Great articles as usual by James M. Corrigan - https://medium.com/@StillJustJames

Taken from http://levekunst.com/loosening-the-chains-of-the-conceptual-and-the-intelligible/

LOOSENING THE CHAINS OF THE CONCEPTUAL AND THE INTELLIGIBLE

I had an experience once in my mid-teens, sitting by a fire my friend and I had built in a weed-and-construction-debris-filled field that had been cleared as part of the construction of the World Trade Center in New York City. We were living in a small shack that we had made out of wooden pallets covered with nylon hosiery fabric found in a pile of garbage from a building that had been cleared out prior to its demolition. Another vagrant, like us, had seen our fire and come up to sit and warm up a little, because the spring evenings were still cold on those city streets, especially when the only meals you had were fetched out of dumpsters behind fast food restaurants—half-eaten food still in wrappers was much more palatable than loose waste from a restaurant. “Grease,” he announced at one point. “Grease is the source of life!” “Cool, man,” I replied. What else could one say? It was my first experience of attachment to an understanding that was less grand than the holder assumed.
Many people implicitly believe that coming to a complete understanding of reality involves a leap, whether it be an intuition or an insight, or some blissful experience in meditation, or a scientific or philosophical theory based upon the givens—those facts of experience that fill our days and our memories, and form the basis of our nervous tensions, phobias, and damaged feelings, as well as our moments of bliss and leaps of intuitive insight and conceptual theorizing. I noticed that the leaps never get one to the finish line. They may get us to a comfortable place, perhaps even a blissful one, but it’s not possible to understand reality this way.
Instead of figuring out how things are, we need to loosen the chains of both conceptual thought and the intelligible appearances that fill our experience, because even though we might be able to come to an understanding of our experiences, that understanding will always separate us from the truth because an understanding creates a something-that-is-understood, even if, through careful movements and keen insights, we never allow a someone-that-understands to arise. The understanding is itself the problem, and it is a huge problem because it is the primordial source of the illusion of separate existence.
The process of coming to an understanding isn’t like getting to the far side of a flat field of information that one leaps over suddenly, it’s a multi-layered lasagna of misunderstandings with the consistency of a bog, that traps us in our many and varied viewpoints, leaving a long, long trail of false halts on our way to our hoped-for complete transcendence. This process is founded on the belief that overcoming wrong beliefs by undoing our strong attachment to our conceptual knowledge and focusing instead on the givens, while being in the moment, will free us from misconceptions and misunderstandings and will allow us to transcend the factual appearances and get to the bottom of it all, in the fashion of a scientist approaching a problem, studying and reflecting. But you should note the way I worded that sentence, making it’s point in the repetition of reliance upon belief. Beliefs aren’t true or false, they are never true, nor false. Instead, they are always wrong to varying degrees, which is their fault, but also, to some degree true, which is their allure. And in many, many cases, the expression half truths really overestimates their value.
It occurred to me that holding to the possibility of complete transcendence, in the manner given above, is a fool’s errand based on a grave misunderstanding. That field of givens is there before us, and seemingly beckoning in a beguiling way, but only because of our need to understand, and it is this that will lead us to our doom. The truly important insight to be had there, derives from that field of givens’ presence, not from anything situated in that field. And it is the same with our conceptual thought—none of the contents of those thoughts will help us to transcend anything, even if they are the words of a respected teacher, or a world-renowned scientist. Even these words can’t. It is the presence of these thoughts, and words, and facts that is the important point. And by presence I mean presencing, or arising presentially. But don’t form an understanding of that word yet; it will just be a misunderstanding.
The desire to transcend reality is a really weird appetite to have, and yet many of us have it, in one way or another, because we either find our lives to be unsatisfactory or we find ourselves annoyed by the unsettling feeling that we don’t really understand what is going on. It’s unfortunate too that the majority of people blithely live out their lives, never having taken hold of their opportunity to realize something truly important through it. For those that want out, getting to the bottom of things is the only way they can see to get out. But there is no out, no exit, no escape—Reality is an inside without an outside, so you can’t escape. But what you can do is get free of all of your misunderstandings—not by creating new ones, but by loosening the chains of the conceptual as well as the intelligible. But it has to be both of those, or like that vagrant who thought grease was the source of life, you’ll just find yourself in another storyline.
Over the course of my life, I have found that every time I thought I had gotten somewhere by coming to some new understanding, or by changing something about the way I perceived my life, all I had done was change a storyline, exchanging it for a slightly modified one, a storyline more to my liking. I had never been able to change my being in a story. For many on this path, their answer is to be found in not thinking or conceptualizing about what is, just being, just being That. While there is nothing wrong with just being That, it is still a storyline. Why do I say that? Because we hold the implicit assumption that while our conceptual thoughts, ideas, and philosophies color our perceptions with our wants and desires, hopes and dreams, hurts and insults, and dichotomies, we believe that our perceptions are something different, if left alone, something more real than illusions of the mind. And who could fault us for that? After all, some of those perceptions can save our lives!
