Anyone seeking enlightenment is of course not enlightened. Nor could anyone ever be enlightened, as on enlightenment, there is no I.

“I seeking enlightenment” is bound.

“Enlightened” is no-I, free.

So drop the idea you could ever achieve, as that achiever is not real. Drop the desire, reach the non-I…

It is not to work on the “I”

It is to recognise the true reality

and that is absent of any “I”

To work on the “I”, to improve, or fix,
To aim to remove the “I” or prove it unreal,
are to re-enforce the “I” which is to enforce an illusion.

To recognise the true nature of reality will kill any idea of “I”
Job done.

“To live in this Realization
is to not worry about perfection or non-perfection.”

Hsin Hsin Ming – Verses on the perfect mind

“even an attachment to enlightenment is to go astray.
Just let things be in their own way as they are,”

“Be in harmony with the Way
and you will be free of disturbances.
Tied by your thoughts, you lose the truth,”

Enlightenment is not a thing that can be had but once recognised becomes a thing we would always love to maintain. This of course is as as tied to things as any other state so is failure.

“Indeed, to accept them fully
is identical with true Enlightenment.
The wise attaches to no goals,
but the foolish fetter themselves.”

Here this Zen poem echoes the wisdom of the Tao (well summed up in a number of passages of the Ch’ing Ching Ching and in nearly all Taoist writings) in saying that it is the movement that we have to be in touch with, to embrace it all with no such distinctions as wanting one state or another.

Tied permanently to a state you feel to be enlightened is as much bondage and death as to be tied to any other thing.

“Using mind to stir up the mind
is the original mistake.”

“Peaceful and troubled derive from thinking;
Enlightenment has no likes or dislikes.”
~~~

Verses on the perfect mind is a lovely work – you can download it in full here. Hsin Hsin Ming.

“Words! Words!
The Way is beyond language,
Words never could, can not now, and never will describe the Way.”

Lao-chun the Master said:
Tao is, devoid of form;
Yet Heaven and Earth are brought to birth,
And nurtured by Its norm.

Tao hath no Will to Work;
Yet by its Way of Heaven
The Moon and Sun rejoice to run
Among the Starry Seven.

Tao hath no Name; Its Word
Is Growth, and Sustenance
To all; I aim to give It Name:
Tao (Heaven prosper Chance!)

Tao hath twin phase, with Te:
The Silent and the Stressed.
Of Motion, those; of these, Repose
Sublimely manifest.

Heaven moves, pure Silence He;
Earth rests, beneath the Strain;
Shuttle and Loom, as Word and Womb,
Their Mystery sustain.

Pure Motion maketh Rest
As Silence maketh Stress.
If man were still, then Heaven should thrill
With Earth to Nothingness.

Self loveth Silence. Yea,
But Mind distracteth it.
Mind loveth Rest; but Passions’ Pest
Allures the trembling Wit.

If man restrain desire
His mind will cease to roll,
And mind’s release allow pure peace
Of Silence to the Soul.

The senses will not soil;
The thought will not upstress;
Nor poisons (Greed, Wrath, Dulness) breed
Their triform deadliness.

Men earn not ease of Tao
For their desires’ disease;
Because their mind is not refined
Of thought by killing these.

If one should slay desires,
His mind and body seem
No longer his; but phantasies
Danced in a wanton’s dream.

Slay mind, slay body, slay
The external: matter goes.
Then space remains; renew the pains!
Up! Front the final foes!

Slay space; then Naught abides.
Hold on thine holy hand!
When Naught gives back before the attack,
Serene thy Silence stand!

All’s rest, devoid of mark;
How should desires fix tooth?
When they are past, thou surely hast
The Silence of the Truth.

Flawless that Truth and Fixed,
Yet apt to each appeal
Nature and Sense to influence-
The magnet to the steel!

Oh! This true Touch with all
Elastic and exact
That yet abides above their tides-
The Silence free from Act!

He that hath this shall come
Little by little, a breath,
So floweth he now, to Truth of Tao,
Wherein he vanisheth.

Men style him Lord of Tao
Yet He hath none to lord.
His motive He of all that be:
Enough for His reward!

He that can comprehend
This Doctrine may transmit
This Sacred Tao to men that vow
Themselves to fathom It.

II

Lao-chun the Master said:
The adept in skill of soul
Hath never an aim; the bungler’s shame
Is that he gropes a goal.

Who most possess the Te
Conceal their magick power;
Who least possess exert their Stress
Seven times in every hour.

These, who cling fast to Powers,
Who guard them, and display
Their magick Art-they are not part
Of Tao nor yet of Te.

Men win not Truth of Tao
Beacause their minds are wried.
The mind uncurbed, the self’s perturbed,
And loses tune of tide.

Lost, the external lures;
They turn to seek it: then
All things perplex, confuse, and vex
Those miserable men.

Disordered thoughts arise;
Body and mind grow sick.
Disgrace and fear grow year by year
To their climacteric.

Wild, they are tossed about
Through Life and Death; they quiver,
Sunk in sea-stress of Bitterness,
And lose the Tao for ever.

The true, the abiding Tao!
Who understandeth hath;
Who hath the Tao is Here and Now
In Silence of the Path

~~~~~~

“If there is no me, then who is doing it?”

