Sunday, December 27, 2009

Life is not individual

What is the nature of reality?  This is an age-old question, and many philosophers and scientists alike have tried to answer it.

In this endeavor, there is an attempt to categorize, to divide, to measure, to calculate and analyze.  And what will the end be?  We can try to explain the workings, yet these theories are always under revision.  If we divide the atom into quarks, then we can divide the quark again, and again, and again, and again.  There is no limit to the mathematical divisions we can make.

If you had a pair of glasses which could see at the quantum level, what would you see?  Emptiness.  Energy patterns.  Nothingness.  The basic substance of all matter is emptiness.  It's space.  It's no-thing.  It's a field of intelligence.

That intelligence is "moving" - that movement shapes or forms or "creates" what we know as the material world.  Yet is that intelligence acting upon some external matter?  No - it's the emptiness itself which is formed.  That intelligence IS the tree, the cloud, the thought, the earth, the universe itself.

Is this a leap of faith?  Is this a mystical insight?  No.  It's obvious.  That intelligence is obvious in the gravitational fields, the beating heart, the firing neurons we call "thought".  It is that so-called "field of intelligence" which forms the atom, which is the electron, the pulsing electrical field which seemingly solidifies matter.  If there are more electrons, we say that atom is "heavier" - it is farther down in the periodic table - from hydrogen to iron, the various attributes are only there because of the behavior of that intelligence, yes?

That intelligence is what we call Life.  Life isn't divided.  It isn't owned.  It isn't partitioned by bodies and brains.  The body and brain IS Life itself.

And because there are thoughts - these thoughts claim ownership and individuality.  That is Life too.  Yet the story in thought, the story of an individual life, apart FROM Life, is false.  It's relative to the individual perspective, which is really only Life's perspectives.

There is only that intelligence - only Life itself.  Right now, Life is this blog and Life is reading this blog.  Life is the hands typing it and the eyes reading it.  Life is the author and the reader.

The "you" you've taken yourself to be, is a product of thought.  It's an image, a story.  The real YOU is Life itself, presently seeing itself, presently knowing itself.  That knowing is an innate attribute of Life.  That knowing isn't owned by an individual.

You are Life itself - there is no individual. Therefore there is no individual to be born nor die.  There is no individual to suffer, no individual in bondage and no individual who eventually finds enlightenment.  There are only appearances, which are "made real" in language.  That is duality.

Even calling it Life is duality, yet words are all we have to communicate.  There is really only THIS, only this singular "happening", this present immediacy, which doesn't move, it doesn't recede into the past, it doesn't come from the future.  It's not on a timeline.  It's not measured by distance.  It's just this nondual immediacy, and YOU are THAT.

14 comments:

No One In Particular said...

Clear as a bell - and all my favourite pointers in one! I sure look forward to your entries, or at least thoughts saying things about positive anticipation arise in awareness blah blah blah blah BLAH.

Lotsa that love label thingy "from me to you" Randall.

Anonymous said...

Only this singular "happening..." Ridiculously beautiful...lucid...a fresh downpour of love...

Keep them coming my sweet friend!

Roeland said...

Great!!!!
Love to you,

Roeland

Anonymous said...

Great stuff at SL last night! This "singular happening" thing rocks! But the lesson of all was: "he is not my baby daddy!" Still laughing... hysterically!

Menno said...

Yes SL chat was fun, like the children of unborn parents

Anonymous said...

Excellent! Many thanks for cear pointers.

lucyandsylviesdad said...

Love the scientificallity. Gosh, the "human experience" is so limited and damn fussy to boot. How could anyone take seriously what their eyes, ears, nose etc. "tell" them?

Randall Friend said...

Hello again Suzanne - good to hear from you. Love to you.

Randall Friend said...

Thanks for all the wonderful comments, my friends.

Randall Friend said...

Hello lucyandsylviesdad,

Very cute profile picture by the way.

Yes, as an old friend once said, you are not a human in possession of awareness. You are the limitless awareness, aware of what we call a "human experience".

We conceptualize or "label" the perceptions and conceptualize the mechanism through which these apparently come. Yet the eyes cannot see, the ears cannot hear, the nose cannot smell. They are the instrument. The seeing, hearing and smelling is at once KNOWING - COGNITION - that is beyond all apparent senses.

If we begin to question even the most basic assumptions, like senses, we also inherently question the body and the identifications.

Take note of the Wei Wu Wei quote - "The eye that sees, the ear that hears, the tongue that tastes are only apparatus, but the "I" that sees, hears and tastes is Reality. We only need to realize that and the first perception becomes satori."


love
randall

The Crow said...

"You are dreaming"?

The title is good.
But like most good things, it is relative.
Life lived on a ladder.
No rung being the whole thing.

"You are dreaming" fixes the subject in time.
"...until you are not." releases the subject.

Using words to convey non-words.
Ahhh...

Einrich said...

A few things that 'you' may already know, haven't read the rest of the blog yet. :P

With regards to the first sentence, here's my answer: Enlightenment is understanding the true nature of nature. Nature is nondualistic in nature. Nature does not realize contradictions. And that's just the start of it... That said, I'm not even close to being considered enlightened. :P

I also want to say that it may be useful to point out that the dual of life is death. Cheers, and off to reading the other stuff. :)

Anonymous said...

Hello Randall,

I would like your thoughts on an experience I just had yesterday. If you would be so kind. First I know experience is not valuable in itself, but I just wondered what it was I experienced.

I was in my room and for a moment things kind of 'went back'. Its hard to describe - but it was like the room was a cave, or a dome. And that was me! It was very odd. And all inside the room was feeling and when i looked at objects they seemed strangely alive! I looked at my own body and it seemed very odd - heavy, fleshy, alien - like a wooden doll on strings. I noticed the breathing of it and the energies in a way i never had before. I held up my hand and it seemed far away and it wouldnt have seemed any more arbitary or alien if a paw had been there instead of a hand. And i thought..."fuck... i am not a human being" Then it snapped back to normal again.

The whole thing seemed strange, hard to describe. It was amazing - but ordinary. And when i thought of other people they seemed like gross fleshy zombies who drop dead with a thud at any moment.

In that experience - does that sound like the self position - or just some mystical experience?

Thank you
John

Randall Friend said...

John,

Yes, experiences can get very interesting when we start questioning the default knowledge base of beliefs. It is freedom beginning to shine through, so to speak. We might say a spiritual experience is what it feels like when a belief starts to fall away.

However, an experience requires experiencing. Experiencing itself isn't changing as the experiences come and go. The issue at hand is the idea that there is an experience, as objective, and an experienc-ER, as the subject. This most basic "split" isn't reality. It is the "first concept", so to speak.

See if there is really any separate subject and object - then if you can actually locate such a thing, then question the value of experience.


love
randall