I’ve heard it said that when we see, we should just see—and not color what we see with hopes, dreams, aversions, fears, doubts or dichotomizations—and when we hear we should just hear. And by doing that, we free ourselves from our suffering because in those moments there is no self intervening in the process.
Even ignoring the fact that physical suffering from thirst, hunger, pain, age and disease is still suffering even when it is freed from all of our self-colorations, and what we perceive through our senses is always perspectival, so that while there may be no self involved in the perception, there is certainly a perspective limiting the visceral experience to a certain body. The truth is, everything arises empty of intrinsic self-reality, based upon conditions, uncreated and uncaused, as the spontaneous naturing that some call dharmata.
This idea that perception through any sense-door is somehow being in contact with something real, or at least pure as in pure experience, is an illusion. It is an illusion because there is no thing to be in contact with, there is no entity who can drop the illusion of self-colorations, there isn’t even an entity that natures that which appears, even the Buddhist dharmakaya is empty of an intrinsic self-nature. What we perceive arises in our mind, which is the name we give to that perspective we gloom onto because of our confusion and misunderstanding, not realizing what that perspective truly is. So in seeing, there is only the fabrication of form and light. In hearing, there is only the fabrication of sounds, etc. We are never not in intimate contact with what is arising because there is and can be no separation in reality, and what arises does so in the mind. So what’s going on?
Literally, what is going on is that we have come to understand that experiences are based upon perceptions that arise from conditions of some external kind in conjunction with a body with some specific senses. Many Buddhists include consciousness of thoughts as a sixth human sense, but a more insightful view is found in those teachings that point out that there is only one sense—that our dichotomization of experience involves a transfer of the source of perceptions from the dharmata, which is not a thing, it’s just the essential character of the activity I am referring to as naturing, to some physical equipment inherent in human and non-human lifeforms and their associated mental faculties that are distinguished based upon the kind of physical phenomena that is sensed.
If you are starting to feel that in naturing, just naturing than you are well on your way to complete freedom. Gaining freedom from conceptual thinking is the first step. I did it by noticing how thoughts arise—presentially—based upon conditions, but uncaused by any condition. Being empty of origin, empty of an intrinsic self-nature, how could their content or meaning be otherwise than empty? And yet, thoughts spontaneously appeared, and that was necessary to see. And see that I did, and you can, through the practice of meditation. But seeing that thoughts are empty of origin, means I am not creating them, and yet, if I focused upon them I found them arising in a coherent stream of thoughts strung together for as long as I attended to them. And if I looked away in another direction towards some other focus, that stream of thoughts changed! All of the words of this essay arose because of the direction of my attention and various manifesting conditions that include a desire to share something that I’ve found. Authorship is an exaggeration of an activity that is spontaneously natured, uncaused, by no entity at all. And if that doesn’t take your breath away… but you can’t stop here.
Once we see through conceptual thinking, our next step is not just to be in the moment averting our attention away from conceptual thought, it must be to see into this process of self-less naturing. And for that, I didn’t use thoughts, instead I turned my attention towards a phenomenon that had always been there for me to use—the self-arising sounds of dharmata, which are the resonances of that self-less activity of naturing. I listened to the sounds of thoughts arising, as well as my whole being arising, and it was there in those sounds that I came to realize that all of our perceptions arise in exactly the same way—not through some hybrid physical process and half-understood concepts—and that this meant that pure experiences were just as empty of intrinsic self-nature, and therefore truth, as any conceptual thoughts that might arise for me. Useful, yes. All of it—thoughts, experiences, understandings—were useful in a practical sense, but wrong in a real sense, thus always lying somewhere between truth and untruth. I had to see through all of it, and in doing so, in direct experience, not out there in some kind of illusory world, or even in here in a confused mental understanding based on beliefs, but just directly experienced through peeling off all those layers of concepts and understandings, perspectives, and causes, freeing myself from conceptual thought and intelligible appearances. And in the end, there was no myself to free. What needed to be done was to unbridle, unimpede, unobstruct, uninhibit, and stop interfering with, the natural and spontaneous inventiveness of this self-less naturing with my wandering attention and its searching for meaning in understandings and ideas, whether based upon experience or not.
It is through concepts that we learn of the problem. It is through conceptual thought that we learn of techniques to overcome the problem. It is by letting concepts go that we free our minds, opening it to other possibilities. It is through the intelligible appearances that we can truly see reality in action. But it is in giving up those intelligible appearances by training our minds to stop wandering aimlessly all over the flowerbed, that we allow the true self-less naturing to appear in all of its awesome beauty. And it is in that, that all the confused thinking and frightening appearances can be seen to be nothing other than what we casually call our mind, i.e. self-less naturing—the dharmata.
This is the strategy, half-measures are only tactics in a never-ending story. End the story.

