Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness
Ego is the creator of suffering; the enlightened mind is egoless.
The basis of delusion is ego clinging, to hold onto the idea of I.
The role of meditation is to allow our minds to calm down and gain insight about our non-conceptual, real nature. Thinking is flawed and we have no idea how bound up in our thinking we are. As we think, “I like this” and “I don’t like that”, we form a perception of what is that creates duality from what is originally non dual. What is simply occurring, we tend to perceive dualistically as what we like and what we don’t like. Judgement, masquerading as thinking, is biased, yet we revere thinking as if it were the highest virtue. Shakespeare said “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”. “To me it is a prison:” said Hamlet. Fear is an example of an emotion becoming a concept, that is difficult to shake off, which has the effect of keeping us in conceptuality rather than our more powerful underlying awareness.
The ultimate practice is to remain undistracted and fully present.
The recognition and realization of our underlying true nature totally and permanently can obliterate all past karma, disturbing emotions and habitual tendencies. Confused experience falls apart the moment we let be in a non-dualistic state.
Our underlying fresh present wakefulness is frequently obscured from our notice by our emotions and conceptions. Emotions can be loosened by loving kindness but conceptuality and our web of thinking is much more pervasive and difficult to even notice, much less get free from.
Thought free wakefulness is our awareness that underlies the scaffolding of our thought driven monkey mind. It is always there but mostly not detectable (obscured) to our scattered attention. Because our underlying awareness is not an object of thought, it is not known to our intellect nor to our conceptual mind. If we know something intellectually that is not where our deeper intelligence lies. If this is only intellectual knowledge that is not enough…it must be integrated into our direct experience. This begins with mindful effort but the recognition of our real nature is ultimately effortless. Contemplation is preferably filled with the recognition of thought free wakefulness but it may involve going into and out of thought repeatedly, relaxing thought’s grip and lingering in the space between thoughts.
Why is it important and valuable to recognize our real nature? Recognizing our real nature is essential because it is the only source of real protection that we can rely on. Stabilizing and realizing it is the key to manifestation…it is the knowing of one that is the knowing of all. Although it is always there, it is obscured by thinking and emotions which when combined with karma keep us in a cycle of suffering. It is actually the clinging to thoughts and emotions that cause the problem including clinging to the notion of our separate self.
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: Awareness, fresh present wakefulness, rigpa, wakefulness
The sign of learning is to be more gentle and disciplined.
The sign of practice is to have fewer selfish emotions.
What obscures our underlying wakefulness is thinking and emotions.
Be free of the two obscurations, especially the subtle cognitive obscuration.
The training is to recognize the nature of mind as thought free wakefulness.
This cannot be done by thinking which covers over awareness.
Awareness is not known by thinking because it is not an object of thought; therefore your real nature is not accessible or known from thought.
All formed things are produced and then perish; they arise and cease. But this unity of being empty and cognizant does not arise and does not cease; it is unformed…understanding that these are a unity eliminates duality.
Thought free wakefulness is unformed and unconstructed.
In the gap between thoughts you risk discovering thought free wakefulness…innate suchness…fresh present wakefulness.
This gap must be recognized, the recognition stabilized and then the underlying awareness realized.
That will be the same as never being distracted.
This “where to look” is the knowing of one that is the knowing of all.
It takes effort and desire at the beginning to know our real nature but it becomes effortless.
There are many things to do but this is the most important to know.
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: point out, pointing out
How to break habit needs to be pointed out as we have many habitual tendencies that have been inherited, assumed and accepted often without their even being noticed.
If we are aware, nothing needs to be pointed out.
It is our unawareness that needs to be pierced, broken, understood and released.
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Habits (or wonts) are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously.[1][2][3] In the American Journal of Psychology it is defined in this way: “A habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.”[4] Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habituation is an extremely simple form of learning, in which an organism, after a period of exposure to a stimulus, stops responding to that stimulus in varied manners. Habits are sometimes compulsory.[3][5] The process by which new behaviours become automatic is habit formation. Examples of habit formation are the following: If you instinctively reach for a cigarette the moment you wake up in the morning, you have a habit. Also, if you lace up your running shoes and hit the streets as soon as you get home, you’ve acquired a habit. Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioural patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways.[6] But the good news is that it is possible to form new habits through repetition.from Wikepedia
Our underlying wakeful awareness is always there but frequently obscured by our thoughts and emotions.
That is what needs to be pointed out and recognized.
