Keep Quiet

That we believe ourselves to be a person is completely taken for granted. We don’t even think to look into this, to question its veracity. We’ve been conditioned to stop short in our curiosity about our nature.

Go all the way. Use your discrimination and intelligence to fathom what’s true. I can set you down the right track, many can, but you must walk the walk.

Perhaps it’s only when the limits of our knowledge fails us in some way that we even become interested in looking beyond our previously prescribed limits of comprehension. Maybe our life needs to break apart a little first. Maybe it needs to fall to pieces. Either way “if it ain’t broke, don’t look” seems to be the maxim of choice for most.

Who wants to know?

To whom do these thoughts arise?

To me.

Who am I?

.

There is a pathless path, a road to self-knowledge that begins and ends right here and right now. It is the road of stopping, of ending, of keeping still.

Quiet.

From where do thoughts appear?

If you watch them, in real time, you can locate their source. Not conceptually, or inferentially, not by speculating on their psychological origins. No, right now, arising in your mind. Are you not the awareness-space in which they arise? Are you not the emptiness that Knows?

Just watch, observe, abide.

So tell me, where is this body of yours? Where is your sense of self, of being?

What comes first, the knowing or the known? Are they two?

And is this mind of yours in the body? Or is this body in the mind?

And this mind, whose is it? And how big is it? And where?

Abide

Observe

Inquire

This is the work of the Jnani. This is the awakening Spirit.

It is only conditioning that seems to muddy the view. Only thoughts, concepts believed.

There’s nothing to do here. Life wakes up to itself naturally, spontaneously, in its own time, through you and I. This game of separation is fleeting, short-lived, less than a heartbeat; a whisper, a story, and a dream.

You are not the body, the cause of all your misery. It’s here, sure. It shows up, but you are so much more – intelligence itself, life itself, existence itself. The only thing holding you back from knowing this for yourself is your loyalty to concepts, particularly about yourself.

There’s an obviousness about our nature that is revealed when observed, but the mind’s insistence on holding a contrary view, the insistence on filtering what-is through a framework of conceptual notions, and the refusal to drop the false in the light of the true, the real..

Any moment, any given moment you can simply refuse to pick up anything. Forget about dropping, just leave it be. Let it go, remain open, you are openness itself.

Breathe.

In the light of the truth the false dissolves, has no weight, no substance, inconsequential.

The truth is bliss.

You have to set your motives straight. Do you want some philosopical position you can cling to or some knowledge you can use as social currency? Or do you want the truth on its own terms, for its own sake?

Keep checking in. It’s just you that you’re accounting to, no-one else is calling you to step up. It’s just that the price of truth is integrity, or ‘earnestness’; true sincerity, courage, and humility.

And ultimately surrender. Not to anyone or anything, just surrender.

 

Martyn

Exploring present moment awareness.

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