Translations: (Vietnamese) Không cần danh từ để bắt đầu động từ - No nouns are necessary to initiate verbs
Everything isn’t made of awareness, it quite literally is awareness itself. In your direct experience there isn’t anything inside looking out at something. the very thing that you presently think is the “seen” is the ongoing activity of the “seer” or awareness.
I like your answer. Also, I would like to add, awareness is none other than the ongoing activity. It is not the case that awareness is an unchanging substance modulating as everything. 'Awareness' is just like a word like 'weather', a mere name denoting the ongoing dynamic activities of raining wetting sun shining wind blowing lightning strike and so on and on. 'Awareness' has no intrinsic existence of its own than moment to moment manifestation, even if at that moment it is just a mere sense of formless Existence, that too is another 'foreground' non-dual manifestation and not an unchanging background.
Just like there is no lightning besides flash (lightning is flashing -- lightning is just another name for flash and is not the agent behind flash), no wind besides blowing, no water besides flowing, no nouns or agents are needed to initiate verbs. There never was an agent, a seer, or even a seeing, besides colors, never an agent, a hearer, or even a hearing, besides sound. Everything is just radiant and pellucid without a knower, sound hears and scenery sees. Anatta.
Some excerpts from the 2nd most famous Buddhist masters (right after the Dalai Lama) of our time, the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh :
Excerpts from http://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2008/10/sun-of-awareness-and-river-of.html
some
other quotations which Thusness/PasserBy liked from the book --"When we
say I know the wind is blowing, we don't think that there is something
blowing something else. "Wind' goes with 'blowing'. If there is no
blowing, there is no wind. It is the same with knowing. Mind is the
knower; the knower is mind. We are talking about knowing in relation to
the wind. 'To know' is to know something. Knowing is inseparable from
the wind. Wind and knowing are one. We can say, 'Wind,' and that is
enough. The presence of wind indicates the presence of knowing, and the
presence of the action of blowing'.""..The most universal verb is the
verb 'to be'': I am, you are, the mountain is, a river is. The verb 'to
be' does not express the dynamic living state of the universe. To
express that we must say 'become.' These two verbs can also be used as
nouns: 'being", "becoming". But being what? Becoming what? 'Becoming'
means 'evolving ceaselessly', and is as universal as the verb "to be."
It is not possible to express the "being" of a phenomenon and its
"becoming" as if the two were independent. In the case of wind, blowing
is the being and the becoming....""In any phenomena, whether
psychological, physiological, or physical, there is dynamic movement,
life. We can say that this movement, this life, is the universal
manifestation, the most commonly recognized action of knowing. We must
not regard 'knowing' as something from the outside which comes to
breathe life into the universe. It is the life of the universe itself.
The dance and the dancer are one."
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Comments
by Thusness/PasserBy: "...as a verb, as action, there can be no
concept, only experience. Non-dual anatta (no-self) is the experience of
subject/Object as verb, as action. There is no mind, only mental
activities... ...Source as the passing phenomena... and how non-dual
appearance is understood from Dependent Origination perspective."
.............
Zen
Master Thich Nhat Hanh:"When we say it's raining, we mean that raining
is taking place. You don't need someone up above to perform the raining.
It's not that there is the rain, and there is the one who causes the
rain to fall. In fact, when you say the rain is falling, it's very
funny, because if it weren't falling, it wouldn't be rain. In our way of
speaking, we're used to having a subject and a verb. That's why we need
the word "it" when we say, "it rains." "It" is the subject, the one who
makes the rain possible. But, looking deeply, we don't need a "rainer,"
we just need the rain. Raining and the rain are the same. The
formations of birds and the birds are the same -- there's no "self," no
boss involved. There's a mental formation called vitarka, "initial
thought."
When we use the verb "to think" in English, we need a subject of the verb: I think, you think, he thinks. But, really, you don't need a subject for a thought to be produced. Thinking without a thinker -- it's absolutely possible. To think is to think about something. To perceive is to perceive something. The perceiver and the perceived object that is perceived are one.When Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," his point was that if I think, there must be an "I" for thinking to be possible. When he made the declaration "I think," he believed that he could demonstrate that the "I" exists. We have the strong habit or believing in a self. But, observing very deeply, we can see that a thought does not need a thinker to be possible. There is no thinker behind the thinking -- there is just the thinking; that's enough. Now, if Mr. Descartes were here, we might ask him, "Monsieur Descartes, you say, 'You think, therefore you are.' But what are you? You are your thinking. Thinking -- that's enough. Thinking manifests without the need of a self behind it."Thinking without a thinker. Feeling without a feeler. What is our anger without our 'self'? This is the object of our meditation. All the fifty-one mental formations take place and manifest without a self behind them arranging for this to appear, and then for that to appear. Our mind consciousness is in the habit of basing itself on the idea of self, on manas.
But we can meditate to be more aware of our store consciousness, where we keep the seeds of all those mental formations that are not currently manifesting in our mind. When we meditate, we practice looking deeply in order to bring light and clarity into our way of seeing things. When the vision of no-self is obtained, our delusion is removed. This is what we call transformation. In the Buddhist tradition, transformation is possible with deep understanding. The moment the vision of no-self is there, manas, the elusive notion of 'I am,' disintegrates, and we find ourselves enjoying, in this very moment, freedom and happiness."