Realization of “One Sense”

Question: What leads one to the realization that there is truly only one sense, not five or six as we normally understand experience?
Answer: One way that this realization arises is out of the process of “turning hearing around,” which is both a deconstruction of the subtle structuring of experience that is normally overlooked, and ultimately a direct experience.
Even though we may understand the emptiness of thoughts and other sensations, which arise without any intrinsic self-reality, and though we may also have direct non-conceptual experiences, what is still present is the perspective, even if there is no inferred, actual, or imagined observer/knower involved. This is the normal perspective that we all have, because it is our familiar way of experiencing things. So, in hearing something that is arising impersonally, we still understand it to be “heard,” even if we know there is no one to hear, nothing to hear, etc. But instead of taking that perspective, turn it around: “you,” which is that perspective even when it is stripped of all the concretions of ego and identify, is still a false structure. “You” are confusing, through a subtle structuring of direct experience, what is actually happening. “You” are doing this because you understand hearing to be structured as a perception, therefore encompassing something perceived and the perception of it.
Sound is a manifesting experience that is empty of an intrinsic self-nature like everything that manifests is. You neither create it, nor hear it in a dualistic sense. Instead it is experienced because all that is manifesting is the process of knowing. This knowing is not self-centered, so all the problems of shared knowledge are not present, but a perspective still exists. So which way, truly, should the perspective be pointing? From an illusory “you” that, lacking an intrinsic self-nature, isn’t real at all, toward a “sound” that is just as illusory? Or from the source of the manifestation towards the manifestation? That latter perspective is our normal perspective turned around. When we realized that there is no “me” or ego “here” we forgot to realign our more fundamental understandings of perceiving and experiencing, leaving this subtle error to trip us up, and leading to a proliferation of identified types of perceptions and senses.
Once you understand that there has been that subtle misunderstanding of the experience of hearing sound, every time you experience sound, note the error and force yourself to understand “sound” as just something arising in mind, and by that I mean being selflessly natured, so really not having a source at all. Done with some dedication, suddenly you will experience it directly, without effort, because that is how it truly is. And once you have that direct experience you will understand that all of the senses are like this, and they will all collapse into the only sense there truly is—selfless naturing, which is the process of knowing.
It’s easiest to do this with hearing “unstruck sound,” in my experience, because the overpowering attraction of a source, like a tree falling in a forest, is absent with “unstruck sound” which has no source in what is manifested.
Unstruck sound has been referred to in many ways, even by me. Some of them are: unborn sound, Anahata Nada, Chönyid kyi rangdra, Dharmata Swayambhu Nada, Divine Tremoring, Shabd, Eternal Sound, Music of the Spheres, Primordial Sound, Sound of Creation, Soundless Sound, the Word of God, Autogenous Resonance, and others.
Question: It is difficult to comprehend that sound isn’t dependent on a source. How can this be?
Answer: In my experience, there are two ways that sounds can arise: as sympathetic resonances in the mind based upon manifest conditions, and autogenous resonances in the mind. I use the word “resonance” so as not to confuse what I am speaking of with normal “sounds” that we understand we hear in a dualistic sense, and the difference between sympathetic and autogenous must be fleshed out below. But note that the word “autogenous” is being used, not because its meaning is accurate, but because, properly understood, it’s meaning can be clearly intuited. Once one clarifies their understanding, the “auto-“ prefix is seen not as indicating a relation to a self-entity, but to the “essence of self-less naturing,” i.e. “emptiness.” So, onward…
Since everything is empty of an intrinsic self-nature, everything that arises does so spontaneously and uncaused. I experience a self-less (actor or agent-less) naturing and mindfully do not infer a cause or source of that naturing as many do, because that is intellect trying to impose rational order on our understanding. Thus, for me, there is nothing to be known apart from this naturing, and that necessarily includes the understanding that there is no entity such as a “nature” that is naturing.
In all cases, this naturing is the event-horizon between the intelligible—all that we experience, and which can be puzzled out, to make sense of—and what is beyond the intelligible. And of what is beyond the intelligible, there is nothing that can truthfully be said, although interpretive explanations abound in religious and spiritual traditions. But the fact that the naturing itself, as well as what is natured, is intelligible, at least in some respects, provides a hook into a more subtle understanding, as I will explain. By this I mean, for example, that we can note that what manifests is coherent—things go together—so we can say something like: “this naturing, while spontaneous and uncaused, is conditioned by what has already manifested.”
First, this naturing is viscerally known. It’s not a knowing of something, and it’s not a knowing by someone, it’s just an awake/aware naturing, so while ultimately empty of selfhood, it is also ultimately pregnant with infinite possibility of visceral presence.  If this was not the case, then nothing would or could be known, given that what manifests has no intrinsic self-nature, and reality is an inside without an outside, so there are no other forces, causes, actors, etc. at play here.
But in our experience, it is noted that what arises is somehow coherent with what is already the case. At least, that is how intellect orders experience. I understand our idea of “time” to be just such an ordering placed upon what appears in the eternal (i.e. timeless) Now, in which there is no time, so no past, no future, no present—only presence. I have noted that the coherence is not the result of causality, but of conditioned freedom, thus what arises is coherent with the range of possibility opened up by what is manifest Now, but it is not caused directly by it—how could that be, since there is no “it” and no separation, nor “self-causality,” and thus without such bounds, there can be surprise, novelty, range, awesome serendipity, etc.
What is experienced is always arising in mind (i.e. naturing), and what we experience arises sympathetically (coherently) with current conditions—the state of the universe, so to speak. The perspective, the “I” and the “we,” is what is imposed upon reality by intellect, and intellect is the acquired habits of conceptualization and thought, a kind of karma I suppose, that imposes a narrowing down of focus. That narrowing can be overcome… but that’s another subject.
