same question. What are you? Catch yourself when you want to answer that question. You cannot say you're something. You cannot say you're nothing.
Don't you see what this is leading to? Just by knowing this, it should make you feel peaceful, more peaceful than you've ever felt in years. You should begin to feel happy for no reason at all, total happiness. When you think about this, and you realize that you're not something and you're not nothing, there's nothing else to say after that, nothing else to do after that, nothing to become, nothing to achieve. You're totally free, and there is nothing to think about.
The point is, when you have nothing to hold onto, when you realize you're not something, you're not nothing, there has to be complete silence. You have nothing else to say to yourself. The thoughts stop. You should find that happening right now. The thoughts just stop by themselves, for there is no one left to think anything. The thinker has been totally destroyed. If there’s no thinker, how can there be thoughts?
Isn't it beautiful? Do you feel what I'm talking about? You have gone beyond everything. You've gone beyond everything that exists and does not exist. You've gone beyond everything that appears and does not appear. You've gone beyond everything that thinks and does not think.
You are now totally, absolutely, whole heartedly free.
Shanti, shanti, shanti, peace.
By Robert Adams
19 September 2008
Me Or Not Me?
I have spent most of my life asking the big questions. Who am I? Why are we here? Why are we so violent, so destructive of life? Can we live in harmony with each other and all creatures and all the earth?
For all that asking, I feel I have little knowledge to offer. But there is one thing that I do know.
Everything is as it is.
One unbroken whole.
One act of being.
We live in devotion, not to what is, but to an image of what is, to a story concocted in the mind to make sense out of what it can not truly comprehend.
The mind lives by distinction and differentiation. By relating what is new to what is already known.
That is its nature.
So if we live in devotion to the mind’s image of reality, we live in fragments.
We live in the belief in distinction and separation.
We live in the past.
We live in untruth.
We forget that the mind’s experience of what is, and the image it creates from that experience, is just a tiny, keyhole glimpse onto the whole.
The only reality is the whole of everything.
All form. All emptiness. All being.
This is not trivial.
These habits of mind go very deep. They are ingrained in the nervous system.
Some are obviously negative and destructive.
Others are accepted by nearly everyone as "normal."
For instance, the thought habit that identifies the body as "me." That puts a label on anything that happens on or within the body as "me" and anything outside the membrane of skin as "not me."
What about the Oxygen the body breathes in and the Carbon Dioxide it breathes out? Me or not me?
What about the water it drinks? Or the ocean, the source of that water? Me or not me?
What about the plant or the animal that produces the proteins and the minerals that make blood and bone? Me or not me?
Or the sun that fuels it all, or the elementary particles, spread through out the universe that make up that sun? Me or not me?
Where does the body begin and where does it end? The whales teach us something about this. The body is continuous with the world it swims in.
Where do I begin? Where do I end? Who am I, in reality? As opposed to who or what I THINK I am.
If I come to this point, realizing that what I have always accepted as "me" is just a deeply habitual thought pattern, what happens?
Find out.
Find out what it means, to live in devotion to the truth of wholeness, rather than the illusion of separation. To live in devotion to the incomprehensible.
I can't tell you what will happen to you. But this feels to me like the root of the whole problem.
It is why we see ourselves as separate. From nature. From each other.
It is why we are unwilling to live with less.
It is why we are unwilling to question our cultural and personal assumptions.
It is why we fall into devotion to greed and comfort and security, to getting more and more for ourselves.
It is why our opinions and beliefs are so inflexible, so resistant to being contradicted by even our own experience.
It is why we make enemies.
Because we believe in the mental image of ourselves.
We believe that our thoughts and opinions define us. Tell us who we really are.
We live out the whole drama of believing the story of the self, whatever that story may be, and we forget the wholeness.
We forget what we truly are.
The whole of everything. All form. All emptiness. All being.
