The mystery and mastery of awareness
This post will explain the mystery of awareness. But it will probably be lengthy.
If you want to live in the mystery, you have to be a mystery yourself. And that’s actually quite easy. The mystery of you is that you are aware; you are conscious and consciousness, and all is consciousness, so the mystery is always right where you are.
Isn’t it a wonder that you can look at these letters, that are just symbols, just lines and curves thrown together, and yet you are able to find meaning in them and able to communicate back? And as you type your fingers naturally drift to the appropriate symbol-letter to express the thoughts arising in the mind. How does it do that? Isn’t it a wonder? You couldn’t do these these when you were born, and it took a couple years or more of practice and repetition to be able to master reading, writing and typing. And now it happens almost automatically.
That is the mystery and mastery of awareness. What you’ve forgotten is that these lines and curves that form letter-symbols have ABSOLUTELY NO MEANING IN AND OF THEMSELVES. They mean something because we’ve LEARNED to give them meaning. We’ve done so through AGREEMENT. If we didn’t follow the same program, if we didn’t agree that c-a-t spells cat. Then we couldn’t be doing this right now. Instead we’d be doing this:
jshsdbvcbashfhfHH
Do you know what that says? What it means? Me neither. But that’s only because we HAVEN’T AGREED TO GIVE IT A MEANING. Right now it’s gibberish. But you must remember that everything is gibberish. We’ve given meaning to some gibberish, and other gibberish has no agreed meaning yet.
If you don’t see the mystery in that, you’re going to miss the whole crux of sorcery. Because the entire world is the same gibberish that we’ve agreed to give meaning to. Let me emphasize this first with other examples in communicating before moving on. If you look closely under a microscope at newsprint or a book, you’ll see that each individual letter is made up of a bunch of dots. All these dots thrown together in such a way, really unrelated, but we intend the relation and give them meaning. Or Braille (reading for the blind)… it’s just bumps, but you can learn the system and agree that such and such bumps means this and such and such bumps means that. Without the agreement, they’re just bumps. But we’ve also even agreed to call them bumps… THEY’RE NOT BUMPS! We’ve just agreed to call them that. When we talk, our languages are just noises… but we’ve learned, been programmed, to give them meaning. It’s just noise. It’s actually chaos! But we’ve AGREED to see order in it. But there isn’t any. All is still chaos! Mystery!
So this applies to EVERYTHING. Not just communicating with others. We’ve agreed to call barky, branchy, leafy, rising from the soil towards the sky objects, TREES. And I’m not just saying that the mystery is that we’ve named things. I’m saying that we’ve agreed to recognize them as the complex things instead of their elements. And that sorcery, the mastery of awareness, is to learn to unrecognize them, to return order to chaos and then re-order it into whatever order you see fit.
YES, this has all been said by CC. I’m not trying to be original or claim anything. I’m just saying it again with many examples so that it hopefully impacts you.
IF IT DOESN’T IMPRESS YOU THAT WE ARE TAKING CHAOS/INFINITY AND ASSIGNING NON-EXISTENT DIVISIONS AND ORDERS TO IT AND GIVING IT MEANING THROUGH AGREEMENT/PROGRAMMING, then you need someone to throw you in a cold irrigation ditch and rap you on the head a few times until you wake up. THERE ISN’T ANYTHING MORE TO SORCERY. THIS IS IT.
So read this with great attention: FOR YOUR AVERAGE HUMAN BEING, THERE IS VERY LITTLE TO THEIR WORLD THAT IS NOT SUBJECTIVE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL.
What does that mean? It means that 99% of what we CALL reality can be manipulated, BECAUSE IT IS PERSONAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND NOT ACTUAL. It is learned agreements! Descriptions. Descriptions that could be described differently AND GIVEN THE SAME AMOUNT OF BELIEF AS FORMERLY, AND THAT NEW REALITY WILL BE JUST AS REAL AS THE OLD ONE. But we don’t call that believing anymore. Belief is ignorant. Intentional belief is INTENT.