And in the case of sound, everything up to, but not including, the magical idea that consciousness arises from some quantity, configuration, or function of physical matter, that scientists have observed, holds. Yes, a tree falls and it’s falling conditions the arising of pressure (sound) waves that travel through the air, striking our ears, which are so structured that when the pressure changes condition a vibration in the eardrum, those vibrations condition impulses that move into the brain, which conditions further electrical and chemical activity in the brain, which conditions the arising of sound. But all of those steps, are just intellect imposing ordering upon the dichotomized conditions that are selflessly natured.
So, “sound,” properly speaking, arises only in the naturing (called “mind”) based upon manifest conditions. Sound is thought of as a kind of vibration, but the time and space that vibration requires are also impositions of order by intellect upon this naturing—they are our way of conceptually explaining experience, ordering it, and showing where we have cut things up with our distinguishing thoughts.
What we are trying to do with such orderings is explain what is beyond the event horizon of self-less naturing. But given that we cannot truly succeed, what happens if we just step back and don’t impose an intellectual order? What is “sound?” It can only be the visceral (known) presencing of this self-less naturing, and specifically one kind of presencing that our intellect distinguishes from all other kinds (the concept of “kinds” itself shows this to be the result of intellection). Vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and thinking are all just subtle structures of distinctions that intellect imposes on self-less naturing. And light, sound, tastes, kinds of physical touching, and smells, as well as thoughts, are all just distinctions that the ordering intellect imposes upon what selfless naturing is manifesting, in this case pointing to the content of the distinguished experiences.
Thus, what is manifest is intelligible in this way. We can, through habit of thought, whether self-developed or learned, make all these distinctions and order all the conditions and coherency in such a way that we build this whole edifice of a world of separate things somehow interacting together through causal relations. And we do this without intent, thoughtlessly! These habits are the very structuring that we have become so accustomed to.
But there are manifestations for which there are no conditions, such as a source for a particular kind of sound that we can experience. We can distinguish these sounds into kinds, but cannot relate them to any conditions that, such as a tree falling, open the possibility of these sounds arising, so they can be called “unconditioned,” or “unstruck”. And in our normal, sleepy way of being, we don’t even notice them, but in deep meditation we can. And when experienced in meditation, they are called “nimittas,” or “meditation signs,” also “siddhis,” and “charismata,” among other names.
When they are experienced, and clearly so as unconditioned sound, they can be referred to as the “resonances of selfless naturing” as well as all the other names from different traditions that I gave earlier. I call them “autogenous resonances.”
We tend to screen these out of our awareness (i.e. we do not turn our attention to them even when they become apparent), or we immediately think, upon hearing them, that we are ill and run to a doctor for drugs or therapy to make them go away. But being that they are unconditioned, there is no intelligible link between them and current conditions in or around us, and so the intellect can’t jump in and say “over there, over there! that’s where they are coming from” thus imposing a subtle conceptual structuring, and even a dualistic perspective, on what we are experiencing. Thus these are the easiest way to see through the dichotomization of our experiences into kinds of phenomena perceived by kinds of senses, collapsing it all into just self-less naturing, which we habitually call “mind.”
I don’t know if this is helpful, without a direct experience of these sounds. Just stay vigilant and if you notice them, follow them. The trail leads to surprising experiences and insights.
Question: What is this “non-conditioned” referring to? Buddha taught that all that arises does so contingently, which is referred to as “dependent origination” in Buddhism, so doesn’t this go against his teaching?
Answer: No, this doesn’t go against what the Buddha taught. It’s comes out of a subtle point about the truth of Dependent Origination—which is that while what arises originates in dependence upon conditions, this truth is not itself dependent upon anything. Dependent Origination holds independent of conditions—there is no contingency upon which it is or is not true.
And what I am saying reflects a more wholistic understanding than Dependent Origination when it is emphasized out of the context of Emptiness.  Dependent Origination and Emptiness are not two truths, they are two perspectives upon nondual reality. On its own, Dependent Origination could be just a codification of the conceptual idea of Causality, and that is how it is often understood, in my experience with others, given the tendency to speak about “causes and conditions” as if they are they same thing. What I am speaking of as non-conditioned is useful for seeing that sound arises solely in mind, and this insight originates in a direct experience I’ve attained and is not the result of speculative intellection. I am presenting this explanation to overcome the absence of first-hand experience of it, pointing others to the possibility of using unconditioned sound as a meditation support, and its superiority as a support.
So, what is non-conditioned is the naturing itself… this processual unfolding is unborn, timeless, and immortal. There is no condition that allows it to be, or not be. What is conditioned is the contingent arising of coherent manifestation, which is called Dependent Origination. That which is unconditioned can also be found in the spontaneous freedom of naturing—because conditions don’t cause anything to arise, they are merely the conditioning of possibility, so that, what arises is not specifically caused, but is dependent upon the conditions that made it possible for them to arise.
The unconditioned sounds that I speak of arise as the resonance of this naturing in the same fashion as the universal ether, the Akasha, is conventionally understood to be both the medium for vibrational movement (sound), as well as, more subtly, nothing other than the vibrational movement. Thus self-less naturing—“dharmata” in Buddhism—can be directly experienced as resonant sound, as well as the manifested appearances. These unconditioned sounds are the naturing of what manifests, thus we can turn towards the naturing in its bare essence as resonance empty of a cause—the non-conceptual emptiness of all that manifests—or toward the formal, structured experience of all that manifests. This is unconditioned sounds’ importance as a meditational support, and the origin of its power to heal and transform.

