Standing As Awareness Read online

  Yes, I was telling him that experience isn’t “mine.” It carries no logo or branding. If you add up all the experiences that seem like they are yours, and set them aside – what is there of you left over to have experience? Such a place can’t be found. Yet experience is a presence, a global sweetness, unshakable and unbroken.

  Yes, I’ve heard you say this. I’ve heard others say this kind of thing too. But I just don’t get it. With all the talk about awareness and consciousness, it smacks of idealism to me. I’m more a physicalist. Can you explain this in physical terms?

  Sure. We can use physical terms. That doesn’t mean it’s a physical thing. It’s not a mental thing either. Experience has no geographical center or preferred substance. Let’s say you experience a pain in your leg. It seems to immediately suggest the leg itself. You could say that the leg has a geographical location. But the experience of the pain has no location.

  I feel that my experience is here.

  Right about where you feel your leg to be?

  Yes, right here.

  OK, let’s try this. You are sitting at the table. Shut your eyes and reach your hand out to touch the tabletop.

  OK...

  Now, the touching itself, the experience itself. Is it behind something? Is it in front of something? Is it to the left or right of something?

  Well, the table is right here in front of me. My hand tells me so.

  For the moment, I’m not talking about the table or the hand. Your question was about experience – so try to isolate the experience itself. See what’s true of it. Is the experience in front of you?

  (Eyes still closed) Now I think I understand what you mean. The experience itself isn’t in front or in back of anything. It’s just kind of there...

  Yes. Does it seem to be inside your body?

  No. My body is not really included in the experience. It seems to be just present, just there.

  From the vantage point of inside this touching-the-table experience, does it seem like it belongs to you?

  Again, no. From inside the experience, I have no impression of me.

  OK, you can open your eyes. This is what I meant by no “your” or “my” to experience. It is presence, neither personal nor impersonal. You asked how my experience is. Like this. And it is the same for you. It is experience itself.

  But when I think about it, lots of stuff comes back, like my body, and the idea that experience is nothing but brain function. You know that I’m a chemistry major!

  Yes, but the brain and chemistry, and your web of beliefs are no different. They are just like the table. They are non-located experience. There are just presence – the same way you saw right here.

  Yes, I did get a glimpse right there. It certainly doesn’t seem like that all the time. Right now, it seems like the brain made me have that experience, and is making me have this one. How can I get that same nonlocated experience all the time like you do?

  Do you visually observe the brain creating experience in a particular place? Or is that a story? Your experience, even in the midst of that story, is nonlocated. There is no true location. There is no true entity to occupy any location or to serve as a personal pivot-point for experience.

  But how can I really be sure of that?

  At some quiet point in the day, take a look at what seem to be your experiences. See if you can find any inherent difference between the experiences that seem located, and the glimpse of nonlocated presence you had. Experience will prove it: everything is like that tabletop moment. Seeing this very clearly will make you more and more unable to take the brain-function story as absolute truth. This in turn will allow you to open into experience itself. It will become your living reality. This is the sweetness I mentioned earlier.

  That would be great! But what would it do to my science studies? If science isn’t absolutely true, then what should I do? Change my major?

  There’s no need to change your major! No story is absolutely true – that is, no story is a more realistic image of a storyfree reality. Science, law, folklore, medicine, religion – none of it. Even our conversation here. Instead of regarding these concepts as accurate or inaccurate representations of a reality outside of concepts, allow the assumed border between inside and outside to melt away. All of these fields of study are stories or songs, interwoven webs that arise within the globality of experience itself. Chemistry is just like this – it’s a very helpful story. It relates to other stories, such as creating new medicines and computer chips. If you don’t change your major, maybe you will create a new medicine. That would be a nice story! None of this requires you to believe chemistry to be a representational truth. That belief is misleading, unnecessary, and leads to feelings of separation.

  (A few seconds later) Wow! I got a jolt right there, like a fl ash of insight. But now it’s gone. Let me think about this for a while...

  So Now – How Should I Talk?

  Yesterday I had a deep experience that everything is borderless space. I just knew it. And then of course I came back to my normal kind of experience. But now I don’t think that anything I see or hear is the truth anymore. I feel that I am not being true to my realization by the kind of talk that goes on day to day.

  Sometimes it’s confusing to encounter nondual teachings. Many varieties of nondual teachings seem to imply that there is simply no free will, no mind, no people and no objects. So we wonder how to talk without “backsliding.” If the teachings are then taken at face value, what about those mundane things like paying taxes, raising children, eating dinner and getting a haircut? Do we somehow stop doing these things now that we’ve ingested a teaching that says they aren’t what they seem, that they don’t truly exist?

