Dear Rupert,
Your knowing presence clearly strengthens the knowing presence here, ‘pulling back the curtain’ on the ignorance and consequences of a separate, personal self. What about being joy, love and peace, collectively? Will you comment on us all ‘realising’ as one knowing presence, e.g., a commonly sensed conscious self, perhaps in groups (outwardly composed of many members), and/or how humanity as a whole can see itself, pragmatically, actually awakening to being one, no one and many?
Best wishes,
Sperry
Dear Sperry,
I cannot really comment on this because love (as well as joy and peace) is the experiential realisation that there is no separate self in here and no separate others out there.
It is the dualising mind that fragments the seamless totality into people, objects, selves, others and the world. This mind then seeks to alleviate the suffering that is inherent in its own fragmentation of experience and by so doing simply add more fuel to the fire.
This approach does not imply that we all sit around doing nothing. Once the mind is no longer dominated by and in service of the belief in separation, it becomes a tool in the hand of love and intelligence. This love and intelligence is expressed in the activities of such a mind or body, and these will vary greatly depending on the particular characteristics of each.
One may express this love and intelligence as an artist, another as a social activist, another as a mother or father looking after a family, another as a teacher, and so on, in an almost infinite variety of ways. But joy, love and peace are prior to all these activities, not their result. If we make them into a project, we create a future and we commit ourself to an endless cycle of becoming.
Whatever their particular characteristics, activities that come from joy, love and peace are pregnant with their origin. They give birth to it. The scale on which they deliver depends on the power of the body and mind and the circumstances in which they prevail, but that is not important.
* * *
It is not the person or humanity that sees the self. It is the self that sees the person or humanity. In fact, the self sees only the self. In order to see an apparent person and its counterpart, the world, the self has first to take the shape of the mind. The person and the world are made out of that mind.
In other words, only the mind sees a mind. Only the apparent person sees a person and a world. This person then tries to relieve the suffering in the world without realising that the suffering that it is trying to relieve is inherent in its view of itself as a person, amongst many others, in a world.
However, the person does not suffer. The person issuffering. This so-called person cannot cure the problem because the person, with all of its projects, isthe problem. Without this person, there is no world, no humanity, no others to save. And it is this understanding that is truly humane, that truly saves the world!
Of course, the person is often offended when he or she hears this, because its own essential separate identity is being exposed. We may even feel frustrated or angry when we hear this. But this frustration is a beautiful gift from the self because it shows us the seed of our separation. It is this seed that flourishes as all the various forms of suffering in the apparent world.
Likewise, it is the dissolution of this seed of separation that flourishes as all the forms of joy, love and peace in the world. It is here that all conflicts, personal or otherwise, are resolved.
Well, now I have commented on it!
With love,
Rupert
