What We’re Not
Among the great things which are to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness is the greatest.
– Leonardo Da Vinci
That which causes us all the misery in life, is that we confuse our true nature with the fabrication we’ve designed – a fabrication made up of all sorts of things we use to describe ‘me’. If you ask almost anyone to describe themselves, what will they tell you? They will tell you only about different aspects of their fabrication. Their name, their job, their interests and dislikes.
But that is not who we are.
Our Construction
Imagine, for a moment, that your life is a construction of little sticks. Since you were young you began building it on a table-top, one stick at a time. Each stick is an accomplishment, an idea, a set of morals, a philosophy, a conviction, a material possession, a person. Each stick is a part of who you are.
People take this construct very seriously. The construct, after all, is our life! In the construct we can see all that makes us who we are – our ideals, our careers, our relationships. Our Selves.
And we are urged, by everyone around us, to keep building – to make the construct bigger and better by becoming more enlightened, by gaining wisdom, by increasing our security and peace and presence in the world. If we’re less spiritually-oriented, we make our construct better by adding more money, a better health insurance policy, a nicer car, and a bigger house.
Our construct grows and grows as we tend to it, but something strange is happening, for the more it grows, the more it begins to teeter and wobble. We want it to get bigger, but as it gets bigger we realize how much more of a mess it’s going to make if part of it falls off!
So we spend each day attending to it – worrying about one aspect or another, adding more sticks in an attempt to give it more stability.
When we discover the spiritual paths, we begin reading books that give us new insight – ‘put sticks over here’, they say, and ‘build a new section here to balance your life’, they say. And for a moment the construct seems better and more stable. But only for a moment, because all we’ve done is added more to the construct of wobbly sticks, and by its very nature, it tends toward sagging and slowly falling apart.
Our entire lives are spent attending to the construct. Indeed, all of human endeavor is concerned with attending to the construct. Our goal, insane as it may sound, is to build the construct bigger and bigger, fighting all the while to keep it from falling apart, until finally, one day, whole portions of it tumble down because our spouse leaves us or our government falls apart or we get terminal cancer or get in a car accident. And in the very end, we die, and the construct falls apart completely, once and for all.
If this were only a game made of sticks, it might be fun. But it’s not a game. It’s our life. The thing we take most seriously in all the world.
But we don’t have to live our lives in this strange endeavor. We can be free. And if we truly wish to be free, to be free of stress and suffering and anxious worry about how our construct is always on the brink of falling apart, there is only one thing to attend to.
Attend to sweeping the construct off the table. Let it crumble and brush it away. Now look upon the empty table, and experience a new way of being.
——–
The construct of sticks is made up of something we could call ‘progressive paths’. A progressive path teaches that in order to achieve more and better things, you must constantly attend to gaining more . . . something. More money, more items, more compassion. Perhaps a better outlook on life.
In the spiritual realm, nearly every book you pick up, nearly every ‘guru’ who speaks to you, and every spiritual system, is offering a progressive path. By coming to new and sequential levels of realization and growth, we can grow as spiritual beings, gaining in wisdom and enlightenment.
But all of these progressive spiritual paths, no matter how ‘right’ they sound, are simply providing nourishment for our ego – and ego is the foundation of dualistic thought. Their words and teachings betray that they are clinging to the subject-object viewpoint of the world. Their very ‘wisdom’ actually reinforces your concept of being something other than what you are. Reinforces your concept of being the construct.
You, however, are not the construct. And any path that supports your construct will only pull you further from freedom.
There is a single release to freedom from dualistic thought. Many, many paths can point to it, but often, such paths become only more ego-nourishment. It is entirely too easy for us to make ‘the path’ another portion of our construct.
Experiencing true ‘constructlessness’ is something that we can only experience directly. It’s like a color – we understand yellow when we see it, but if we had to describe it in words to someone who has never seen it, it would be impossible. That’s why it’s important to remember that a path can only point the way to non-dualism. Every article you read on this site is such a pointer – not a written declaration of truth. Only a pointer. You alone are capable of seeing things just as they are.
Explore posts in the same categories: Awakening and Reality