At the very least, devoting your life energy to the truth means abandoning your beliefs and opinions and self images in the face of new experience that contradicts the old. Because you know your beliefs and opinions and past experiences do not define you.
Where did your earliest understanding of the world come from?
Playing.
Directly engaging the world without prior knowledge.
Being immersed in the unknown and learning about it physically, through spontaneous interaction, and seeing what works and what doesn't.
At the very least, devotion to the truth means being constantly at play.
In this playful devotion to the truth, beyond the known image, there is a radical freedom. You know that who you truly are is in this moment, free of the past.
There is no knowing and no telling where this freedom might lead, for in this freedom the whole universe participates, and you do not know where the whole universe is going.
What am I?
The whole of what is.
All form. All emptiness. All at play.
All deeply, deeply in Love.
By John L Crockett
Eight Spiritual Laws
Eight Spiritual Laws
These "laws" of the spirit emerged over the course of an extended period of solitude. I call them laws, because in my experience they are as ineluctable as the laws of gravity and motion. A few are familiar to practicing Buddhists: the Law of Impermanence particularly. But I did not learn them from any religious or spiritual system. I have watched them at work in my own life. They are not matters of belief. You can test them against your own experience and either verify their validity, or discard them.
The Law of Appearances: Nothing is as it appears to be.
All experience consists of the sensory and mental apparatus of the experiencing organism, not of objective reality. Sensory illusion is relatively trivial compared to mental illusion, which is much more troublesome. Mental illusion filters and obscures our experience so that our view of reality can become deeply divided from reality itself, from what actually is. This is the state most of us are in most of the time. Since everything known and experienced is at best a minor echo of reality, and at worst a delusional fiction, how then is one to live truly? Is it possible to live out of being rather than out of knowing? Summing up: Everything known is fictional. Everything lived is real. We believe the fiction and deny the real; Trusting what is known, and not trusting Life.
The Law of Interdependence: Nothing exists in and of itself.
Everything exists in relationship to and dependence on everything else that exists. This is true at all levels, organismic, ecological, and cosmic. In some sense, the universe is one organism, one being, made up of interdependent systems, just as the body is made up of many cells, and is host to many organisms on which it depends. The sense of separation that humans often feel is a complete illusion.
The Law of Impermanence: Everything that is born, dies.
Everything that arises, falls away or is transformed into something else. Thoughts. Breaths. Heartbeats. Bodies. Species. Suns. Galaxies. Reality is in constant motion, and always returning to emptiness. One can believe in eternal life and reincarnation. But these beliefs fly in the face of all our experience of reality, which is that for anything to exist at all, it must have a beginning and it must have an end. As an aside, eternity is often thought to be a very, very long time. Actually, it is the very absence of time. In the absence of time, nothing is born and nothing dies. That which is eternal, is that which can neither be born nor die. Neither created nor destroyed. And what is that?
The Law of Emptiness: Form is what we know and experience, but form is mostly emptiness, and emptiness is where we live.
Emptiness and form are two aspects of the same thing, just as the head and tail of a coin are two sides of the same thing. We are surrounded by emptiness. It is vast. It is everywhere. It gives shape to all form, just as form gives shape to it. We get enchanted by form and become blind to the emptiness. The walls of the room define the space, but it is the space that we use, that we live in. Our blindness to emptiness is like clinging to the wall and never using the full available space of the room. Those who get to know emptiness realize that it is the heart of being.
The Law of the Present: This particular time and place are the only reality.
If we constantly live in resistance to whom and what and where and when we are, we can not live fully. If we derive our sense of self from anything other than who and what and where we are right now, we will never be happy. Living in the present is easy, but we make it hard. Living in the present, which is the only reality, means being open to everything exactly as it is and clinging to nothing. What we tend to do is just the opposite: close our minds and our experience to almost everything except our own habitual thoughts, and grasp at everything that serves the pattern of those thoughts. Thus is it possible to go from birth to death without ever really living. And since the whole universe participates in the creation of this and every moment, living here and now is a wee bit of a threat to the ego/self, which thrives on the illusion of being separate, autonomous, and in control.
