A week or so ago, I started jokingly referring to my almost daily journal entries (going back many years) as Today's Column. The subject area is advaita, or non-duality, and arupa is a sanskrit word that refers to formlessness. So...
Here's Today's Column....
Mind and "You"
January 8, 2009
The mind is not you. The mind is a map of your identity, which, again, is not you. The mind is a pattern of ripples, spreading out in all directions and reflecting off infinity. Those ripples – memories – form a living hologram, constantly adjusted and refined by your experience, which integrates with the reflexes and instincts that evolution has equipped your brain with over billions of years. But that process is subject to error, and, again, that is not “you.”
What you are is something altogether different, something timeless, something that is unchanged by any circumstance, something that is the one irreducible consequence of all enquiry: awareness. No matter how convoluted your philosophy gets, there is no way to eliminate the single undeniable fact of existence. To suggest that your own awareness is an illusion is to dodge the question, when, in fact, awareness is the question.
The universe is a question, not an answer. Awareness is curiosity, not meaning, and it is a door that opens in all directions, with no criteria, no judgments, no particular qualities, and most of all, no particular location or identity. Looking out of me and looking out of you is the same awareness. We are not separate beings. Being is universal, immanent, ubiquitous, infinite, unbounded, and when I am most open I know that you are me and i am you.
About Me
- Jim Dodds
- I live in a myth. It's called Vermont. It's real. It's the center of the universe (but what isn't?). About 10 years ago, I started to realize that what was scaring me was me, and then it was ridiculous. In December 2004 I found out about Byron Katie. I spontaneously went into samadhi once before meeting Katie, and once after. In the summer of 2009, at David Carse's satsang my friend Lee Alden said, "I get it now. There's nothing to get." In my head, the words were added, "...and no one to get it." That was, for all practical purposes, the end of the quest. Enlightened? Nobody here but us chickens. Micahel Walsh says, "...let go of the rope that's pulling you through the shit." I let go. Jan Frazier says, "...fall back into its arms," and I fall. Samadhi is rare, and often confuses the issue. But awakening is easy. It's right here.
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