Will keep ‘desire/ignorance’ in mind from now on. Thanks for making the recipe a little more simple. I’m getting tired of complicated and tedious self-development advice elsewhere. I prefer your ‘just be aware’.

The challenge for me, though, has been to stay ‘awake’ Duality is just too good at lulling me back to ’sleep’. So how does one stay alert in the middle of a seemingly all too dual life?

I’m just now reeling from one backward step after a couple of succesful steps forward. I don’t beat myself up as I know I’m making progress. I’m thinking some sort of an instant ’sleep alert’ would be helpful. How do you do it? Amedei chockies in your pocket? Pity they’re not easy to come by

Thank you so much. =)

Sof Theo,

You’re on to my secret! It’s the chocolate

This sensation – of moving into more awareness, and then finding yourself slipping into the ‘auto-pilot’ mode of our usual living – is actually a wonderful teacher. If we look at it, we can ask ‘what does it mean that I feel myself slipping in and out, or moving closer or further’?

Usually, we’ll find that we have created an idea of what we have to live up to – of what it means to be Awake.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this process (of defining Awakening) as we work on waking up, because the desire/interest is what motivates us to attend to awakening, instead of just watching old episodes of CSI.

However, as we move closer to Awakening, it begins to become fruitful to hear that our efforts are getting in the way. Our efforts are always directed toward a goal, and when we hold a goal in mind (however subtle it may be), we’ve created an object at the end of our quest. And this object, since we must define it, must have qualities. And in the case of defining awakening, we create qualities which we must then live up to.

Often we can be quite convinced that we are ‘there’, and may feel that we dwell ‘there’ for months at a time. But if we can conceive of a ‘not there’, we can be sure that we’ve simply developed a powerful ability to ‘deal with life’ more effectively. This will serve us well until circumstances push us out of our ability to ‘deal’ (in many cases this is not a tragic circumstance, but a lulling one, where things quiet enough that we find ourselves slipping back into unawareness). Then we discover that we’re still engaged in the same process of trying to get someplace better.

When we’re at this point, it’s time to pay attention to our efforts. (Don’t try to cease them, as that just becomes a new effort.) Whenever we feel that we have slipped back into unawareness, it is time to ask ourselves just what ‘unawareness’ is. Just look at how we’re defining one state, then another state, and notice how we’re preferring one over the other. At once, it may become quite comical as you watch your present mind trying to label this-or-that ‘past’ state of being, and you can get delightfully tangled in the whole dualistic mess of it all.

These are the moments when it may snap – when we see that all of this that we’re doing is Awake, and dualism is just a game we’re playing in our heads. When this happens, we can’t find anything dualistic any more, and we come to see that the whole world is enlightened. Indeed, the only place that dualism exists is in our heads. And I mean that in a strictly personal sense – as in saying to each individual person – ‘Dualism exists in only one place in this whole universe. In YOUR head. No one else’s. Just yours, alone.’ Dualism is strictly personal.

If this doesn’t immediately depress us, it can remove us from the feeling that dualism is ‘out there’, a force in the world against which we must do some sort of battle. When we see it’s ‘in here’, we can become intimate with it, and then we’ll see that it, too, isn’t dual. Nothing we can do or think can ever be dualistic — we’re here, right now, fully present in every moment, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

As always, I appreciate your comments, and hope that this pointer was effective for you!

Sweetwater,
Kenton

Thank you for your feelings! I’m so happy to hear that these writings are making some sense!

Sweetwater,
Kenton