This post is Takuin’s response to a conversation going on at the blog of Mike Sayers. His is a blog of many things, but the focus lately is on the search, the silliness of the search, and frustration at not getting anywhere with any of it. He has an active community of supportive people over there, and it is definitely worth the time to have a look at his site, if this is the sort of thing that interests you.
The first, short part of this post is the initial interaction from the comments section on Mike’s article, I Am Bigger Than the Universe… What? To see all of the contributions, be sure to check out the comments on that post.
Mike:
The problem I’m wrestling with is the notion that what I really am is this nothingness in which everything is.
Takuin:
The difficulty may lie with the notion. The notion is external; a thing you hold out to ponder and wrestle with. But is this activity helpful in any way?
This activity points to a difference, or a separation; the thing to have, and the person wanting it (or wrestling with it).
Less, Mike. Less.
Mike:
“…is this activity helpful in any way?”
Hell no! Not helpful whatsoever! The thing is that it’s all a notion. Every damned thing I think about is a notion, and nothing about notions are helpful.
So, OK… less. Do nothing? You must know how nearly impossible that is, right? Nothing? The “truth” is there, supposedly right in front of my face, and I want to understand it, but I’m to do nothing about it. It just makes no sense to me, even though I keep hearing, “nothing to do, no one to do it”.
OK, OK… You know, I have to go through it like this, right? Can’t argue with reality. I have to be completely stupid and unreasonable about it because I am.
Less, Mike. Less. I’ll feel that for a while and see what happens.
Takuin:
Probably, none of this is helpful, you know. I always tell everyone to see it for themselves. Find out for themselves. That is the real reason I do not give ‘advice,’ or tell people to do this or that. People make these things into notions, or things to do, like a shopping list.
So please, listen to others, but never follow anyone. I can understand people wanting to give you advice, and that is all well and good, but really, what can we do with it? The only thing, really, you can be aware of is how you function from moment to moment. In listening, things may arise, but it is not for us – or even you – to make something out of it.
The truth may be there, in front of your face. I am not saying it is, or it isn’t. But having Takuin, or someone else, tell you it is there, is not really helpful for you. You already know this.
It is like that finger pointing at the moon nonsense…forget the moon; there is no finger!
I don’t know if this will be helpful for you, but I will tell you a personal story…(this might be on the blog somewhere, but I do not remember.)
In 2001, I was living in Quincy, Massachusetts, and running a vitamin/health store in Harvard Square. One day, on my way home from work (on the train), I was reading a book by J. Krishnamurti called The Awakening of Intelligence. I had not read that kind of stuff before, and had no real introduction into non-duality or enlightenment at all.
Somewhere, around the middle of the book, Krishnamurti said something about finding out for oneself; If one relies on any kind of authority – even the words of Krishnamurti – then all is lost. So, I closed the book, and thought about his for the rest of the train ride.
When I reached Quincy station, I took the book and threw it in the trash. For whatever reason, I felt that Krishnamurti was right. But if I carried his words – find out for oneself – and held them out as something to attain or something to hold as sacred, then I would still be lost.
It was at that moment I knew, if there was indeed anything to find, it would be like a field of fresh snow, with no footprints other than my own. I never read another spiritual book again.
Within Takuin, curiosity was triggered to such a high degree, there was no turning back. I could no longer accept what anyone told me to be true, but I could not resist it in such a way as to say, “I will reject everyone because they are wrong.”
Forget about everyone; I could no longer trust myself.
This all took place sometime in 2001. I can’t remember exactly when. But the liberation, or the accident as I call it sometimes, happened on December 1st, 2006. But this is not to say you must do what Takuin has done. That would be a terrible dis-service to you.
This alone-ness is not for everyone (if that is the right way to say it). And it is not even necessary. In the end, you’ll never know how you move from place to place, so let’s not make it into something to have.
Takuin comes from a ‘place’ of no teaching, or no learning. But others might have come to a similar end through intense study and teachings. Davidya, a frequent contributor to this site, is a good example. But it really doesn’t matter what either of us have or have not done. The only thing that matters is what arises within you.
So tell us, Mike…what do you see?
Thank you very much for this exploration, Mike. It is something all of us can go through with you.
