Is it a feeling? Are you looking for the experience
of positive-only feelings? If so, there may be a condition where that occurs. I
think Walt Whitman found it, as did Richard Bucke, who wrote a book about the
condition, Cosmic Consciousness. I suspect it's also what Jill Bolte
Taylor experienced when a hemorrhagic stroke shut down the left hemisphere of
her brain, which she described so eloquently in her Stroke of Insight. I
don't know if Taylor's subsequent experience has or will dovetail with
Whitman's, but he reported that his cosmic consciousness left after an initial
period and, although it returned, it did so less frequently and for shorter
durations as he aged. It may have been better than no comfort or maybe worse,
once it had been experienced and then lost but in any case, it wasn't Perfect
Timeless Comfort. And while we often hear people say they'd settle for more
comfort (or peace of mind, or love, or security, or certainty, and so on), more
is never enough.
Our mentalities could be ranged along a line from
feeling-oriented to thought-oriented. If we're predominately feeling oriented,
we're most likely looking for the magic elixir to come in the form of feelings.
But if we're predominately thought-oriented, then we're probably expecting our
efforts to arrive in thought form. If you're not looking for a solution in the
domain of feeling, are you looking for a conceptual understanding that will
bring Perfect Peace?
If a teacher or a teaching conveys an understanding that seems to satisfy you,
how will you know whether what you've found is real or a
product of suggestion? When Douglas Harding,[1]
whom I have great respect for, would ask: "What do you see when you look
back at what you're looking out from?"[2]
he was pointing in the direction of final authority. But he then provided a
suggested answer: no face, open space, awareness, capacity for the whole world,
not a thing separate from everything else, no-thing full of the whole world,
and so on. If a teaching brings our beliefs into question, then it's effective.
But if we believe we've now seen the truth in a new understanding, we're stuck
in a belief that's only relatively true maybe equally as true as the
one it contradicts.
The advaita vedanta or nondual teaching that's currently
popular in the US and Europe, sometimes referred to as neo-advaita, has
led many of its adherents to a conceptual image of nonduality. The ersatz
nature of the attempt at "understanding" the truth of nonduality
intellectually is humorously portrayed in a short video titled "The
Advaita Trap"[3]
using a dialogue supplied by the likeable nonduality teacher Jeff Foster: "There is no I
to get anything, and nothing to get
there is nobody here who thinks
there is no beauty, beauty is a concept
there is no past, only the
eternal present
there are no problems in this eternal present," and
so on. In other words, there's nothing to be done other than to admit that
there's nothing to get.
The conviction that seeking is the problem and that the
solution is just to admit that there's no one here and nothing to be done
represents a windowless corner that the seeker may find himself boxed into. Seeking
is the automatic reaction of the mind to feeling a want (i.e., that something
is missing or lacking). Trying to think ourselves away from consciously feeling
a feeling only complicates the condition.
In addition to the intellectual trap that
advaita folks can fall into, there's also an emotional advaita trap, which
can be expressed in the belief that: "Everything's fine in the
present moment." Everything is truly fine in dreamless sleep, but when
dreaming or waking consciousness occurs, the dimension of problems we
call it life manifests. Everything may be truly fine behind or beyond
time, but knowing that involves a form of knowing that only occurs
beyond the mind's limitation.
You don't have to be an adherent of neo-advaita views to
fall into the trap, emotional or intellectual, that seeking is the problem. The
seeker of ultimate satisfaction repeatedly finds that what he thought would
bring full satisfaction didn't, in fact. Or he intuits that more seeking along
the same line won't bring lasting relief. Or he reaches a belief in his own
inability to find that which may bring relief. He concludes that seeking is
useless, and if he could stop seeking, that would relieve his dissatisfaction.
But seeking is a symptom, and suppressing or repressing a symptom isn't likely
to cure a disease. Time may cure a malady, but not when time is the malady.
The Truth Will Set You Free
Jesus was reported[4]
as saying that the truth will set you free. What kind of truth would he have
been referring to? Would it have been objective or subjective?
By objective, we usually mean
"mind-independent" that is, not subject to the judgment of a
conscious entity, as in "scientific" evidence, where observations are
evident and reproducible. The opposite of objective, or subjective,
typically refers to the way things seem to us
opinions or
interpretations of experience that vary with the person experiencing them.
Plato, however, distinguished between objective knowledge, subjective opinions,
and a third form of knowing: subjective knowledge, or true belief.
Self-consciousness where the mind experiences a thing,
an object of consciousness, and automatically infers a self-thing, the
experiencer or subject of consciousness is the "sting of the
scorpion," as the Indian guru Nisargadatta Maharaj pointed out. The belief
in being a separate thing apart from objects of consciousness, is the induced
duality at the root of our existential suffering.
Regardless of the object of your quest whether it's
completion, wholeness, certainty, love, security, or any other of a host of
abstract objectives no object will settle or fully satisfy the
heart-mind. No thing, neither tangible nor intangible (thought, feeling)
will satisfy the longing. Full, permanent satisfaction can be found only in a
new form of knowing or seeing: knowing the knower, or seeing the seer a type
of knowing not limited by relativity. That may be what Plato was referring to
as the third form of knowing.
The antidote to duality is not a belief in
nonduality. The antidote is love. The path is one of
triangulation[5]
over opposites, over equally true[6]
or false beliefs, which ends when we know what we truly are. Ultimate knowing
or seeing is our true nature or being. Ultimate love is true identity.
[1] See Douglas
Harding's "tube" experiment www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0okQCx9108
in this wonderful excerpt from his "On Having No Head" video. [2] Douglas
Harding's "pointing" experiment http://headless.org/experiments/pointing.htm [3] "The
Advaita Trap 1: Absolute and Relative Confusion The Cartoon" www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KXidr0z1RY [4] John 8:32
Bible (New International Version): " Then you will
know the truth, and the truth will set you free." [5] See the
essay titled "Triangulation" at
www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/arTriangulation.htm [6] True
belief is an oxymoron from an absolute perspective. Beliefs are true or
false in relation to other beliefs. On the surface, you might expect that the
belief: "I'm something beyond consciousness, something that exists when
the body is in dreamless sleep, etc." may be a true belief. But it's like
a belief in nonduality: The belief and the believer of the belief are
mutually contradictory. Nonduality may be absolutely true, but a belief in it is not.
*
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What Are You Looking For?
by Art Ticknor
If you're looking for the truth, as opposed to a comforting
fantasy, let's consider together what you're looking for.
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