Dear Rupert,
Without wishing to label anything too quickly, it feels as if something significant has happened here. Over the last four or five days, a new and spacious awareness has opened up, in which the previous, merely intellectual knowledge has shifted to direct experience. It’s incredibly disorientating actually, and I thought you would be the best person to ask about it.
Before, I might have said that there were inner and outer worlds, with the outer being the world and the inner being my personality, thoughts, etc. Now it seems that there’s only inner – and the world and thoughts are all happening simultaneously on one vast panoramic screen. I find myself unable to speak much of the time, and simply sit silently, absolutely agog.
I think what’s most surprising about all this is that my reactivity to phenomena seems essentially unchanged. Is this normal? Piers seems to be as fearful and insecure as ever, but it’s witnessed much of the time now, and allowed to be.
Will this reactivity will change over time and die down to silence? Thoughts have now been seen through as one facet of this mind-body organism, and I no longer believe ‘I’ have any influence over them either way. But if there could be said to be longing remaining, it’s for pure, unbroken silence – for this field of awareness that I am to flow without even the personality-influenced thought-stream bubbling away.
Any advice you may have on this stage of the enquiry would be much appreciated. I’m just about coping with all this, but it feels unbelievably intense – although for no one.
With best wishes and thanks,
Piers
Dear Piers,
The personal reactivity to phenomena that you describe can result from (1) the deep belief and feeling that what we are is a separate, limited entity, with all the inevitable insecurity and vulnerability that are inherent in that position, and (2) an old habit of thinking and feeling on behalf of a separate entity which has nevertheless been clearly seen to be non-existent.
What enables us to see clearly that we are not a limited, separate entity is the experiential understanding that we are unlimited, unlocated awareness.
The reactivity of the first type is perpetually regenerated and nourished by the belief in separation. The reactivity of the second type is simply the residues of ignorance playing themselves out at the level of the mind and the body, and will naturally die down in time.
These residues are deeply embedded in not only the way we think but, more importantly, the way we feel, move and act.
The process of self-enquiry which was engaged in prior to the experiential understanding of our true nature can be continued afterwards. In this case, it is more a process of cooperation with our experiential understanding which, over a period of time, facilitates the realignment of the mind and the body with that understanding.
In our attempt to live our understanding in every realm of experience, these old habits of thinking, feeling and acting will be exposed. The important thing is to have absolutely no agenda with them. Any agenda would be the agenda of an apparently separate entity.
These old habits are simply exposed and welcomed. We see them for what they are, allow them to display themselves fully, see that they are completely empty of content and let them pass away in their own time.
When met with this benevolent indifference, these feelings are robbed of the one thing that is needed to keep them alive – resistance – and as a result they will slowly appear less and less in our lives.
Piers: If there could be said to be longing remaining, it’s for pure, unbroken silence – for this field of awareness that I am to flow without even the personality-influenced thought-stream bubbling away.
Rupert: See clearly that ‘this field of awareness’ is already the ‘pure, unbroken silence’ in which all bubbling-away-thought-streams arise and out of which they are made.
Once it is clear that all bubbling-away-thought-streams are made only of awareness, it is simultaneously realised that nothing that arises can veil its ever-present, pure, unbroken silence.
With this layer of longing dissolved in clear seeing, the last traces of otherness or resistance slowly melt, leaving pure, unbroken silence, sometimes resting quietly in its own being and sometimes bubbling up as the mind, body and world, but never for an instant being or knowing anything other than itself.
With love,
Rupert
