PRIME POST! Life Without Death

All week long I’ve been helping students recognize their stories of future. To see them is to see through them. It’s funny how just the presence Truth can be liberating. If you bring a lantern into a dark room you don’t have to muscle all the shadows away; the light simply dispels them.

This morning I was working with a student who has used one of my “mantras” quite a bit. She uses, “I am unborn, I am unbound, I am untouched.

I am unborn
[I am not in or of the dream that is my character, or the dream that is that character’s life.]

I am unbound
[I have a sense of being in the dream via the character, but upon investigation this is proven false.]

I am untouched.
[Not being in or of the dream, I am completely unaffected by anything that occurs within it.]

Used as a whenever-I-happen-to-think-about-it style of mantra, in actual practice (not in thinking about the practice) this little mantra can be an effective ice pick to wield against that big block of mental conditioning that declares, “I am not yet awake.” 

Chip, chip, chip. Sometimes it’s all we can do.

This morning, however, my friend said to me, “I often say that mantra to myself, but sometimes when I do, I think, ‘I want to really be Unborn!'” 

I said, “Look at what you’ve just said. Is it actually possible for you to become unborn tomorrow?” She immediately saw the ridiculousness of this position and we both laughed about it.

Yet this is precisely the position we typically hold. You are always already awake, and you can never not be awake, because you are always already Awakeness Itself!

Just as a sort of experiment, acknowledge or even pretend for a moment that you really are Oneness, regardless of what thought is telling you. Oneness wears all kinds of different costumes, and in this case Oneness is showing up wearing the unit Oneness sees when it looks in a mirror via the costume. 

If you take yourself to be the costume instead of the animating presence within the costume, then to the costume and other costumes similar to it, it will look like you are of the born persuasion — that you are populating a world. You are doing neither. You are experiencing a world but not populating it, because you are experiencing this world second-hand.

You are experiencing a world as it is being produced and experienced by that costume-unit-character, which is your primary experience. When you take yourself to be the costume you think, “I am living this life in this world.” It is to laugh.

When you discover your True Nature you immediately see something entirely different. You see that the costume you thought you were is not living an independent life. There is no independent life. There is just One Thing Going On and you are IT.

When you, Conscious Awakeness come to your senses, so to speak, you see that the costume is being lived. The costume appears to experience the world, but in fact the costume is empty. The lights are on, but there’s no one home. YOU are the one experiencing first a character and then a character’s world.

The costume-character-unit is merely a camera — a sentient lens through which you are looking. The costume is your tool, not you! Thanks to this costume, and it’s sense of individuality, and the story you partly inherited, partly were gifted, and partly cook up as you go, you, Conscious Awakeness get to experience yourself objectively.

You have a sense of individuality. Along with that sense of individuality comes a sense of being. But the sense of something is not the same thing as the truth of something. This is lila — the play of the universe.

This second-hand experience of self-as-object/object-in-a-world is what this whole play is all about. It’s the point of the dream. It’s not a mistake that you don’t recognize your True Nature until you do, those are the rules under which this experience manifests. 

You play until you’re tired. When you’re tired — suffering seems to wear you out the fastest — you abandon the story of separation and we, the bystanders to that story look at each other and say, “Look at that unit. It woke up.”

This is all just a spontaneous happening, including the stories of winning and losing, being right or being wrong, and being asleep and waking up. Within this spontaneous happening there are patterns you, Conscious Awakeness, can come to recognize prior to your abandonment of the story. You begin to be able to spot unskillful patterns — your character’s unskillful patterns, as they unfold within the dream.

As you, consciousness, slowly recognize, pull apart, and then embody a unit, your presence mandates an absence of the character. We don’t clear up in post-awakening, the character is gradually cleared out. Out goes the character, along with all (or much!) of it’s tainted conditioning.

We call this “dying before we die,” but in truth there is no death for something that is unborn to begin with, so that term is just another of the many erroneous terms that we use to try (usually unsuccessfully) to point to truth. 

The character is devoid of truth, it has no actual center. There’s nothing there to die, because there’s nothing more (or less) than a series of patterns that have their home in space and time. As a result of that, it’s going to take time for the patterns to wither in what we erroneously but skillfully call post-awakening.

You are beyond space and time, but your experience is of space and time — of volume and duration — the two things necessary to create a convincing mock reality in which you can ride the roller coaster of becoming. We all find our thrills where we can.

In truth, however, this is not a becoming thing, it’s a being thing. You may not think you are unborn, but I promise you such is the case. Don’t take my word for that — wake up and see it for yourself. The process, so to speak, of “awakening” is the movement from thinking you are a character holding doubt about the truth of Nonduality to the conviction that you are, in fact, Nonduality Itself.

One way for you to know that you have gone insane is to notice that you have a story of future.

“I am going to wake up — soon!”
[You can’t wake up waiting to wake up.]

“If I can just get through this set of problems, then I’ll be able to really concentrate on my spirituality.”
[That set of problems is showing up to make you concentrate on your spirituality now.]

“Right now I have some really important stuff to do, but then…”
[The content of our daily lives counts, but none of it ultimately matters.]

“I know they say to surrender to all arisings, but surely they can’t mean this arising!”
[That is exactly the arising they’re talking about.]

Enough. I’m supposed to be on holiday. Betsy has been sleeping for hours, and here I am at 1:30 a.m., typing away at this damn computer. This is a totally one-trick-pony of a unit, let me tell you. And did I mention that we don’t actually control these units???

Peace.