Causation is a name for the process of objectivisation whereby the sensorial universe is produced.
Doing away with the I-notion is the same as not desiring the personal attainment of enlightenment.
The idea of liberation automatically inhibits the simple realisation that we are free.
The space-time subject-object phenomenal universe is a manifestation of mind.
The negative method is provisional only; it turns from the positive to its counterpart, and then negates both. That wipes out everything objective and leaves an emptiness which represents fullness, total absence which represents total presence. Here the thinking (and not-thinking) process ends, and the absence itself of that is the Inconceivable.
Inconceivable for whoever attempts to conceive it. But who suggested that we should do that?
When Time stops the universe disappears.
We know it eternally. It is the background not only of thought—as Maharshi told us—but of every act of living.
What is there mysterious in This-here-now-am, which is everywhere, and apart from which nothing else is? This which is is pure presence, autonomous and spontaneous. It is This which is looking for Itself when we look for It, and we cannot find It because It is This which we are. Objectively It is not here.
To understand this objectively has little practical value. It must happen to us. It is happening to ‘us’ incessantly. It is that by which ‘we’ are being ‘lived’. If, instead of letting it ‘live’ ‘us’, we live it—we find we are it and it is all that we are.
Every time you try to name This-Here-Now you are an eye trying to see itself. You cannot objectify This-Which-You-Are.
There is no objective ego or self.
Our state of apparent bondage is due to identification with an imaginary objectivisation of ‘I’.
Disidentification, or awakening from the objective dream of living, cannot take place as a result of thinking or of speaking.
Do not nearly all of us spend our time looking for ourself as some object other than ourself—as Reality, ‘the’ Absolute, God, Tao, Pure Mind? Is that not the quintessence of nonsense? The idea of ‘an I’ or of ‘a self’ is absurd, manifestly absurd, even linguistically. No ‘I’ is. But I am.
There is no That and no This, no self and no other, no man and no God, no Buddha, Tao, Absolute, no Reality and no Unreality, no ‘you’ or ‘me’. I am no object, you are pure I. And I am utterly absent.
There is only one universe—and it is This-which-we-are.
There is no present, for the future becomes the past before the temporal process of perception and interpretation can be completed. The ‘present’ is a theoretical line of demarcation like the equator.
As long as we are identified with an object: that is bondage. As long as we think, act, live via an object, or as an object: that is bondage. As long as we feel ourselves to be an object, or think we are such (and a ‘self’ is an object): that is bondage.
You are neither that nor this. One just is, and doesn’t know it. Everything just is, and doesn’t know it. Such is what one finds when one wakes up.
The whole sensorially perceptible, knowable and imaginable universe is I.
The universe is ‘I’.
We are not different: we only appear to be different. Noumenally we are one: as phenomena (appearance), as one another’s objects, we sensorially perceive and mentally interpret one another as the beetle, you, and I. But as what we are, we are not.
I am only eternal Subject—and neither in eternity nor in apparent time could I be known nor could there be anyone to know me—for no such entity as ‘I’ could ever be.
The apparent universe is a dream-structure in-formed by Subject, and therefore can be nothing but I-subject.
Both see-er and seen, hearer and heard, injurer and injured, are Subject, not as dualities but as unities. The man who hates me and its me, and the me that is hated and hit, are both ‘I’, not as two but as one. I who hate him and hit him in return, and he whom I hate and hit back, are both ‘I’, for every possible phenomenal manifestation is in-formed by I-subject, and every possible phenomenal manifestation is objective whereas I am totally devoid of any element of objectivity.
Being (or living noumenally, subjectively) is not ceasing to objectivise—for that is the functional aspect of subject—but ceasing to objectivise oneself, and thereby ceasing to regard one’s objects as independent entities, as other than an aspect of oneself as their subject. That, of course, implies that one is profoundly aware that one is not at all as any conceptual object, even a ‘being’. That integral absence, both phenomenal and noumenal, is the necessary awareness of is-as-it-isness—commonly called Awakening.
No perceiver of any sense-perception, or performer of any action, is to be found.
Without ‘intentions’ we do not have to form concepts; we just act. That alone is transcending conceptualisation.
The attempt of a ‘lived’ puppet to lead his own life is essentially the same as that of a ‘dreamed’ puppet to lead his, and it is as real as any dream. Moreover these attempts are the only reality either could ever know. But neither can ‘live’. And neither is ‘lived’ by an entity. Both are puppets reacting to impulses engendered by psychic conditions over which they have no control. Neither is sentient objectively, neither is an entity, the apparent sentiency of both is a reflex of the Mind which is all that they are.
The I-notion which has intention is itself such a reflex. Its performance as inaugurator of pretended acts of volition is a phantasy, and it is precisely this phantasy which constitutes suffering. In the absence of the phantasy of dreaming there is the bliss of deep sleep, and in the absence of the phantasy of living there is the bliss of ‘nirvana’ or awakened life.
Volition is the psychic chain which holds the phenomenal individual in apparent bondage, for volition is the pseudo-subject attempting to act independently of the force of circumstances. The absurdity of this performance should be sufficiently evident.
All the teaching of the Masters of all the schools of liberation, not only Buddhic, Vedantic, and Taoist, but Semitic also—as, witness, ‘Not my will but Thine, o Lord’—consists in attempts by means of knowledge, practices, and manœuvres to free the pseudo-individual from the chains of volition, for when that is abandoned no bondage remains.
At a fair, when I was young, one could pretend to drive little motor-cars round and round a track. They had a steering-wheel which reacted to springs, but the vehicle was driven and steered automatically from below. Since one instinctively turned the wheel in the direction the little car had to go, it was difficult not to believe that one was steering it, and even more difficult to stop trying to steer it and leave it to take one where it would, for that might have been disaster. Such, exactly, is our volitional way of living.
Tao, the pathless Way, has a gateless Gate which, just as the Equator separates the Northern from the Southern hemisphere, illusorily separates and unites the phenomenal and the noumenal, samsara and nirvana. It is the open road of escape from solitary confinement in the dungeon of individuality. It is the way of reintegration in this-which-we-are, and it is pure as-it-isness.
In Temporality (subject to the time-concept) Volition is an appearance (phenomenon), like every other appearance, an apparent element of the mechanism of living. It has no self-nature (is not as such): its only existence is its phenomenal absence.
An apparent entity is ‘lived’ or ‘dreamed’: his is a rôle played by an ‘actor’. The dramatis persona has no volition at his disposal: the apparent volition displayed is a pretence inherent in the part; and the energy via which that part is played is not subject to a volitional at. For the ‘actor’ is not an entity, but Mind-Only.
Not only can so-called Enlightenment not be ‘attained’ by anybody, as it was not ‘attained’ by the Buddha, but there is no volitional attainment whatever.
Cause-and-effect continue to operate, but volition as a causal factor is eliminated. A body is still lived by causation, but the phenomenal aspect of mind, the split (dualistic) aspect of subject-and-object, is freed from all that depended on volition, affective or intellectual, and is thereby liberated.
Is there any longer a reason why one should go on living in subjection to an identification with a psycho-somatic ‘I’ which one now clearly knows is not what one is? Has one not realised that a ‘self’ is only one’s object, perceptual and conceptual, and that it could not be what we are?
Envy, hatred, and malice will be no more, vengeance will no longer seem desirable, we shall be invulnerable, and so there is no one to hurt any ‘us’. Love and hatred are replaced by universal benediction, manifested as kindliness and good nature towards the world around us which we now recognise as ourself.