Example: Pain is a real element in this world. But ACTUAL pain is made far “worse” by ADDING PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN TO IT. Psychological pain is wanting the pain not to be there when IT IS… wondering why this pain is happening TO ME, poor me, self-pity, etc… All psychological pain can be dropped.
ALL PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY CAN BE DROPPED. That is called SEEING.
So you still think you’re not free? You’ve agreed to a description of not being free. You’re here, as infinity, but you’ve agreed to divide infinity and condition the unconditional, and see a non-existant order in this chaos and name it “NOT FREE”. There are a lot of groups, religions etc, that each have their own unique version, there own set of rules and requirements to “reach” freedom/salvation/redemption… whatever they call it. As long as you’re a member of that group, you AGREE to those terms, and you struggle to ATTAIN freedom. A freedom that ALREADY IS, save your blinded by your adherance to a description that says “it is not”.
That goes for Castaneda’s descriptions too, people. Wake up. This should hit you like a wall. What a wonder! What endless potential you are, if you unlearn your agreements.
D5 Creation
So how do we function if we return the world to it’s actual chaos?
Consciously.
“Wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.”
If your not engaged in using something, let it be energy, let it return to chaos.
A car doesn’t have to be a car unless you intend to drive it. When you’re not intending to drive it, stop recognizing it as “car”.
A rabbit doesn’t have to recognize it as “car” in order to get out of it’s way and avoid being run over. And neither do you.
Stop talking to yourself, naming the world, until you NEED to (strategically). If you want to keep your job, by all means continue agreeing to the conditions necessary to keep it.
And when you want to be magical, stop identifying with name and form. Stop seeing your body as “the body”, “my body”, and let it be it’s elements until you get down to cells and atoms and subatomics and energy. And with the same conviction that accepted your body as “the body”, and with the awareness that all chaos is ordered by agreement, now accept the description “energy body”, and you’ll be it. You’ll leave your body and walk through walls and whatever you want to do.
Why do we fail at achieving this? Because we’ve been trying to do these things while still unconsciously agreeing to many rules that CONTRADICT THE POSSIBILITY OF THESE THINGS. That’s why you have to go void first… chaos, energy. You can’t just INSERT the extraordinary into your world of ordinary agreements. You have to undo everything and then come back to order with intent.
So practice those not-doings until you’re pretty crazy :blink: and you see a “tree of sky” instead of a tree of leaves. When the T.V. is talking, intend to not make sense out of the sounds… just let it be noise; don’t recognize any words.
When you read a post, see gibberish. That’s all there is. 😉
Apply this to everything, strategically.
Nothing has any inherent meaning. So don’t believe anything you don’t want to. Be your own authority.
You don’t trust yourself? Well you better start. Someday you’ll have to face infinity, and you’ll face it alone. There is no one to trust. There’s just this moment. Noone knows what it will bring. Make a stand.
I’ve said all that needs to be said for now. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. So if I don’t see you again, good luck.
And if you see the bird of freedom, kick it’s ass. Freedom isn’t a bird. It’s everything. It’s this very ordinary moment, that really isn’t very ordinary at all. Stop dividing the world into ordinary and extrordinary. The extraordinary is the ordinary if you stop thinking you know everything about it. It’s right here, right now. Hopefully you got that – reading is very ordinary, yet you should see it’s quite extraordinary now. Everything is. Don’t agree to waiting if you don’t want to. It’s all waiting FOR YOU. And don’t excuse yourself from this mystery by saying you haven’t acquired enough energy. Right now is all you have. There is no future where you have more energy. All these descriptions are bullshit. If someone tells you you can’t, for any reason… well, you should know that reason is an agreement by now.
Love,
True
DJ said,
“There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn’t do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself.”
true-good posts, can you give any more such not doings as examples, as the ones you mentioned seemed cool. (name something easy cos im a cripple.)
also, how far along the path have you got? out of interest? i mean have you got to the point of say, creating the car when needed or something. (walking through walls??!!)
also can you give an example of seeing the mystery that is right in front of us? in your words, bring the exraordinary in to play. ?