And please feel free to reply to anyone commenting below. The comments are threaded, so just use the reply button to target your victim.
18 Comments
Hi Taukin,
Many years ago, I almost became a Vedanta/Buddhist nun. I was initiated and pretty much on my way to final vows. Along the path, it occurred to me that I was not ready to give up the concept of being married plus I started to realize that there was more to life than what I was being taught.
So I left that path and went on my way. Eventually, I went to India and lived there for six months to find some type of deeper understanding. I learned a lot in those months and I stopped reading spiritual books at that time because I wanted to find my version of truth. I knew that what Buddha and others said were true but I wanted my own experience and I did have my journey.
When I was guided to blog about spirituality, I started to read spiritual books again so that I could learn how to be a better teacher or communicator of what I had learned. My feeling is that eventually, I will stop reading those books again when I feel I have mastered the art of communicating my experiences.
Nadia,
And that is a good point you’ve made. Even though you might now read spiritual books, you don’t do it to be told what to do. It is not as if you say to yourself, “I don’t know how to live my life, but this book will tell me.”
I’m certainly not saying anyone should quit this or that. If someone quits because of me, it is just a different version of the same conformity.
Living is far simpler than any search might lead one to believe.
I am a victim
may I contribute?
“The problem I’m wrestling with is the notion that what I really am is this nothingness in which everything is.”
So what is there to do but wrestle? You will never know what this nothingness is, never get to the bottom of it and never be satisfied with this not knowing/not feeling/not experiencing/whatever. Nothing to do but wrestle, my friend.
Takuin says no one can show you the way/there is no right way/there is no way/whatever. These are all just words. Everything right here, right now is all you will ever know and ever need to know. Nothing more, nothing less.
The seeking stops when you realise that the seeking will never stop and then you give up, not because you try to give up or want to give up, but because there is nothing else to be done and in that moment all is perfect and complete and pointless and exquisite, just the way it is.
Then you see. Not because you are ‘present’ or you know you are ‘just a thought thinking about nothingness appearing as everything’ or because your body disappears in the ‘oneness’ of it all, no, none of that crap……you see because there is nothing to see, understand because there is nothing to understand.
that is it.
then you get on with your life………
Thanks, Lune.
Yes. These are all just words.
Yes. These are all just words.
In the end, I suppose we’ll never know how useful these words might have been…
What I tell you lets play on. Lets play.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_JayWrkqDI
Thanks for that, iamasimpelman. I was unaware of that artist until you introduced me.
I like the message. It was funny, too.
Takuin,
First, thanks for putting so much time and thought into this. There’s a recurring theme in my blog… giving up. It comes out of frustration every time. This search I’m on (and I HATE to call it a “search”) always ends in frustration, even though it never technically ends. I do the whole “who am I?” bit, never see or experience anyone or anything, get scared (seriously) when I realize “I” am not here, then it seems like I convert all of that into some sort of, oh, I don’t know… disgust maybe? Disgusted that there’s nothing to search for yet the search continues. I don’t want to search… I don’t like banging my head against a wall. I don’t like being frustrated, angry, pissed off, because I can’t seem to grasp whatever truth I think there is. So, every once in a while, I give up… walk away from it for days and weeks at a time. It never fails, though… I always come back for more.
I have three books on nonduality at home that I read off and on, mostly off. All three are sitting on top of the toilet tank, if that gives you any idea of my reading habits. Maybe I should toss them in the trash, too. They really are of no use to me anymore. I’ve mastered the lingo. I know the answers to all of the questions I will ever ask. I’ve been trained, I guess, and I don’t like the answers. They don’t sit well with me. There must be something else. So I search, but not in some laser-focused fashion… just lazily searching. It gets intense every once in a while, but it gets dropped (I give up), and sometime later it comes back. Nice sinusoidal cycle.
Meanwhile, I find it helpful to be able to discuss it with folks like you. I know you could never tell me what to do. Hell, if you did I wouldn’t trust you. When I talk with folks like you, my hope is that one day something that is said will end up cracking the shell a little bit, and maybe it’ll all fall away. Ahhhhh… that’ll be nice.
Thanks, Mike.
I appreciate you letting this discussion go on. And these things may end up being useful in some way. Even though comments on a blog are only semi-living, they are far more personal than what we might read from the old ‘masters.’
