Friday, July 3, 2009

Conceptual Imprisonment





Love cannot be conceptually understood and this is why it's not available. However, it can be experienced by engaging to understand it. Unfortunately, you engage from prediction and, therefore, suffer disappointment, because it can never be what you predict.

Attempting to extend outward from a concept is to demonstrate misunderstanding. To experience a concept is, of course, no experience at all. This is equally true for "non-dual awakening." If you think you've experienced “it,” then clearly you haven’t.

Love is an awakening that is unpredictable and cannot be prepared for, since you have no idea what it is. To predict and prepare is to set conditions upon an experience for which you have no understanding. When you think you know, you only imprison another within your concepts, thereby, imprisoning yourself. To define what you need from your own “knowledge” is to deny the truth.

Yet, when you engage without knowing or defining, you allow an openness for surprise.

Surprise is natural, while concepts are completely made up. Love, like enlightenment, must come as a complete surprise. Otherwise, you can be certain you have come prepared for the experience you expect based on what you predicted and, make no mistake, you will have it as expected. Yet, it's funny how what is expected seems to lose value over time, which means your preparations have been useless.

This applies as equally to "non-dual awakening" as it does to love, since both transcend time and are thus, timeless. Prepare for either, based on past learning, and you will experience neither. However, your ego will inform you that you have experienced the concept you were prepared to experience and you, obviously, will become a “believer." Are you a believer?

The world is full of "believers," but exhibits little in the way of truth. Love transcends the world, but if you awaken to it based on the world’s specifications, you have nothing other than what you had before. And who wants that?

To predict is to construct experience based on past learning. What is “loved” is the concept of another and not the other at all. In fact, essentially the other has ceased to exist by becoming a concept that you have constructed for which to fantasize an exchange of conceptual "love" based on your predictions of what it is. But concepts are always empty and there is nothing you can experience from a concept. Duh!

Yet, it’s funny how we look to concepts for our salvation, rather than to each other. But wasn't that the Buddha/Christ message? What happened?

Imprisoning another through a concept means that the other will exist only as a concept and "love" must be predicated upon conformance to that concept and for the ego, nothing else will do and anything less feels like betrayal. Therefore, if another fails to conform to your concepts, the ego can only see "love" as absent and will adjust accordingly.

This is why the ego seeks endlessly for love, but dies without it. To awaken to it, is to live and many realize this just prior to dying. In a moment they immediately understand what they were here for. Do you know what you're here for?

Love is “awakening” to truth and therefore, can come to you only through another because the truth of you is in them. It can’t be realized alone, through deep contemplation or years of meditation. It must be engaged with in the understanding that you cannot predict or prepare for it, whatsoever. Fail to see it in them and you will mistake the truth of yourself and choose your own imprisonment by limiting what you can awaken to in them. This is because "they" are indivisible from "you."


"and all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside"

"in your eyes

the light the heat
in your eyes

I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches

in your eyes

the resolution of all the fruitless searches

in your eyes

I see the light and the heat

in your eyes

oh, I want to be that complete

I want to touch the light,
the heat I see
in your eyes"
(Peter Gabriel)

8 comments:

  1. You have nothing but what you had before. Who wants that?

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  2. "You have nothing but what you had before."

    Oh. Is that your "story"?

    mikeS

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  3. Just echoing. A story seems to unfold. What seemed to be "before". What seems to be "now". Whatever it is, it is. There is only this, whether it is strung together in a story of cause and effect or not, by no one.

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  4. "Just echoing"

    hmmm...what does that mean? You don't associate with a story, but an "echo"?


    "Whatever it is, it is."

    Ha! That brings to mind a recently famous quote: "It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair.

    So define "is."

    Thanks!
    mikeS

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  5. Timeless, present being. Just happening, to no one. It can't be perceived, it is what perceives. It can't be let go of, it is what lets go. There is no one to associate with any story, there is seemingly a story, the content unimportant. You wrote "you have nothing other than what you had before. And who wants that?" That seemed particularly poignant, and I echoed it. The stories are endless, many may be about "having what you had before", and wanting it. Or seeing it was what was sought all along. That's all.

    I like the idea of this entry, although you seem to gently spar with the content of my comments. I guess the words (useless words) that come about this are: we are all the whole world. Seemingly separate, but just the same. Each seemingly differently located and observed and lived reality is one reality. It is possible to recognise this. All the seemingly separate lights, one light.

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  6. Ahhhh...now I get ya! Your wise one-liners often leave me a bit befuddled. But this only proves my lack of wisdom ; )

    "gently spar"? hmmm...yes and that does seem to keep you coming back for more. Keeps it interesting, eh?

    Yes, that's what the wise masters have said: "useless words." However, I suppose until we get it right, words must suffice.

    'All the seemingly separate lights, one light."

    I'm afraid it's really not an either/or proposition. It's not a choice between the one and the many. It's both the one and the many. This seems to be a sticking point for many non-dualers, causing them to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

    Thanks,
    mikeS

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  7. I hope you make it a point in your life to never laugh or Be happy.

    In fact I hope you live by your convictions and never even allow youself to smile...
    I mean..there is some little kid dying of aids or worms or something.. and there is you smiling.
    What kind of person would you be to smile in this world..don't you know that during the time your smile lasts...thousands of people in the world will die from hunger, war, cancer, torture, suicide, aids and a thousand other horrible, ways to die.
    While theres you smiling... there are millions of people starving and having other kinds of awful lives.

    I hope you make sure you never smile again.
    Do you eat food three times a day?...How selfish of you. A man like you should only eat one meal a day and give the other two meals to people who hungry...I could go on but I am bored with this now.

    A man like you should be sainted.

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  8. Jubilee says: You are just another phony/baloney guru like all the rest of them selling something like books.....

    ReplyDelete