The Wave and the Water
La ola y el agua
A teacher describes the collapse of the personal self under the gaze of pure awareness, the danger of interpreting visions too literally, and the distinction between the appearances that come and go and the knowing that remains.
The Wave and the Water
A teacher describes the collapse of the personal self under the gaze of pure awareness, the danger of interpreting visions too literally, and the distinction between the appearances that come and go and the knowing that remains.
The more activity we project onto the seeing, the more we get lost. In a sense, that is what it means to not be ready. But the more it becomes clear, clear, and clear again, something opens. In my case, and these are only words, because even now it remains very mysterious to me, what became clear was this: as the seeing came closer, as it grew more energized, it was everything. It was the whole universe. Everything that was not me was simply knowingness turned toward me.
Being seen by what one hides from
What I had recognized as separate was the very thing I was trying to hide. And I recognized that what I was hiding could not possibly be hidden, because as I saw what I was trying to conceal, it saw what I saw. That is where I recognized that it was the one seeing. In a sense, those two touched. Then everything that I was, and everything that seeing took me to be, disappeared, because it was only a construct of the mind.
In that moment, the person I called myself disappeared. From the place where I is seeing, I saw all the beliefs I had held about myself that I did not want, and there was shame. I had wanted to believe that I existed out of my own nature, that my will was my own, that my choices were my own, that I came from myself.
My will is thy will
This is where it becomes a little Christian, because it is the realization that my will is non-existent. My will is thy will. Before, I thought those words meant that I surrender my will to your will. In that reading there are two: a will that is real and mine, and a will that is God's, and I am praying to hand mine over. But no. Literally, my will is thy will. There are not two wills. There was only the illusion that my will was my own. That seeing was showing me, showing the mind, showing the person, the illusion I had believed myself to be, which I am not.
The demons were my own projection
Before I saw through that, every time I came to this seeing there were fears and pains that were unbearable, and projections of them so vivid that I thought a monster was coming at me. When I was younger, I spoke about demons. That was my own mind projected onto the mirror of pure consciousness. To me it was more real than this reality, that I was battling with demons. But those demons were not external. They were in my own psyche. The fears were helping me avoid. When all of that was processed and dealt with, when I came to terms with it and made peace with it, then pure seeing was what remained to be encountered.
To me, all of this is a mystery. I have not really heard it described this way, but the fact that it resonates, and that it resonated even before the story was told, probably carries some validity.
The significance we give to visions
There is an important question here about the significance we give to the visions we have. It is obvious that we do not want to give them too much significance, to attach and say this was a great thing. Yet we should not ignore them either.
All that appears is, in a sense, illusory. What ultimately needs to happen is the clarifying of true nature: the true nature of self, of I, of other, of visions, of mind, of sensations, of pain, of fear. From that perspective, visions are included. The appearance is not fully what it is, but that does not mean we should ignore a vision. What matters is that we see things for what they are, across different levels of reality. There is ultimate reality, and there is relative reality, and within relative reality there are different levels. It is important not to mix them.
Interpretation is only thought
This has to do with how we interpret. When there is an appearance of a vision, there will be an interpretation of it. There is no way the mind will not interpret. So the interpretation itself must be seen as our thought, and not more than that.
Suppose I say, "Maybe this was a past life, though I have never been interested in that." To interpret it as a past life, take the interpretation as a possibility, not as a truth, not as a fact. To interpret it as not a past life, take that too as an interpretation, possibly untrue. The interpretation that it is a demon, take as a possibility and not ultimately true. The interpretation that it is a Buddha, the same, and so on.
When something is more charged, more alive, we want it to be reified. We want an interpretation that solves the question, that resolves the issue, that resolves whatever the mystery stirs.
More than is dreamt in your philosophy
There is a line worth remembering: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The mind is the philosophy, dreaming. To the claim that it is a past life, or that it is not, the answer is the same: there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. So you must not settle on an interpretation.
This includes the answer to the question, who am I? If your answer is a name, then there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. Meaning: you are more than that. You are not that name. You are not not that name, but you are not only that name. All of perception, all of experience, all of sensation, all of memory, all of the past, all of now, the past which is only thought now, the future which is only thought now, all of it appears to be something it is not.
The wave and the water
Everything that appears is known because it has a form: a color, a sound, a thought, a sensation. That form is the surface of the ocean. If you were to go down into the depth of the ocean, and assuming there were no fish, you would not see much. There would be only this empty, dark blue, deepening with depth. The water is like emptiness, which is why it makes a good metaphor. In Buddhism they speak of the reality of everything as empty. That is the true nature of things: emptiness.
The confusion arises when we talk about the waves: sound, sight, sensation. They are so real. The pain in the body, if I am cut, is intense and real. But so is the intensity of a great wave in the ocean. The point is to realize that the wave is only water. The wave itself does not exist, in the sense that it is an appearance. Five seconds later it is no longer a wave. It has become its opposite, the trough. Yet the water is still there. The reality, metaphorically, of the water remains.
The water is what I call the knowingness. The knowingness does not stop. It is no longer knowing a thought about the past; now there is a knowing of a thought about the future. Where the thought about the past was so important and intense, or the thought about myself was so important and intense, the next moment brings something else. But knowingness is uninterrupted. Everything that appears, especially the person I call myself, comes and goes.
A glimpse that becomes known
What can happen is that the wave we are most familiar with, the sense that I am this person, the experience of subjectivity that I am here and nowhere else, localized as this self, can temporarily stop. It is as if that wave goes down into the ocean and disappears as what it was. It literally disappears. It is no longer a wave. That wave is completely gone. There is now only the flatness of the ocean. But the knowingness remains.
That is a glimpse. The person disappears, and I am still here. Knowingness, consciousness, beingness, awareness is still here. The person disappears, and then can return. So it is only a glimpse. But now it is seen. Now it is known experientially.