The Law of Love (which encompasses all the other laws): The essential nature of reality is total acceptance of, and movement with, everything exactly as it is.
This is very difficult for most of us to accept. We tend to define ourselves by what we exclude or whom we exclude. Total acceptance of everything exactly as it is feels like personal annihilation to most people. Who am I if not my dislikes, my gripes, my revulsions, my conflicts, my opinions? Who am I if not who I think I am?
The Law of the Separate Self: There is no seperate "self!"
This "law" is actually our attempted violation of all the other laws. To believe in the fiction of the separate self is to violate all these laws, and since these are laws that can not be violated, the attempt to do so is the root of violence, and causes great suffering, for oneself, for others, and for the Earth. The illusion of separation, and it is truly only an illusion, a tale we tell ourselves, comes from resisting and clinging. Imagine if the "in" breath tried to separate itself from the" out" breath and declare that it alone was eternally real. Death would not be far off.
The Law of Release: We will return endlessly to all that is resisted or held until all is accepted and released.
It is my experience that human suffering springs from our attempts to resist Life or cling to Life. The way to end suffering is to embrace life - including that which is painful - but not cling to it. By returning to those places where we have been hurt, or frightened, or shut out, and allowing ourselves to fully experience the pain, without resisting it and without clinging to it, without weaving a story around it; that which was held, and which persisted as suffering, can finally be released. It is an almost miraculous alchemy that transforms suffering into joy.
One could also state this law as follows: we will continue to attempt to violate the first five Laws until we become aware of the violation, and so begin to embody the Law of Love.
By John L Crockett
Law of Causation
Besides the Laws of Permanence and Cause and Effect, the Buddha also preached the Law of Causation. Through his meditation, Buddha observed that a thing does not exist independently by itself. Every existence is a combination. Without such as a composition, nothing actually exists. To beis to be under the formation of causes and conditions.
Let's try some observations as the Buddha did. Scientists now confirm that the human body is a combination of one hundred trillion cells which create the formation of blood, bones, and inner organs such as the brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, stomach, intestines... and of outer organs such as eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, etc. Lacking one or more of these components, a body does not function properly or simply cannot exist.
The Law of Causation shows that in humans, there is no such thing called the "ego" or "self". The concept of "I" or "You", with the underlying idea that "Mine" is always better than "Yours" is a delusion. Actually, if "my" condition is better than "yours", it is only because the karma of previous life is not the same, rather than because my body is better than yours.
In addition, even if the body is make from a perfect junction of cells and organs, it will not last long if there is no proper provision of fresh air, nutritious food, and potable water.
In other words, the Law of Causation also means that: "Things only exist when there are enough causes which come together under favorable conditions; and things will disintegrate when causes or conditions are scattered".
Obviously, to be a human, there are numerous causes and conditions that blend together and create an existence. From the day a mature egg met a healthy sperm and grew in a womb, there are countless unfavorable causes and conditions that may abolish the chance of being born a healthy human child.
Statistics shows that in the Third World, the percentage of young children who survive their harsh environment after seven years of age is also very low. Apparently, being born in the Third World is having less favorable causes and conditions than in the industrialized world.
The Buddha explained that the earnest observations on any events in daily life, one can recognize that nothing happens without numerous causes and conditions involved.
Normally, they appear in innumerable form that result in good or bad occurrences, depending on one's karma. When karma is formed and causes and conditions cast on, it is not in anyone's hand to control the event any more; not even Gods.
Scientists today express the same about the Law of Causation. If there is enough Oxygen and Hydrogen in proper proportions and if the condition, if favorable, it will product Water (2H + O = H2O). Otherwise, no water exists. This same law applies to all aspects of the human world, including family structures, politics, economics, and social activities.
by Thich Thanh Tu translated by Minh Tâm