in INNER KNOWLEDGE by James Corrigan02/16/2016%s Comment Part Two of REALITY AND EXISTENCE.

Because what is real must be simple, it must be nondual. This nondual oneness of reality is the great mystery at the heart of all things. It’s why people who talk about it are called mystics and what they’re talking about is called mysticism. You might think that saying non-dual or One captures reality, but it doesn’t at all. That expression I used above when describing my experience as a young man, unseen loving light, fails to capture what was, at that moment, and similarly, non-dual and One fails to capture what is real.

The best explanation of why that is, that I’ve ever read, is from a 3rd Century Neo-Platonic mystic named Plotinus. I’ll quote what he said, but don’t get lost in it. Why? Because it is often more helpful to use a visual or allegorical depiction when dealing with a difficult subject such as that of the nonduality of reality. Speaking of the nature of reality necessarily introduces errors that cannot be overcome, unless one uses a technique designed to mitigate such structural errors which are introduced by everyday dualistic language, since all language is unsuited for metaphysical and spiritual discourse in the sense that it was created for the marketplace, according to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

One such technique used almost universally by mystics is apophasis, which means unsaying or saying away. In apophasis all statements are signs in a most indeterminate way, since they are used to point to that which can only be apprehended in a flash of illumination, or gnosis. It must be noted that apophasis is a linguistic performance and is different in intent than apophatic, or negative theological statements, with which it is frequently confused. Those kinds of statements say what something isn’t. That’s not what is going on in the quote below in which Plotinus explains the problem that necessitates his use of apophasis in this section from his “Enneads:”

“Since the substance which is generated from the One is form one could not say that what is generated from that source is anything else – and not the form of some one thing but of everything, so that no other form is left outside it, the One must be without form. But if it is without form it is not a substance; for a substance must be some one particular thing, something, that is, defined and limited; but it is impossible to apprehend the One as a particular thing: for then it would not be the principle, but only that particular thing which you said it was. But if all things are in that which is generated from the One, which of the things in it are you going to say that the One is? Since it is none of them, it can only be said to be beyond them. But these things are beings, and being: so it is beyond being.
“This phrase beyond being does not mean that it is a particular thing, for it makes no positive statement about it, and it does not say its name, but all it implies is that it is not this. But if this is what the phrase does, it in no way comprehends the One: it would be absurd to seek to comprehend that boundless nature; for anyone who wants to do this has put himself out of the way of following at all, even the least distance, in its traces; but just as he who wishes to see the intelligible nature will contemplate what is beyond the perceptible if he has no mental image of the perceptible, so he who wishes to contemplate what is beyond the intelligible will contemplate it when he has let all the intelligible go; he will learn that it is by means of the intelligible, but what it is like by letting the intelligible go.

“But this, what it is like must indicate that it is not like: for there is no being like in what is not a something. But we in our aporia, complete befuddlement, do not know what we ought to say, and are speaking of what cannot be spoken, and give it a name because we want to indicate it to ourselves as best we can. But perhaps this name One contains only a denial of multiplicity. This is why the Pythagoreans symbolically indicated it to each other by the name Apollo, in the negation of the multiple. But if the One, name and reality expressed, was to be taken positively it would be less clear than if we did not give it a name at all.”