..and of course that has no answer as if there is no I or me, then there is also no other to do it.

When there is no I there is also no universe, no possible thing. So they probably just nod and hope you go away soon.

This concept that is outside the bounds of language, is of a no-thing, not any thing. It comes over as you may accept there is everything or you may accept there is nothing – in either case you can not then have a notion of I or other or anything – even in the concept of everything you must see this comes to a one outside of definition.

All of this word play sounds like a pointless headache, the key writers on it do seem to go on and on and thinking about it is a koan in itself, and there is the point.. as on trying, you see the fallacy of trying and your mind stumps itself and stops – open to bliss. Bam – and you get it (well not you but it is got), the notion of I is blown away, you may smile or laugh and see the magic.

Wherever it makes something of interest, where it wants to monitor what is going on, it places a black-box recording unit – you call this your mind or self.

As the black-box recording unit sees all acts just after they happen and records them, it thinks it is seeing them in real-time and it thinks it is doing them!

The plane turns left, the black-box records the event but thinks it did it.

The black-box in a plane thinks it is flying the plane, you think you are acting out your life. It is being acted out in complete oneness, you are a monitoring unit fooling itself it is driving.

When you see that you are truly the action of the universe and not this monitoring unit you go beyond the scope of the senses. Rather than “I, hear the rain, see the wall” it is “I am the rain, the wall, the garden, the human and the tree in one unified action”.

We are never in the past or the future, they are unreal, just ideas, but our minds insist in wandering off into the unreal.

We choose to avoid reality, this here now and go off to a side step, a distraction, thinking a thought that takes a past or future idea, plays with it; a false thought based on a false notion – and choose to deliberately avoid the very thing we seek.

And the seeking itself is like stepping forward to achieve standing still, an impossible method.

Crazy as it seems we are the barrier to finding ourself. There is no one who can be awakened, no one to be enlightened. When “One” is found then by definition there is no other, especially no you. No seeker.

A method to finding now is to look out from your solar plexus or heart. Don’t use eyes or ears as they are filtered by the mini mind that is trained and has the nature to form time and analyse. It does this as it is too weak to comprehend the “Now”, the “One” so it splits, measures, analyses and gets lost in its own fallacies.

“The eyes do not look, they absorb. The mind is responsible for looking; its failure here is the splitting of one of the sensory inputs into values, good and bad. These only exist due to the mind itself – here is the illusion.” (source)

instead …

“Your empty mind,
is your full life;
The impenetrable solid reality,
is the ungraspable mind.” (source)

Our mind is useless, our language contaminated with rules that split the mind. Drop it all and then you are left with “Aaaaaaaa!” Here Now! it was there all along, Bliss!

You can not be enlightened. When you are one, then by definition,there can be no other, especially no you. So enlightenment is a very special state that has no doer.

So in proper meditation, you can not “do it” you can not do it to get to somewhere. Meditating the mind on something is duality, meditating by some method is dual if you use the mind, eyes, any such system.

So – Find the place between the solar plexus and heart, about the base of the ribs. Don’t meditate on it or dwell on it as that is dual, just locate it, know where it is – It has a strong being so is easy to locate.

Now look out from there.

Look from that space. Using this space as your centre, as your root, is beneficial as it has no sense of time and thinks no thoughts. It links to a being that is undivided by sense or mind.

Look out from there and you will notice the rest falls into place. The breath falls into place, gets deeper and becomes unnoticed; you find a way for your body to rest, (obviously different if you are on a bus, by a lake, walking, cooking, or on your bed), and the non-dual meditation takes place of itself.

There is an infinity, an undivided One. All dualisms must eventually resolve to that from which they were born and that is the unnameable Infinite One. Naming it causes dualism and is thereby pointless. Reason as much as you need to to agree with that, but I know for certain it can be no other way.

As there is something that is infinite, it means that everything is that infinity. There is no room for infinity +1 so You are infinity. You are Infinite Oneness but – - – you’re not are you?

The Mask

You observe and something is observed. You by nature, not fault, rip the one into the many. The Infinite One is mother of the 10,000 things as they say.

