Does God Exist?

Actually, God is an entirely human concept. What else could it be? Please take the time to consider that carefully and give it its due.

It could be said that God is humanity's attempt to describe what is beyond itself, beyond its own knowledge—which, it would have to concede, according to its own logic, is theoretically infinite. Even that should be moderately impressive. We cannot award it higher marks than that because, sadly, we have not yet exceeded the bounds of thought and convention.

This charming little drawing, archly done in a mock childish style,

is probably a little too sophisticated for ordinary children,

even though or perhaps because it's complete nonsense.

Knowledge and Being

People prize knowledge over being. So they are always trying to assimilate knowledge, which they believe will help them get around in the world.

But getting around in the world, one is always trying to reach somewhere. In other words, what one is trying to do is to BE. It's called 'living,' but in fact, it's just forever trying to reach something. It means involvement in a process of becoming, rather than being.

BEING is the big challenge, because the whole of conditioning tries to kick you out of being into a frantic world of search and grasp. Of achievement, realization, 'fulfillment.' And it's all going the wrong way! It is running away from a self that accompanies you where ever you go anyway. It is turning one's back on being in order to become something. 

As To The Future

A completely mistaken attitude is always to be trying to grab for the future, to be trying to get to the future before it arrives. One has no presence; no presence of mind; no peace at all, as long as one is scrabbling to get to a future which will NEVER ARRIVE!!

Then and Now

The people of the past: where have they gone? They have not 'gone' anywhere - that's the fact.

Because ALL the people of the past have never been anything but the timeless presence of awareness (which is now). This is the truth of it, the 'open secret.'* It's a secret because it seems to be hidden from the human point of view. One can't understand it at all. Everyone who has ever been must be now? From the human viewpoint, because of birth, which is bound up in time, it is ruled out totally.

One says, 'I don't understand at all. I can't make head nor tail of it. I'm sorry: it's beyond me totally. I've got things to do.' It's only those really interested who will find out that there has never been anything else but presence.

Imagine: all those countless billions of people, the figures of history, never were anything but this very same awareness, which is strictly speaking nothing at all. Not an object of any sort.

*Wei Wu Wei

The Stream of Awareness

A word about the basis of everything: above all, note that awareness is without detail of any kind, so that detail may appear to exist. Existence itself does not appear; appearance is the manifestation of existence. Included detail is all that is felt to go on in one's personal mind—to be voided in a single flash of awareness or clung to as a sort of virtual reality.

On The Road To Enlightenment

To the end of exposing the self-centredness bundled into the notion of 'personal enlightenment,' the quest can be imagined as hiking up a fairly steep, winding road to get to a mountaintop. It's a tortuous way up, but it'll be well worth it, one imagines, to get an amazing view over everything, a sense of immensity, a feeling of being on top of the world—ah! the pinnacle of spiritual endeavour.  Persevering in spite of any and all difficulties, including much tedium, one eventually reaches the last turn in the road and—surprise! there on the summit is a huge car park and an enormous coach is slowly disgorging a lot of people in wheelchairs. Privately one feels a strange sense of disappointment because that view was for oneself alone. One desired the exhilaration of looking out from the top of the mountain, with the overview and the sheer aloneness that should have been there. Still, it was a bit churlish on the part of a spiritual seeker such as oneself to mutter a complaint. They're in wheelchairs, dammit! So it's a good thing that they get to enjoy the view. One turns to go, thoughtfully.

Another time maybe. Anyway, it's only a dream. In the meantime, it may be useful to bear in mind that 'Spirit' is already and always all the 'enlightenment' there could be, so that the seeker is an irrelevance. Oh, and 'Just find out how to put a stop to conceptual thinking.'*


*(Huang Po)

Respect - an analysis of the break-down of relationship

We frequently hear complaints from those who feel they are not getting the respect that they feel is their due. People often demand respect for themselves and their 'views'. But the fact is that irritability, contempt and general bad behaviour is more likely to be expected from another. As the world population swells, respect is lost.

But that's no good, because when respect is lost, everything starts to go wrong!

Just look at what happens in relationship. First things get casual, causing people to cut off from each other just a little bit. In other words, they don't give each other the proper respect. Then quite a lot of misunderstandings occur; people don't mesh properly and they end up hurting each other through ignorance, because they are not paying attention. They hurt each other, in small ways, but it builds up until they get heartily sick of each other and feel angry and annoyed. Well, yes—ignorance is very annoying, and it easily becomes a question of, "One of us has got to go—will it be you, or me?"

So it's very important not to lose respect! Surely it's not so difficult? However, it's respect for the whole environment, not just for people.

Real respect is observing things and people just as they are. It doesn't imply a special kind of deference. Respect is in fact a deference to the whole of reality. The biggest killer of respect is, of course, self-contempt.

Mind Clear. Hopefully.

This letter sent today from IRI to some close colleagues is exceptionally comprehensive, and accessible:-

'This is just a brief note to acknowledge your message of appreciation. When we investigate these vital matters, we have to struggle through a dense fog of human hopelessness. This is because the sense of deadendedness permeates a society that no longer possesses faith to provide hope of eventual salvation, release and remission of sins. It is thought better and even right for everyone simply to indulge themselves in every sensation, overriding any promptings of morality, but the result—plain for all to see—is deep depression, exhaustion, despair and sickness. And then, what hope is there for those past, well past, the mating age? Of course this state of affairs has been building up as history for a long time now and stress is such that men are breaking down in tears and crying that they want to be women. Women get all the attention and even though they increasingly take over men's roles the womb remains the cradle of all meaning for humans. And if death is increasingly seen as the sole and only release, how could life not be felt as overwhelmingly depressing?

'The weather today, being drizzly, overcast, cold and sufficiently foggy, gives us the perfect opportunity to study all this, doesn't it?

'To be able to see and acknowledge this sense of hopelessness at once gives us a little distance, enables us to probe more effectively into what on earth consciousness is up to!

'You write that 'the study, in fact, is preparation for release.' The trouble with such a statement is that it presents us with a victim or victims who are being harassed by life and who hope to be released at some time which is not now. There's that idea of 'hope' again! Hope allows for postponement, so that we can continue to be hapless members of a disintegrating society, but hopefully—who knows?—we might get some sort of relief eventually—especially if we study hard. 

'Whatever meaning can be ascribed to the ideas of 'release' or 'relief' or any other term indicating a total cessation of suffering, that meaning must be present here and now and forever, so to speak. It's just that we're addicted to the pleasures and pains of humanhood, which require us to continue as entities, that is, as (imagined) objects.

'What can I do but try to state it all as clearly as possible? 

'Surrounding us, at all times, is the absolute clarity of 'mind,' and we are right in the middle, as it were, seeking and finding objections! 

'"Sorry, but it's what we do!!" 

'And this is where the joker bops the sufferer on the head and the audience laughs.'

Should consciousness be studied in the first-person, the second-person, or the third-person-plural?

Neither 1st, 2nd nor 3rd, nor any other number!

The basic point is that awareness is not personal, contrary to what we are taught. Awareness is bodiless, and doesn't know dimension at all: it's undimensional. And 'it' is not something else, something other. It's what we are, and it's what we are now, not some other time — in the past, in the future, or in the present.

Not in the present!?!

No, because the present is only part of the same imaginary time-sequence. Why does Awareness need to bother with terms like 'past,' 'present' and 'future?' It's only people who engage in mind-games like that!

Religion

is when one tries to objectify the first principle.

Atheism happens when one imagines that principle is oneself.