(meant to post it to you, but sent to Solon in error)
A couple of Adi Da quotes. I don't suppose you will LIKE
them, but you may find something of interest!
thinking - and Narcissus
The usual man is trapped in a loveless orgy of knowing what is. He must be liberated into the moral and spiritual ecstasy of irreducible Ignorance and Love.
The usual man is self-possessed and self-divided. The two halves of his brain and of his body as a whole are in conflict, even out of communication with one another, like a divorced couple. Thus, his sense or conception of life is one of inherent dilemma, as if the universe were frustrated to the degree that it had become a mortal self, and it fears to fall in love again.
The usual man conceives of human existence as a problem, or a primal and irreducible dilemma, and he seeks solutions by exploiting his own separate parts, or all his capacities for experience. He is reactive, and subjectively oriented. Yet, he is motivated toward experience and repetition of experience in the functional and outward realms with which he is already familiar.
The usual man is in fear of the loss or death of self, of defined body and conceptual mind. He is bound to the solutions of Narcissus, or the habits of self-possession, founded on self-division. Narcissus is himself the waking state, the conscious or verbal mind. The usual man is bound to this state of consciousness and defends it with all sorts of rational nonsense. He feels threatened by the nonrational dimensions below and above the verbal mind, below and above the conceptual or knowing mind that defends him against both the unknown and the unknowable. He recoils from the subconscious and the unconscious, the wordless realms of feeling and energy. And he remains bound to his life of self-defense against the powers outside verbal consciousness-so that he remains unaware of the realms of superconsciousness and intuitive ecstasy above and beyond the verbal mind and the knowing self.
The usual man seeks knowledge, solutions, and power-to control what is beyond knowledge and beyond the waking or verbal states of mind. He is often mean, righteous, rational, blithe, and apparently fearless. He is always weak in love, in sacrifice, in sensual sensitivity, and in understanding of the essentially selfless or undefinable nature of the body-mind itself.
If we can discriminate between our mechanical and our truly ecstatic ways, if we can awaken from our self-divided mental and bodily states, if we can be shaken out of the subjective and self-defining recoil from the unknown and our own vulnerability, then we can be the ecstasy of self-sacrifice and "see" the Vision of Eternal Life. If we can be awakened from the inherent sleep of the verbal mind, if we can identify with the formless fire below the brows, if we can relax the tension at the brows and so release the brain to the truly awakened mind above and beyond thought, then we can feel we are not self or limits but a living process moved to ecstasy beyond the body-mind.
The usual, contracted, verbal man is always asking questions, trying to find a way to be comfortable in the chair of the body. His reveries are all so correct, punctuated with symbols that gesture at great matters. But he cannot rise or fall. He is frozen in the dream of certainties, the mysticism of a rationality that excludes what is above and below the thinking mind.
The usual man seeks control by all means, since he fears that he and even existence itself are out of control. He makes sublime sighs whenever he sees something orderly. But he does not understand that all order is an arbitrary design, made of repetitions of like things.
Order is Truth to Narcissus. He dies for the sake of order. He dies because of order. He is self-possessed, possessed of the duplication or repetition of everything he wants to continue to be. He repeats himself, literally. He is fixed upon himself, the symbol of certainty. At last, unable to yield to what is more than self, below thought, above thought, outside the thinker, he contracts upon himself, imploded on the instant of thinking.
There must be awakening to the Condition in which we are appearing, and which always exceeds our situation. We are born to ecstasy, or release of belief in the independence of consciousness and existence. We are obliged to awaken beyond our fearful defenses, the motives and solutions of Narcissus. No matter what arises, and no matter how familiar we become with any factor of experience, we never know what even a single thing is. The whole body-mind is the mind, and it is not conception, knowledge, or self-preserving certainty. It is Ignorance, the ecstasy of participation in the centerless Consciousness and limitless Radiance of the Real World.
from: The Enlightenment of the Whole Body
AND:
Thought
What appears to the beholder as light, to the hearer as sound, to the shapely actor as life-energy, and to the thinker as thought, is Known directly-on the level of Consciousness Itself-As Love-Bliss. Then It becomes light, sound, life-energy, and thought. All such things are only apparent modifications of the Original Reality That Is Love-Bliss. They are conditionally manifested form. And conditionally manifested form is that same Love-Bliss.
Love-Bliss is not radically separable from Consciousness. Love-Bliss Is Consciousness. Consciousness Itself Is Love-Bliss. Thus, on the level of activity, there is also no radical distinction between thought and form. There is Only the Love-Bliss That Is Reality Itself-Which is originally, now, Identical to Consciousness Itself
from: The Knee Of Listening
Namaste!
Jim |