So how is it that you get so tied up with the imaginary role you are acting out and not in fascination of the infinite one of which you are? You are deliberately seeing others as the mask they wear and you are identifying with your mask too. This is the fun of life. It must be for fun as you do not conjure up such an idea from infinity to deliberately bring about your suffering. Being a human in a mask and doing all the nice things humans can do seems to be a choice infinity makes even with the risk of seriousness as a side effect. Looking at animals and children shows how great it is when the mask is not taken seriously.

The masks make for very convincing disguises, we can’t play this game without a very good act. We can come to realize by logic that we are all infinite oneness wearing masks and playing a game, but knowing that by reason is still not enough to explain the game.

Seeing Mask A destroy the nation of Mask B because of a difference in opinion is awful if you are Mask C observing. Even if you know it’s masks by reason it’s still horrible to observe. So we have to get beyond reason.

Yes on the human level, here with compassion as our highest attribute, the suffering of other humans and all life is heart wrenching. We would like to say “Look here infinity, lift your mask. See? it is you under there getting all serious. And it’s you under the other mask too!” – but what can this achieve?

There is a danger that this view in the wrong hands or in the mind of an underdeveloped human (one convinced by the mask) that they can treat life as dirt. This however is not the level of awareness we need to be approaching this from. Approached from the correct level of awareness we result in extending compassion even further than that achievable on the human (mask) plane. Compassion goes from the high attribute and gift on the human plane to infinite compassion. Compassion with infinity for playing the game. Compassion for people who take the mask seriously, compassion for the ones who suffer due to another oppressing them. Compassion for the ones who never realise and die as the mask not as realised, awakened, infinity. Compassion for those who try to shape the world and destroy others.

Those who see the world as something that can improved upon, that can be shaped to benefit them, are missing the spiritual nature of the Earth and themselves. – If they realised this then they would not be attempting to extend life, gain wealth and power and so on as they would have all they need in one breath.

Ultimate compassion goes out to those who are so lost in the game that they conspire to fix the rules and by nature of their perspective ruin it for the many. When they become truly enlightened then the world will rest. Hiding behind secrecy, conspiracy, fallacy, is fooling them more than anyone else and that, in the end, is funny. The so called Elites are truly the most imprisoned. They have missed the true wisdom and in seeking to fix the human game are running to catch their shadow.

Sit in the shade, take off your mask, there is nothing here but infinite bliss.

I am my guru, you are your guru. Quote another and fail, follow the path of another and fail. Quoting is allowed when it expands your point or when you have personally grasped that same truth and wish to share it, deciding that the version you are quoting is better written. Apart from that you don’t quote.

A wise man once said: “I don’t know” and he was so so so right that everyone ignored him as his truth was too high for them, instead they turned to the person who’s truth was very long and in depth and sounded important.

Nothing lasts. Nothing, not one thing has any real importance except nothing. No thing lasts, it is all in a state of change apart from nothing, only that lasts and it does so by maintaining the place no one else wants. All things, all ideas, all insight, come and go. They seem important, then they decay or lose relevance. Have a fantastic moment of insight, write it down, tell your dog, tell your best friend, tell your grandkids, tell yourself the very next day – all responses will be “Huh!? what are you talking about?”.

Shut up, shut the fuck up and shut up.

Only have thoughts that are; funny, loving, positive, blissful, short, serve to douse other thoughts, or if you are going to think at all, ignore yourself, let your mind rattle on, but ignore it.

Empty the mind, don’t decide what you are going to do when.. what you’ll say to whom when… and so on. Just open to the Wow and be. As things come to you that need to be done you will address them with a perfect emptiness, your response to it will be perfect.

The biggest waste of mind is preparing to protect yourself. Preparing for say; the boss asking you about the thing you did wrong. Just don’t bother with it at all. You have no finer response that to say “yes, I am not perfect, or pretending to be.”. Wasting your thoughts on such things are 1) wasting valuable bliss time and 2) preparing for something that will more than likely not even happen and if it does, not the way you had it i mind.

I had a wise old friend who used to say that is was good to be paranoid, he would always fear the worst and prepare for the worst then then nearly always be pleasantly surprised that none of the bad stuff ever happened. This sounded like a great method to live by! But I came to realize not long after he died that he had wasted so much time in paranoia and was probably fearing what his wife would say when he got home right at the moment that a bus made him into a new paint job.

Don’t think, don’t worry, don’t bother. Wander through your life, enjoy the bliss and when bad stuff happens, it will, just take it and drop it. Don’t waste time thinking how you can learn your lesson from it or avoid it in the future, you can’t and you already have. If you think you can think it through in your mind as so to learn then it is also possible, and is in fact the case, that the mind can do it alone without your interaction. You have already learned the lesson by getting though the situation, you don’t need to think about it in words. Just drop it, move on, get back to being blissful again and well, I’ve had enough typing for now…

Go and do that nice thing you were planning on doing and stop thinking and reading will you?