Perhaps it is just time to go out and live your life. It will reveal all you will ever need to know. But don’t take my word for it. Have a look for yourself…
It is encouraging to hear that others also search, though search is too small a word for the process. To me it is more like an explosion. I aim at I know not what, and find what is not there, expanded a thousand times by my desire to know, then forced back into me with expanded energy until disintegration seems inevitable. But, I have found. Now the real journey begins.
Thanks, Kathleen.
That is nice. And luckily for us, it always begins now…
Seng-ts’an writes: “Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” This resounded with me the way Krishanmurti’s warning not to rely on external authority resounded with you.
And yet, to forcibly release the cherishing of beliefs or seeking is not quite it.
Spirituality is not my way but I can see how it provides a framework for many.
All this seeking and spiritualizing and practicing and accumulating is effort. Perhaps effort is necessary to see that it is not.
Kaushik,
One feels sympathy for those effort-ing on a fool’s errand. And all we can do is talk. But these words we use may have some eventual impact on others, as certain words may have impacted us.
Perhaps it is not such a fool’s errand in the end. After all, one must live their lives in some way.
An interesting discussion. Thanks for the link, Takuin.
I stopped reading spiritual books many years ago when I found they either were impenetrable (poor translations) or didn’t cover what I was experiencing. For a long time, the focus was on the mundane. Then it all came round again and I discovered a broader outlook had matured. I began reading again but now to see what another perspective brought to the table. One truth, many perspectives.
I find it more useful to look at what I am experiencing now rather than what concepts someone has of another state. A global perspective is useful but the real work is in gong into your experience, not someone else’s concepts. You are, after all, the experiencer. Everything else arises from that. The source may be experienced as nothingness. But it may also be experienced as fullness. Both are valid. It depends simply on how you come to it. What’s the point of making everything nothing if that’s not the experience?
And even though I say experience, waking is not a shift in experience but rather a shift in being. But being arises from awareness, so attention is the key, not the content of, those concepts. This is why teachers speak of looking at what is looking. What is looking is what awakens. This is why it might be described as an “accident”. It happens from Self rather than the me. As one fellow put it, it is not Bob waking to Self but Self waking to Bob. What can Bob do about that?
Thanks for sharing more of your process, Takuin. There was steps after all. (laughs) But they are steps into less rather than more, if we are speaking of the me. The me of you
Davidya,
I have not gone back to reading spiritual works. But I can see a time when I might do so. Not to learn how to live, or learn what to do, but to see how one might express this untouchable thing. But to be honest, at this time, I am just not interested. Not yet. (Maybe not ever? Who knows?)
That is it, right there. It is nice to hear these things from teachers or gurus. But really, it has no meaning. Not that it is a waste of time. But what can one do? Just smile and say, “That is nice.”
Perhaps it is just this perspective (non-perspective). A person might sit in front of me and recite my own writing, unbeknownst to me, and it still would not mean anything.
Of course, that is not to say words might not move another person in a special way. None of this is to deny that which might move another person into their own investigation. But one must be careful not to cultivate a reliance on the words, no matter how lovely or penetrating.
I don’t remember much of anything in the years between 2001 to 2006, although there was no ‘explosion’ as such. (But I remember our wedding, dear! Really I do!)
I remember not liking certain jobs. Feeling pain and hate, vaguely. Feelings of wanting sex and so on. But sitting here now, I cannot be sure of any of it. It is all like a vague dream. Even the memories of yesterday are quick victims of this ‘wasting disease.’
Certainly, one is not preferable to another. It is silly to want to escape a dream.
You just go on. You live your life.
This is my first time at this website, I found it because I’m on the 5th day of my first fasting, and was googling for some insight into other people’s experiences.
I don’t know where to start because I find being rational a very difficult exercise. The way I work best is by feeling things, which then later on get translated by my brain when I or it needs to interact with the outside world. But when I’m all alone, I don’t really feel the need to use my brain much. It is perhaps a strange thing indeed, and I am not entirely sure how I do it – its like I’m am mastering the art of passive activeness – if that makes any sense at all.