Hi blu129,
The most important not-doing IMO is ridding oneself of the mind, and we can accomplish this by not-knowing. Knowledge is what structures the infinite into things, so to do anything new, extraordinary or magical, we have to free our minds from the knowledge of old, ordinary and mundane. To do this, start by not believing in anything your internal dialogue tells you, because it can only tell you the second-hand acquired knowledge it has received from everyone else as you were growing up, and these are just descriptions, nothing final. Then stop believing in everyone else’s internal dialogues externalised, for the same reason. You can allow all these descriptions, and even appreciate them, appreciate each person, but don’t believe in them. See them for what they are – stories, programs, skimmings – always biased by the storyteller’s personal history/knowledge.
Inquire into all of your beliefs, goals, hopes and dreams… find out if they really belong to you or if they are someone else’s ideas/stories. Even the dream of freedom… what do we really know about freedom for certain? How do we know it’s worth having? What will it mean when we have it? Why don’t we have it now?
Look at how life has changed from being a child to now. First we just needed food and love. Then we wanted attention. Then we wanted toys and then friends. Then we grew to want relationships and sex and a car and popularity. Then we wanted money and freedom (from our parents). Then maybe we find a spiritual path, become seekers… then we want knowledge, we want power, we want enlightenment, we want freedom…
But all of these, save the very first, is a description that came from somewhere else. We have to find out what we are without these descriptions. Or maybe you don’t. Don’t let me give you another description! 😀
I have no idea how far the path goes. I feel I’m just beginning to do the real work, even though I’ve been studying many, many things for over twenty years. I’ve had some success over the years (otherwise I probably would not have continued) but not much consistency. I only recently saw that the inconsistency was due to trying to add this “extraordinary” to my old self/knowledge, which can’t be done. You have to go blank-slate, void, all descriptions equal… otherwise your core beliefs will deny any description that goes against them.
So I’ve had some magical things happen in my past, and I expect more to occur, but right now I haven’t been trying to do anything magical in the sense of altering my external reality because I’ve been so focussed on undoing myself, my mind, my beliefs, and that is the most magical thing to me right now. I have many moments where I don’t know who I am, or where I am, or when. I no longer have expectations on others, and myself, which makes relationships much more interesting – though it’s difficult in some ways, because most people want to relate to some “one”, something consistent, something they can find security in, and I’ve lost much of that. I’m more content than ever; I don’t visit extremes much at all, so everything is just fine with me… not much conflict. So all the energy that went into upholding all those things is becoming available and I have magical dreams and waking reality is more magical too, like zen beginner’s mind. I’m never bored, I don’t blame anyone for anything, I’m responsible for everything I perceive. And I’m beginning to experiment with intentionally describing myself into strategic identities (stalking), and that’s going very well. Now and then I am visited by a heightened awareness of death. I know for certain that this is going to totally undo me and I won’t be able to stop it. I sometimes feel like I’m going to break down right there and just fall to pieces. Once in a while, I do. And then it fades away for a while. I try not to make a polarity out of it and try to blend the two seemingly different ways of being into just one, just life, just this – not knowing any distinction between life and death. Death (the disintegration of oneself) is actually too much life. Life as we now experience it is a skimming. When we let more of life into our awareness, our human form cannot contain it and it is blasted apart. So the “afterlife” is actually more alive than this life.
I have to go to work. I’ll get to the mystery next time.
Thanks blu129.
For seeing the mystery that is right in front of us, besides the examples I gave above, let me refer you to a student of zen, Douglas Harding. He wrote several books, most notably “On having no head” subtitled “zen and the rediscovery of the obvious”. His work has developed into a system called “the headless way”.
If you don’t have access to the books, you can find all of the experiments at
http://www.headless.org
Check it out. This will show you the mystery that we overlook all the time. It may seem silly at first, the basic idea that there is absolutely no direct proof that I have a head, but give it a chance. There is something very deep and insightful in this. It introduces you to direct, first-hand experience and ignores the second-hand knowledge that we’ve been conditioned with. This is a door to the second attention/heightened awareness.
Happy decapitations!