Real Within the Dream

It’s all mind—
a singular field of conscious awareness.
This is the nature of what is:
the nature of self and world,
the ground of all,
the substrate,
the source, course, and goal
of All.

Unified.
Nondual.
Singular.
No subject/object division.
One without a second.

This is True Nature.

But the knowledge of this—
the experience of this,
identity with and as this—
is smothered,
like an ember in the heart,
covered over with piles of detritus:
false notions,
conditioning,
egoic constructs,
obscuring the recognition
and realization
of the Divine Light within.

And yet,
even the untruth is Truth.
Even the darkness is Light.
All is That.
There is no other.

Who can understand this?
Who can see beyond dualities
to the One
that includes all,
that contains all,
that is all—
and none?

The One is God.
The One is Self.
Atma is Brahm.
Om.

Can you dig it?!

Ask yourself:
Where is God now?
Where is God not?

God—
which is to say, Reality—
is of the nature of awareness,
love,
and being.

That Thou Art

Engage in living enquiry, not analysis.
Use your faculties of attention and awareness
to discern what is—
and what isn’t.

Where do thoughts arise?
Where are sensations known?

Are you in the world,
or is the world in you?

Primordial, uncaused, unborn—
consciousness alone is.

God is everywhere,
everything,
everyone.

Welcome to my hermitage.

Bad theology limits (our view of) God.
God is such a loaded concept
that I’m often reluctant to use it
without much qualification.
The Western mind has been polluted
with thoughts of heresy and divine punishment—
which, in practice,
turns out to be all too human.

"Propositional tyranny,"
I heard someone call it.

The mystic view,
the awakened view,
the realized view:
All is One.
Atma is Brahm.
Nonduality of subject and object.
Zen.

I love that at the end of the Bhagavad Gita,
after receiving the discourse on the nature of reality from Lord Krishna,
Arjuna exclaims:
"Smrtir labdha"—
"I have regained my memory."
This is a beautiful pointer to the nature of Self-realization:
we already are that which we seek to realize,
but we have "forgotten" it.

When we speak of awakening,
we imply that we are currently asleep,
dreaming,
and mistaking the dream for reality.

The sages, gurus, mystics, buddhas, jnanis—
they are alarm clocks,
created by your own awareness-nature,
to say:
"It’s time to wake up."

Buddho is awakened mind.
A Buddha is one who has awakened,
one who is.

Arjuna also says:
"Nasto mohah"—
"My delusion has been destroyed."
Again, pointing to the root of the problem:
ignorance or delusion.

This is echoed in Buddhism as avidya:
ignorance—
literally, non-clarity.
The solution is vidya:
clarity and true knowledge.
Destroy delusion and ignorance,
and restore clarity—
thereby ending the suffering born of these.

Lastly, Arjuna credits his enlightenment to:
"Tvat-prasādān"—
"By Your Grace."

By Krishna’s instruction—
an avatar of God—
Arjuna comes to realize his true nature:
Moksha, liberation.
Grace also lies in his capacity
to recognize and accept this Truth.

Without "the eyes to see, the ears to hear,"
we wouldn’t know Truth if we encountered it.
Awakening is a function of being made ripe through Grace.

In the end,
it’s all Grace:
ordained, fated, inevitable.
God’s will.
The spontaneous unfoldment of Self—
the self-interacting dynamics of the Unified Field.

Call it what you will—
it all adds up to the same thing:
All is as it must be.

Even so,
we must discover the truth of our being—
not in theory,
but as a living, abiding realization.

"For the truth shall set you free."

---