The second guide I have adopted, is to see a kind of event horizon between the real and what exists. It’s an expression taken from Science where it is used to explain an hypothesized character of Black Holes. An horizon, as we all have or can experience, hides what is over the horizon from us. In the case of the expression event horizon, what I mean is that experience, which is easily analyzed into events, something we do all the time, still doesn’t show us what is over the horizon because the other side of that horizon cannot be directly experienced.

As Plotinus mentions, the intelligible must be let go of, if one is to reach enlightenment, in the same way that in order to reach the nature of the intelligible, one must meditate in a way that is free of all mental formations, mental images of independent things. What is the intelligible? Why, all experience, of course! Including all our theories, hypotheses, dogmatic assertions, and mental attempts to seize something that can never be within reach. We cannot understand what does not exist. But we can accept the reality of that which is evidenced, necessary, simple, and not contingent on anything for reality.

Yes, this is mystical. And that may grate our Western mindset even if we think we are better than that. We do so love our terminology! There will still be those that believe that they have the final answer to the riddle. But I learned from the example of Aristotle, renowned as The Philosopher in Western history, who, always looking to the material world for what was real, in the end realized that the only answer his exquisite powers of observation and reasoning could arrive at, was that God put everything in motion.

He failed. Why? Because he was trying to do something that is impossible. Not beyond our abilities; just impossible. He was holding onto the intelligible, searching for The Answer that he thought was there somewhere, and because he thought of Nature as an actor that had to be put into motion somehow. He also thought reality was populated with substantial entities, so he didn’t need to distinguish between what’s real and what exists. He didn’t realize that naturing is possible without a nature doing it, and that there was no need for the answer to why there is something, rather than nothing, there just is, and you and I cannot deny it, because in doing so, we affirm it. Nor can we point to a Nature that truly exists. It’s just idea that we have.

The tricky part is letting go of all those mental formations. There comes a point, the event horizon, when language, and ideas, just obfuscates our way completely. Which leads me to the point of this essay: What is known can only be known by appearing, in showing up the knowable is known. It’s that simple. But we are not the ones knowing. Let me explain this insight. If there is no observer and no true entities to be observed, then knowing cannot originate on this side of the event horizon which consists of that which exists, and therefore knowing cannot be structured as a seizing hold of, or grasping with awareness which is dualistic in the sense of involving a perceiver and the perceived a consciousness.

Frankly, there really can’t be any awareness on this side at all, which might explain why scientists can’t find it, but even speaking of awareness or knowing causes dualistic understandings to slip in because awareness is usually understood as being aware of something, as is knowing. This imputes a perspective into our understanding that is misleading and wrong. We may not see it as a perspective because we have removed the illusory me and you and it, so that it is now a perspective from nowhere; but that is still a perspective, and thus is still wrong.

This view from nowhere is widely found in science, where it is the basis for objectivity. But that kind of structural perspective can’t be real because it exists in experience. So this is my third guide: no views from nowhere. Any explanation that permits such a view to creep in, is defective in at least that way. This fundamental problem we have to confront, these perspectives, is exemplified by our tendency to speak of mind and body. This is yet another dualistic distinction we make because of our habitual failure to recognize our true nature, and that there is no entity in body, nor in mind, nor in the whole of both. Everything we think of, feel, and perceive is also lacking any independent reality. I could not, and I believe, nor can you, ignore what becomes so clear in deep meditation, that there is nothing other than this spontaneously creative naturing going on, and that is the true essence of Reality.

What we think of as mind or Mind is just the spontaneously creative naturing of forms, feelings, perceptions, consciousnesses, and mental constructions, the five Buddhist skandhas. We confuse the naturing of what exists with a mind that we lay claim to having, which finally dissolves in the clear light of meditative insight. Yet, if we adjust for the lack of an entity that we can call our mind, calling it instead, and grandly doing so, Mind, that is again a misconstrual of what is the case, because we think that Mind also knows or is aware in a conceptually dualistic sense, in most cases.
Naturing is not limited to the internal skandhas. Everything that exists has the same origin. This includes all forms: including the five skandhas, mountains, planets, galaxies, hummingbirds, trees, bacteria, quantum particles, wind fluttering leaves on a tree, a musical note, a kiss, a thought, etc. There is no mind entity in reality, neither is there a Nature entity. There is no place for knowledge to reside. That which is known is not known through cognizing in an awareness of sense, as if through reflection or contemplation of something, but directly through naturing. It’s the great mystery, of course.

I can think of an allegory to help you get over the initial difficulty that occurs as you try to swallow this argument, if you are hearing it before actually experiencing it: it’s something called the Piezo Electric effect. You make use of it all the time, in microphones, earbuds, even old phonograph pickups, as well as the clickers that ignite gas stoves today. A certain kind of crystal can create an electric field when sound vibrations strike it, causing it to slightly compress its structure. This is how a microphone works. The same crystal can vibrate and thus create sounds, when an electric current is passed through it. This is how earbuds work. In fact, the same crystal can be deformed in such a strong way by a large enough force that it can produce an electric spark in the kilovolt range. Using a small piston to strike the crystal is how a stove clicker works to create a spark. Think of the electric field as knowing and the crystal deformations as the known. They are not two things, they are the same process.

