Pointing out to Selfless Awareness
A bit from a Guidance to Awakening-dialogue:
-
You know, people assume that there is this "me" here, sitting at it's
throne inside the head. All people assume that and when they describe
themselves to other people, they describe the history of their life as
relative beings, basing their story to the false assumption that there
is a "me" here, inside this body, who really has experienced all these
ups and downs. Right? The notion of "me" is the foundation of our life
story. It's always, "me this or me that, me totally this or me totally
not that", it goes on and on. There is a life story of happenings and
experiences that each of us have. Sure. There is no denying of these
happenings in this relative life. But what happens is that as we take
this relative story and the notion of "me" so seriously, by doing so, we
lose a larger context how it actually is. By believing in a magic
trick, in illusion, we lose the actual reality of ourselves... And
hence, we get lost. This is existential ignorance, the root of confusion
and suffering.
- Our "true being" is not the "me", some sort of
entity identified with the name "Kim" who is "37 years old", a Finnish
citizen and so on and so on. All these defitions are our relative
conditions that we as embodied beings have but that is not our true
being, our true nature. Our true being, our true face, is beyond that.
Our true being is the selfless awareness which cannot be measured and
has no attributes. This awareness is always there in our minds, both
when it is recognised consciously and when it is not recognised
consciously. We may go through our whole life being completely
identified with a limited sense of self, but this selfless awareness
that is always awake and clear, never goes away. It is these also
between thoughts and emotions. And in fact, thoughts and emotions are
just a body how it manifests itself. So. Be smart. Don't ask me
questions and assume things. You are in this trouble of being deluded
and defined as "self", because you made an assumption of yourself as an
entity in the first place.
- I'll end this with a variation of
mine on zen-master Dogen's famous quote: To find our awakened nature,
one has to study the self. To study the self, is to look at the self in
order to see through it. By seeing through it, the selfless nature of
all things is revealed. When the realisation of the selfless nature
extends and becomes encompassing, only selfless awareness of clarity
exists, without existing, or non-existing. Then enlightenment is
forgotten, as it is the way how things naturally rest in clarity.
Baba Kim Katami
Open Heart,
www.openheart.fi
Writings of Amrita Baba
