For those of you who are linked to go straight to the Post page,
I wanted to take a moment to share the copy that’s now
on the Home page. This is the truth of our situation,
in the clearest words I could find.
The chief reason for unending confusion in the pursuit of truth is the sense that one has already understood, and is simply lacking the direct experience commensurate with one’s knowledge. What feels like the cusp of enlightenment is in fact the heart of ignorance, from which most localized conceptualizations of Awakeness will never escape. Whenever Awakeness-as-seeking is self-subjected to that experience, it will almost always require apparent intercession by a perceived outside party if Awakeness is ever to become knowingly conscious of itself, much less remain so.
It does not surprise me that Awakeness so rarely comes to know its true nature in any given apparent, relative, location; it stuns me that it ever does. Yet as seemingly impossible as it is for Awakeness to “awaken” from delusion, that sensed event, which is always the projected “achievement” of a supposed individual, is a short walk in a pleasant park when proportionately compared to the always-ongoing process of Awakeness seeing through the previously believed thoughts that now constitute the ghostly remnants of an entirely imagined separate self.
Thus it is the empty ego’s lack of willingness to keep on “getting it,” versus the pull to self-declare that we have already “gotten it,” which prevents the advent of conscious, divine abidance, and the accompanying sense of localized embodiment. The egoic desire for graduation is so strong that it prevents Awakeness from ever going to school, a school which is created, principaled, taught and attended only by itself.
.
Ego’s acceptance of its own arrogance as being rational is what costs the so-called individual the humility required to recognize and accept the truth of itself when presented with it. Thus is Awakeness’s continuously self-reinforcing trance deepened, and the eternal Ferris wheel of the ever-circular cosmic joke infinitely filled with, and endlessly turned by, Awakeness itself. I know of nothing which could actually be funnier, yet simultaneously feel so tragic, as this perfectly constructed, seemingly infinite mental maze that is gleefully enjoyed and agonizingly endured by an invented character in a viscerally experienced, but nonetheless utterly
make-believe world.
-Fred Davis
August 22, 2016 @ 2:50 am
Reading and pondering this is an effective spiritual practice. It feels like like it’s got everything crammed into those few lines.
August 22, 2016 @ 3:00 am
I think that’s an excellent idea, Robbin. Next week we’ll talk about paragraph two.