In a way, this allegory sits on the top of every Buddhist stupa in the form of the sun and moon, the Bindu-Nada void-point and vibrational emanation that our brains interpret as sound and which is the support of my meditation. I can only imagine what stupas would look like today, if they had had earbuds back in the day.

http://levekunst.com/meditating-more-than-an-hour/
MEDITATING MORE THAN AN HOUR
In TRAINING by James Corrigan
12/15/20152 Comments

Also see: Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why did Nagarjuana start with causation


Very clear, by James Corrigan

http://sciomorphogenesis.mindfully.be/…/trouble-with-agency/

Agency implies an agent. If there is no agent, there can be no agency. Agency, of course, is the action or intervention of a thing, or person, that produces an effect. To say that language can’t capture the truth is even more true when silly things are being stated. So when someone talks about causes and conditions, they are being silly because these are not the same. A cause is that which makes a thing happen. It implies an agent and agency–a veritable proliferation of sillinesses. A condition is that which opens the possibility of something happening. But conditions can never cause anything to happen because they are neither an agent nor have agency. Perhaps this surprises you. But think about all the things you thought were going to happen in your life that didn’t, and all the things that did that you never saw coming! Scientists call this stochastic behavior–it extends all the way down to the quantum level (and perhaps especially there!). It’s the reason why a computer needs a clock, that coordinates all the stochastic behavior of electronic components so that the device can actually accomplish the tasks it has been engineered to allow to happen. Notice I didn’t say “make happen,” because sometimes things don’t. And we’ve probably all experienced that too.

Often, in our attempts to make sense of reality, we fall into old habits of thought that arise from an understanding in our heads that things do things. Exorcising that understanding happens naturally when a certain point is reached, but without the direct experience, silliness abounds.

Parmenides, an Ancient Greek philosopher once wrote a poem about his insights into reality. He didn’t use any pronouns, and few, if any nouns. Smart people, thinking they knew what he meant, supplied a lot of additional wording that made the poem easier to read, but empty of truth. Then, once that was done, they realized that Parmenides hadn’t said the right thing in the right way, so they fixed that up too. When Parmenides said: “the same: to be and wherefore is intuitive awareness” (“ταὐτὸν δ᾽ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὓνεκέν ἐστι νόημα”), equating the manifesting appearances and selfless knowing, they clarified it, equating “being” with “thinking,” turning it into a kind of “I think, therefore I am!” statement instead. Silliness. Neither the Greek word for “thought, nor for “thinking” appears anywhere in Parmenides’ statement.

So, try to make sense of conditions, not as any kind of interaction between entities, not even in a metaphorical fashion. Instead, think of how a seed grows. The sun doesn’t cause the seed to grow, any more than rain does, or the soil, or all the bacteria, fungi, animals, and other plants do. Yet, for the seed to grow, all of those conditions need to be right, including the condition of the seed being present.

As to what causes the seed to grow, well, just let the idea of causes go. It involves agents and agency, and they are just silly nonsense. Understand that when the right conditions are present, the possibility of genesis is present, but what actually happens is uncaused.

Now divest that scenario of all sense of things inherent in it. Sunlight isn’t a thing, except as a concept. Neither is water, or soil, or all the life present in soil. These are all just ideas, ways to talk about reality in shorthand. Instead, see an amazing, and coherent presencing of selfless naturing. Don’t even hold onto the idea of a nature, as something doing the naturing. It will cause a cognitive dissonance that will tire you out, but the effort lays a groundwork for the direct experience to come. It’s all just more conditioning, and in this case, it’s called mind training, but it could be called mind conditioning as well, because you are not making anything happen, you are only developing the right conditions for certain experiences to happen.

So remember: there is no mind, instead there is just this awesome and beautiful selfless naturing. Or if you prefer, there is just this awesome and beautiful selfless minding. But no nature and no mind anywhere–just the appearance of awesome beauty.

Reflect on that phrase, “awesome beauty.” Another way of expressing it, that I use, is the visceral essence of selfless loving. But you can just call it bliss instead.