  So, is there a way I should talk now?

  No. Any cosmically grounded “shoulds” have vanished. Talk as you please. There’s no need for a “nondually correct” way to speak. There’s no fixed, objective world out there to become indignant if you describe it in the “wrong” terms! There are no wrong terms! In speaking, you are free from the limitation of “getting the world right.” Follow your heart. Sometimes people begin their relationship to teachings by adopting a new vocabulary, trying it on for size. You might find a delight in the words, or a resonance with a beloved teacher speaking those words. The teachings might then grow to become clearer through inference or demonstration, or even a spontaneous, noninferential experience. And then at some point it is unshakably realized that experience was never truly characterized by duality or separation in the first place.

  At this point, what had been felt as a difference between “appearance” and “reality” collapses. It no longer seems like there is an “accurate” or “inaccurate” way to “represent” things. Speech is no longer seen as a mirror of reality, but becomes free and unveiled.

  But Ramana and Nisargadatta and Buddha never spoke about paying taxes or getting a haircut...

  This is because virtually every word you have ingested from these teachers was recorded and extracted from teaching contexts. It’s not so common to chatter about one’s hygiene or personal finances while surrounded by people and conversing about nonduality... It becomes a matter of language and context. Multilingual people don’t speak the same language or dialect all the time in every situation. A physicist might devote his life to scientific research, but you can be sure he doesn’t tell the traffic cop, “I didn’t run a red light, because subatomic particles are all there is.”

  But I feel that I’m falling back into duality by speaking normally.

  You can’t slip into duality, which is the false claim that the world is made of many separate things truly separate from you. You can’t create duality by speaking. There is freedom in this. Once you know the truth of yourself, you will feel this freedom from falling.

  Imagine you are telling a friend about your vacation. You want to say how you went to Paris and saw the Eiffel Tower. But then you know that there are truly no external, separate objects to see, and no individual, located
point of view where seeing comes from. There is truly no separate seer. And you know that in nondual circles people often speak in a way that doesn’t assume the reality of these things. And you’ve read how Ramana and Papaji and other famous teachers have encouraged seekers to ask, “Who did this, who said this?” So you are tempted to say something like, “This form appeared to travel and was merged into the Paris form. In the illusory passage of time, the Eiffel Tower form appeared. There was the illusion of excitement in this form.” But there’s no need to speak like this all the time, especially once you have inquired and discovered the truth. You know the inseparability of you as awareness from all that arises within it, including cities and structures, you will not feel as though one way of speaking is more nondually correct than other ways of speaking.

  Words may even come to you more lightly and fluidly than before. Actions as well. There’s no conflict, no backsliding, no falling into anything by using everyday language instead of talk of appearance, form and borderless space.

  So it’s OK to speak in terms of “things”...

  Sure, we’re doing it now! In the Jewish, Advaitin, and Buddhist teachings, there is a profound insight: Not believing in things, yet speaking the language of things.

  “Thing-talk” is a kind of conceptual and social shorthand that makes life smoother. Refusing to use thing-talk leads to foolishness. And not crazy-wisdom, sagelike foolishness, but Beavis ‘n’ Butthead slacker-foolishness: “Pay my restaurant check? No way – that would require separation, and there isn’t any separation.”

  This almost sounds as if you’re trying to impress upon others that you have a deep realization. There’s a name for that kind of talk – Lucknow Disease.3

  So there’s no conflict, nothing gets created in this way...

  That’s right. And you don’t fall back. Insights don’t reverse themselves just because you use everyday speech. You won’t lose points. No one is keeping score. Contexts have different vocabularies. In chemistry lab, you might use the “everything-is-particles” vocabulary. In court testifying as a witness you might use everyday observational terms. While discussing meditation and relaxing into space, you’ll perhaps use some yogic, advaitic, spiritual and geometric terms. In psychology class you might use the language that allows for choice, cognition and willed action.

  In a Philosophy 101 class, you argue about the existence of choice, but in an Ethics 101 class, or ordering food at a diner(!), choice is most often assumed, so the talk is a bit different.

  All of these different language-groupings have their ways, their consistency and coherence. Only if you expect one vocabulary to truly represent all situations are you faced with the sense of fundamental incompatibilities or the need to reconcile different situations under a common neutral description. Without this expectation, language and thought are free.

  Is Consciousness Nondual?

  Many teachers say that consciousness is nondual. Isn’t this conclusion just conceptual? It seems like each one of us has a separate consciousness.

  Yes, it is conceptual. Any statement is conceptual. “Dual.” “Nondual.” These kinds of statements depend on concepts of consciousness, nonduality, duality, “is-ness,” and so forth. You say “just” conceptual. As opposed to what? Conceptual as opposed to actually true?

