One Without a Second
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The state we call realization is simply being one’s self,
not knowing anything or becoming anything.
If one has realized,
he is that which alone is and which alone has always been.
He cannot describe that state, he can only be that.
~Ramana Maharshi
ONE WITHOUT A SECOND
The awakeness that is our true nature is experienced as the expansiveness of pure Being. I am referring here to a verb, or verbness, not a noun, hence the perhaps less confusing Beingness. Upon his awakening, after being asked by his friends if he was god, demon, or man, Buddha stated simply (we are told), “I am awake.”
I say, “I am awakeness.”
When the final tether drops away, even I Am becomes too much. OnlyAmness remains: brilliant, self-lit, a symphonic aliving; beyond time, space, judgment or limitation. This aliving is what we are. It knows itself and only itself, because there is nothing else for it to know.
Since this aliving is the one thing going on, the one without a second, it is not self-reflective. It knows that it is, but it has no idea what it is. It sees only itself, and harbors no preferences, allowing What Is to play out upon its screenness. Who, what, when, where, why and how—the fundamental questions of relativity—can only arise from a center, and there is neither center nor edge to boundlessness itself. It has no inside or outside, apex or nadir, beginning or end. This wholeness simply is. It exists. Nothing further can actually be said about it, although we are going to give it a mighty try.
Opposites are always, always of the dream; they apply only within relativity, which is another word for the dream, meaning our personal world. Opposites are the chief mechanism of the dream. Whatever exists within relativity has an opposite, even if it’s an imagined opposite, and cannot be fundamentally real. Anything can, however, certainly appear be real and that’s good enough for us. Real or not, relativity is our everyday experience. Neither philosophy, nor beliefs fill us up when we are hungry. We are not trying to transcend our daily experience, or our common sense.
Nonduality does not reject relativity—it cannot reject relativity. Nonduality rejects nothing, but rather encompasses everything; it includes all objects whether they are apparently material or apparently mental. It also includes the conceptual absolute, as I use it here. Notions of absolute and relative are the final bastions of an inferred duality. These views are conceptual opposites, which can only refer to the dream. So for our purposes here, it might be closer to the truth to say that they are aspects; two different views of the not-two Reality—that Reality which includes them both.
Reality and Nonduality are used here as synonyms, and they are always, always inclusive, never exclusive. Oneness, so to speak, means the whole potato: there can be nothing other than it, and nothingbeyond it. There is no other, there is no beyond. What Is rules itself.
The aliving that we are is without comparison, for one would have to step outside of the one thing in order to compare the one thing. There is nothing prior to, outside of, or beyond oneness-noneness; the one-without-a-second knows no other and has no past or future tense. There is only Now, which includes whatever is currently arising.
Since aliveness only knows that it is, and doesn’t know what it is, it has no resistance to itself when that self is expressed as arisings. All resistance is the child of an imaginary center. That self-focusing is ego’s job until it isn’t.
Again, this aliving exists without companion, or comparison. This is why we sometimes say it is all-accepting, or that it is acceptance itself—because it has no alternatives to What Is, as it is, right now. Any complaint or compliance on our part is merely relativity’s apparent commentary, or reaction, to the absolute’s current expression of Beingness.
One of the most powerful statements that can be made is currently a throwaway term in our fool’s languaging: it is what it is.
What Is, above all, is clean. Simple and stripped. Naked and neutral.
However, human beings are not creatures to be held back by mere facts. We have ideas that we like better than truth, simply because ideas allow for us—these fictitious separate beings within a make-believe foreign being. The ghosts want to live!
Thus we habitually override our actual experience and defer to our imagination. Until we awaken we hardly ever live in What Is. We blindly choose to live in what isn’t, and so long as we do, we will suffer at the hands of our own imagination. We will get to be right, but we will not get to be free. We can’t be both things at the same time.
After awakening we almost always try to hold onto both of our lovers—truth and fiction—thus we experience a false sense of oscillation, but ultimately we will have to declare ourselves faithful to one or the other.
This post-awakening movement is almost always touch and go. Ironically, it’s quite difficult to give up nothing in exchange for everything. The 180 Paradox holds true yet again, and it feels like just the other way around! That we are giving up everything to get nothing.
Humans are positively addicted to their sense of a separate self, and like all addicts, we live in denial. We deny and defend; we are unwilling to see-be the truth, because it is the giving up of our imagined autonomy and delicious specialness. Of course all of these circular movements are just as they should be until they aren’t. We pretend to be in bondage so that we can pretend to be set free. Hide. Seek. Find. Celebration!
We pretend to be a human this in search of a cosmic That. In fact we are the cosmic That, caught helplessly in the pull of our own dream, always being tugged toward self-recognition, clarity, stability, and finally abiding, embodied awakeness.
And so it goes until it doesn’t.
~Fred Davis 7.22.13