Like for example, I don’t really know (in my brain) why I am typing what I am typing right now, but it would be such a shame to let my brain taint my efforts by rationalising everything. It did start with me reading through the post, when suddenly I felt the urge to post something, with my brain not really understading why, and perhaps looking at me from a distance so to say…
This is not a perfect “skill”, if you call it that, but I find that I am getting better and better everyday at just skipping the brain, and the let the being that I really am (or we are) outside of this earthly experience to really just come through.
These days I tend to see the brain more as a parasite of this body. A little parasite that seeks and perhaps feeds off a need for understanding, and is not happy just being and not knowing. I feel quite truly in my heart and soul that I have joined this experience for what it is, and not to spend the experience thinking about the experience itself. When I tried to put this to people before, I came up with the analogy of getting into a rollercoaster ride, and not being able to simply enjoy the ride, and instead only thinking: “Is this rollercoaster real? How does it work?”
I feel that thinking is perhaps akin to sports and exercise. The brain gets a kick out of it, but it is not something that has to be part of my experience – it in fact gets in the way of me fully being / becoming what I really am.
Perhaps all those “training” years in school really made us addicted to the brain, and perhaps, the reason that I am writing this is to try to put it out for those that struggle with “thinking”, that there is a beautiful world outside the limitations imposed by the constant rationalising of the brain.
Perhaps it is very hard to let go, but it is also very sad to live one’s life only through the eyes of one’s brain.
I’ve come to find that I just know many things, even things that my brain may not be aware of…
It is perhaps funny to realise that “science” most often builds on previous blocks of scientific knowledge, and by going to school, one learns how to build on those blocks if one is so inclined. However, the same is not done on the emotional side of things. Every newborn has to, perhaps, re-invent the “emotional wheel”, from scratch…
I’ll leave it here for now, guess I’ve wandered off enough…
Perhaps, like taukin said before “… all we can do is talk.”
Lots of love…
max7
Thank you, Max7, and welcome to the site.
Good luck with the fasting. I am not sure how long you will go on with it, but if you plan on an extended fast, you’ll probably find things smoothing out around day 7 or so. Just be smart about it, whatever you decide to do.
And thank you for your wonderful comment. After reading it I have only one question for you:
Are you somehow separate from your brain?
Hi takuin
Thanks for your comments
I’m not sure how long I will go. The ultimate goal would be the classic 40 days, but I am happy with anything in between, and I will try to listen to my body and decide accordingly. It’s been a little hard, as I live in South Korea, and I just love the food here. Days 1 and 2 were a breeze, but the last 3 not so much. Ah, and I’ve got the dragon breath too
Regarding your question, I’m not sure I really know how to explain.
Perhaps my soul seems to be brain-aware, and very often I go into a “passive feeling mode”, which is most of the time I’m alone and not interacting with others.
Like I said before, being rational is a very brainy exercise, and when people ask questions for example, I really notice the “switch” from my internal just feeling mode, to whatever the brain was called upon. And sometimes being rational tires me a bit, if I have been in “just feeling” mode for a while…
Like right now for example, I have to try and piece together an answer from something in raw form within me that I “just feel” or “just know”, and it’s often not so easy. Due to this difficulty I often compromise between giving the slowest but most honest answer and the more practical answer. This is most clear in “real-world” conversations for example, where speed is most important… I find that some friends sometimes ask tricky questions, but taking a minute to reply would seem silly if you are in a restaurant for example.
I’m lucky somehow because my work is done in “blocks of time”, for example I work for 6 months then go off for a while. During work time, my brain is called upon all the time, so it kinda just stays there. But when I’m allowed to rest again for a few months, I can then go back to being myself. Right now I’m not working, and its in times like this that I can notice my somewhat struggle with being naturally rational.
I truly believe that “one can argue anything” in this world, and as such, it is very easy to perhaps convince anyone of anything. Using the same analogy, I feel that rationalising is a very silly thing to do, as I can easily convince myself of anything.
The brain is a wonderful tool I think, and very well adapted for life in this planet. But maybe we have a lesson to learn from all the other animals in this planet, and try to leave at peace with the tool, and no, the tool is not you.
max7
This will all sort itself without you. It may not be an easy expression for anyone, but like a flower, it grows and matures then dies, making way for next year’s model.
Good luck with the fasting, and feel free to drop in and let us know how it goes for you.
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