Hi Rupert,
You say, ‘In other words, meditation evolves, as it were, from an “investigative” mode to a “contemplative” mode, that is, from being something that we seem to “do” as apparent entities to being understood as what we “are”, presence’.
Interesting that you use the word ‘evolve’. This is what I would call ‘spiritual’ evolution, the final stage in the process of evolution. The earlier stages are the material (from hydrocarbons to the single cell), the vital (from single-cell to multi-celled creatures) and the one we are living in now, the mental one, the specifically human one. (‘Man’ is from the Sanskrit manas,which means mind.)
Providing you can agree with this, my question to you is, why is there this evolution? Why doesn’t consciousness just ‘sit back’ and enjoy itself?
By the way, wouldn’t the term ‘aware being’ be more appropriate than simply ‘awareness’? It would unite both pure being and pure awareness. To me, seeing the world as ‘aware being’ seems clearer than seeing it as awareness only. In fact, some ‘mystics’ do express their ultimate state as pure being.
Jelke
Dear Jelke,
Jelke: Why is there this evolution?
Rupert: From the absolute understanding, there isn’t. Ask yourself, apart from the mind, what is evolution? And what is the mind? Simply this current thought.
And for whom is there this evolution? Only for the personal ‘I’. The personal ‘I’, with all its plans for improving the universe, is the problem, not the solution. The solution (if we provisionally accept that one is needed) is its dissolution, not its evolution.
Consciousness does not need the help of the mind. On the contrary, if it can be considered to need anything, it needs to be relieved of the dualising mind. It functions very nicely without it.However, if we provisionally accept the idea of evolution, we could say that its purpose is to draw attention to that which does not evolve.
Why doesn’t consciousness just ‘sit back’ and enjoy itself?
It does! It sits back enjoying itself taking the shape of the investigation, enjoying itself taking the shape of the contemplation and then enjoying simply being. That which enjoys doesn’t evolve. That which it enjoys does.
If we take our stand as that one, rather than as the person we presume ourself to be, all the psychological problems beyond which we feel we need to evolve will dissolve of their own accord.
Wouldn’tthe term ‘aware being’ be more appropriate than simply ‘awareness’? It would unite both pure being and pure awareness.
The terms ‘aware being’ and ‘awareness’ are identical. The suffix ‘-ness’ means ‘the presence of’, so ‘aware-ness’ means ‘the presence of that which is aware’, or ‘aware being’. ‘Conscious-ness’ is ‘the presence of that which is conscious’. ‘Knowing presence’ is the presence of that which is knowing. ‘I’ is the knowing of being. Beauty is the identity of knowing and being.
The value of the phrases ‘aware being’ and ‘knowing presence’ is that they spell out linguistically that knowing and being are one, not two. Normally we think that these two are different, that to know and to be are two different modes. They are not. The only way we know something is by being that thing, that is, in identity.
‘Awareness’ is just shorthand for that understanding and indicates directly that knowing and being are inseparable. It is also known as love. Each of these words and phrases draws out a different aspect of that which is entirely beyond words. They are all identical, but they approach reality from slightly different points of view.
Seeing the world as ‘aware being’ seems clearer than seeing it as awareness only.
It is the other way round. It is not the world that is seen as aware being or awareness, but rather awareness that sometimes seems to take the shape of the apparent world.
To see the world, as such, is to not ‘see’ awareness. If we then superimpose awareness upon the world that we believe to be real, we subtly reinforce the belief in the world and the separate person. Then we have to elaborate all kinds of ideas, such as evolution, to account for it all and make it fit together.
The world you refer to only exists in the imagination and is substantiated with all kinds of beliefs about it. This has nothing to do with non-duality, which goes to the very heart of the matter, that is, to the heart of the separate self and its corollary, the world, and finds them to be utterly unreal, as such.
This does not mean that there is no reality. On the contrary, we know that there is a reality to our experience, but it does not reside in the world.
This understanding does not remove us from the apparent world into an ivory tower. On the contrary, when the separateness of the apparent person and the otherness and objectness of the apparent world dissolve in understanding, all that is left is love and intelligence.
If we insist on the idea of evolution, then the highest evolution would be to understand this. All that is left is this love and intelligence in action.
With kind regards,
Rupert