  Yes, I want to know what consciousness actually is, like what’s really true about it. Some teachers say that nondual consciousness is objectless. Others say that it is knowledge knowing itself. But that seems like a subject/object kind of thing, not very nondual! So, bottom line: nondual consciousness – which is it, objectless or self-knowing?

  “Objectless.” “Self-knowing.” Both are metaphors of slightly different flavors. They aren’t meant to be taken literally. These metaphors take advantage of the fact that most people feel that experience is divided. The metaphors are meant to indicate a way of experience that isn’t divided. Once that “happens,” that is, once experience no longer seems divided, then you won’t distinguish between “consciousness” and “other than consciousness.” The very notion of consciousness will gently and peacefully dissolve. And yet you may find yourself using the “consciousness” word, but again, lightly, with no metaphysical baggage attached.

  But I’ve heard of direct, nondual, experiential knowing. I’d like to know nondual consciousness in this way.

  Yes, this is exactly what I just described. You are looking to behold it directly, correct? In such a way that it embraces you and you embrace it, and there is nothing left out, correct?

  That’s right!

  It’s already happening! You inescapably know this consciousness in a nondual way by being it. It’s not the way the mind knows “2+2=4” or “Sacramento is the capital of California.” It’s not an objective knowing, because there are no objects in it. It’s not the kind of thing you can stand away from and look at from the side. Knowing consciousness is not like looking at the headlights of a car.

  Well, why do some teachers speak of “knowing it”? It sounds like some people know it and others don’t.

  And you’d like to be one of the knowers, correct? (smiles)

  Yes. There must be something to that. You’ve gotta admit, lots of writings mention this. What are they talking about?

  “Knowing it” means losing the confusion that you might actually be something else. It means to no longer take yourself as a person, as an object. In the West it’s called gnosis. In the East it’s said that you know it by being it. In both cases, it’s a discovery made by the mind about something that was always the case – that you are awareness itself. You are not a separate object, absolutely cut off from the world. The ironic thing is this – as soon as you “know” it, you see that “knowing” was impossible. The kind of thing to which people attribute “knowing” is a mind, a brain, or a person. But you have realized that these are only objects. Objects can’t “know” anything. A “mind” can’t know anything for the same reason that a “teacup” can’t know anything – it is an object. In fact, knowingness itself is an object. You also have seen that there are truly no separate objects at all, so there can be no separate “knowers.”

  Oh, I see what you mean about knowing. It doesn’t make sense to require myself to “know” something like this. But I would still like to not take myself as a person.

  You would like to lose the belief, the feeling, that you are a person?

  That’s right! I will feel less anguish then. Many teachers say that suffering comes from this belief.

  OK, but notice that you are asking as a person. Having beliefs and losing beliefs is the kind of thing that persons do. Nondual awareness doesn’t “do” anything.

  OK, so what’s wrong with that?

  Nothing! In fact it’s normal to see this in a personal way. Until you don’t...

  OK, later maybe I’ll understand it. But right now I must admit there’s the feeling of wanting to lose this belief, no matter what it is properly called.

  To lose this belief, become curious about what you are really made of. Be true to your own experience and find out whether you actually are a person.

  Find out – how?

  Look very deeply. Investigate the claim that you are a person by investigating the consequences of this claim. If the consequences do not bear up to your direct experience, then neither does the claim itself. For example, if you really are a person, then wherever you are, the person will be too. Is this true? Are you ever there when the person is not? Is the person ever there when the seer of the person is not? Look for the usual parts that make up the person. The body, the mind, values, emotions, memories and anything else included in the person. If you are there when these things are not present, then they can’t be the sum and substance of what you are.

  Can you give me an example of how I go about it?

  Deep sleep is the best example. During deep sleep, according to your experience, is your body present in experience during deep sleep?

  It must be there.

&
nbsp; But is it experienced? In deep sleep, do you see it, feel it, hear it or sense it?

  No...

  So in that moment, according to your experience, can it be said to be present?

  No.

  Are YOU there? Do you sense that you were absent? Look back on the experience of deep sleep. Does it now seem like you had gone out of existence? Or does it seem like you were present the whole time?

  It seems that I am like the body... I didn’t see the body in deep sleep. And I didn’t see or hear myself either.

  Good observation! But the YOU that I am asking about is the witnessing awareness. This is the nondual consciousness you asked about earlier. Did this witnessing awareness stop existing during deep sleep, and then begin existing again when you woke up? Or do you sense continuity in it?

  Now that you say it like that, I do sense continuity. Like I am not interrupted even through sleep.