  Update: the follow article is outdated. The updated one can be found at https://tranquilitysecret.com/awareness-is-unlike-a-mirror-1dfab1569ad5

 

by James M. Corrigan

Taken from Awareness Is Unlike A Mirror

The allegory of a mirror is often used to help individuals understand what awareness truly is like. It is said that, like a mirror, awareness reflects all manner of things and yet is never affected by what appears.
Unfortunately, there is a grave problem with this allegory that instills a very false understanding of awareness in those that take this allegory to heart. A mirror reflects what is before it, but it also reverses that image. Perhaps we should focus more on the reversal aspect than we do on the reflectivity in that allegory because describing awareness as being like a mirror conveys a completely opposite understanding of awareness from what is necessarily true.
Awareness is not reflective. That would imply a dualism. Instead of its reflectivity, it is its “unaffectedness” that is being focused on in this allegory; but that is contrary to our actual experience and leads to a proliferation of reified “minds” used as explanatory devices to get around the initial error of holding that awareness is unaffected by what appears “in the mirror.” This whole concept of “mind” is a fundamental error.
Awareness is essentially cognizance, not reflectivity. “Essentially” means that this cognizance is the characteristic of awareness that makes it awareness.
Unlike awareness, a mirror is not cognizant of what is appearing in it. The opposite of “cognizant” would be “ignorant,” “oblivious,” and even “unaffected by” and that latter antonym is exactly what this allegory wants to convey, and is touted for conveying—thus this allegory illustrates the very opposite of awareness’s essential character and confuses all that hear it and try to make sense of what is being said!
Awareness is affected by what it cognizes; unlike a mirror that is “unaffected by” its reflections because it is not cognizant of them, awareness is cognizance in essence.
We are told that awareness is unaffected by what appears in it in a misleading effort to convey an important point about what is more properly called “pure presence” and this leads me to the first proof that awareness is affected by what appears:
Pure presence is directly known once cognizance of the now—the now of pure presence—is recognized. This is called “Breakthrough” and the knowledge it brings is called Rigpa. In Dzogchen—the highest teaching in Buddhism—it is pointed out that once we become aware of the now as nothing other than pure presence we are liberated. What is liberated? The cognizant aspect of our nature—awareness—is liberated from absorption in the appearances. Which appearances? Primarily the self we have an emotional (egoic) attachment to (our thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, perceptions).
This shows that awareness is affected by what appears. How is awareness affected? Three ways: by remaining attentive in approval; by turning away in disapproval; and not paying attention either way when neither approval or disapproval arises. These three affective responses guide what can appear next as the natural display.
The second proof that it is affected is more subtle, relying on a clarification of exactly how awareness arises.
Awareness is not something other than the “presencing” (i.e. naturing) of appearances. It is not a thing. It is not part of a thing. It is not an “aspect” of a process.
Fortunately, the very word itself, with its “-ness” suffix, signals that it is a conceptual abstraction of some characteristic of something, and that is completely wrong in structure—a dead-giveaway that confusion reigns. First, there is no entity to have an aspect, and second, because abstracting awareness away, making it a thing-in-itself (which is the linguistic meaning of “-ness”) completely obfuscates that it is not only the essential character of a  process, it is the only character of the process, thus it is the process—not some aspect of it. This is why when awareness is said to be the “ground” of all that arises a subtle erroneous understanding arises because it is confusing “knowing” for the unknowable.
Effectively, abstracting awareness removes the natural process (from itself), confusing us into thinking that something substantive has been uncovered.
In regard to pure presence, awareness is the wakeful activity of presencing, which is pointed out to us—our first pointing out instruction—as the “knowing” of appearances. This very subtle dualism starts the confusion, which snowballs as we go forward.
Pure presence is not something to be known in a positive sense, and is only recognized via this naturing or presencing of appearances now—the evidence of the reality of presence. Why? Because the essence of pure presence is emptiness—which does not entail awareness in the sense that is meant when used in conjunction with the appearances—what after all would there be cognizance of? Thus the “purity” that is pointed to is the “unknowable” ground state, since nothing positive can be said (or known) about it. But which we may suddenly recognize is the now of all appearances. Appearances are ephemeral and are void of any entity; however, they are evidential—evidence that we can recognize when we suddenly notice the “clearing” of the now (of pure presence) that is the venue of appearing.
“Now” is never affected by what appears. Awareness is always affected by what is appearing because this is the very essence of cognizance, and thus the very essence of the process of naturing (or more literally, awareness is the cognizing of appearances now, limiting and guiding the possibility of what can arise “next,” and this is the sum total of the process).
To conflate awareness with pure presence is a mental crutch, conflating ideas with the unknowable. Expressing “facts” about that to which no facts apply. When recognized, the now is known to be pure presence. But pure presence is not a thing—there is no nature entity—so what could be stained by what appears as cognized?
Thus, the problem is that in making awareness some thing, subtly separating it from the naturing of all appearances, we find the need to prove that it is unaffected by what it cognizes. Yet we know that the essence of this naturing is cognizance; cognizance is not the “nature of the naturing of appearances.” Such a construction is mentation gone wild.
In reality there is no entity; nor are there any entities in the appearances that arise, and these—appearances and reality—are not two things, so why do we make awareness into something that must be kept clean? Perhaps it is only a lack of direct recognition that creates the confusion.