A conundrum is that it is not intellectual, not a thought and therefore our usual apparatus of intelligence, thinking, cannot get it because our fresh wakeful presence is not an object of thought. That which thinks cannot grok(comprehend) what it means to be thought free.
That is why we need to be still on occasion so that we become aware that there is a space between our thoughts.
Thoughts can come and go if we don’t cling to them. Clinging is the real problem.
Our oldest habit that we cling to is our belief in the existence of our separate self.
Our real nature is not a habit-(in some ways it’s the opposite of habit) and we must let go of distraction, discouragement and laziness for it to be realized.
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence | Tags: fresh presence, pointing out
You are directly introduced to your own state of intrinsic awareness.
Once you recognize fresh present wakefulness as your underlying real nature, you will realize that there is nothing else.
Therefore, you will rest in thought free wakeful awareness without distraction.
Explanation:
Although we all have the same underlying wakeful fresh presence, it is often obscured from our attention by our thoughts and emotions that leave us in a small and confined conceptual prison of our own thoughts.
The main cure for our distracted, discouraged and sometimes lazy performance, is the recognition of our real true nature. This is the knowing of one that is the knowing of all.
Our real nature is absolutely concept and thought free and is being pointed out so that it can be recognized, this recognition stabilized and finally realized.
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: enlightenment, marigpa, rigpa
Thought obscures our real nature from our awareness leaving us less capable to deal with what is.
The recognition of our real thought free nature is the knowing of one that is the knowing of all.
This can only be a direct experience-not an intellectual one.
The recognition of our non conceptual wakefulness is enlightenment.
Non enlightenment is ignorance of our real nature which usually involves clinging to thoughts and emotions of an inflated, separate self.
All of our dualistic thought is a miss-perception and fragmentation of what is.
It comes from liking this and not liking that until our world is divided by our own judgements of it.
What is, is not conceptual by nature, but with our constant stream of obscuring thoughts, conceptuality is usually how we experience it.
The suffering that comes from duality and polarization is not necessary if we can find the space between our obscuring thoughts and stabilize this recognition of our underlying wakeful nature.
What do we have to lose if we try…suffering?
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: enlightenment, thought free wakefulness
We are raised to revere thinking but it is partial, incomplete and fragmenting to what is.
We can experience what is without thinking.
Our underlying awareness is always here to observe with a lot more intelligence than what we think of as our conceptual intelligence, although our more limited conceptuality is what we usually identify ourselves with.
The difficulty is not actually from the thoughts and concepts themselves but from clinging to the thoughts and concepts that gets us into trouble(I like this – I don’t like that).
The paradox is that knowing what is as it is, is a direct experience that is not intellectual or conceptual. This is what we miss when we are caught in thought and not in fresh presence.
The more stability that we achieve in recognizing our nature of mind , the more effortless compassion will well up in us stabilizing that recognition…leaving us in thought free wakefulness-our true nature.
https://twitter.com/freshpresence
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: Awareness, rigpa
It is the direct experience of the recognition of our real, non conceptual, innate wakefulness that is the knowing of one that is the knowing of all. This is not intellectual or there is no benefit.
The recognition comes from our ordinary awareness unclouded by thoughts and concepts.
It is available to us always if not obscured from our view.
We have only to recognize our mind’s nature and remain undistracted which is effortless.
Instead we put our effort into what is out there, while the wish fulfilling jewel is the recognition of our own non dual…thought free…wakeful presence right here.
We live in great abundance but are separated from it by our limited perception. What an irony.
If we want to recognize it we can. It is not OK not to. There is no greater error we can make.
All we have to do, is to recognize our larger real nature by letting go of our small false nature-“I, me, my, mine” .
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: dzogchen, enlightenment, mahmudra, recognition, rigpa
Thankfulness is always in season.
Giving thanks is recognizing that our continual state of want can be interrupted.
Recognizing is the process of interrupting our non-attention.
The most important thing to recognize is our true nature.
Now what might that be?
The things that take our attention away are distraction, laziness, carelessness, procrastination and self discouragement.
The thing that brings our attention into focus is Awareness.
Our real nature is where our Awareness resides when we are not distracted, lazy or discouraged.
Now how do we get and stay there?
One of the more difficult challenges is to not cling and grasp.
The biggest object of our clinging is to our own identity and the next biggest are all the wants and needs of “me” ,”my”. “mine” that we live with.
We cling to our identity as if it were fixed and real and not impermanent, and we fail to recognize our real underlying nature…non dual, non conceptual wakefulness.
We fail to recognize it because it is obscured from our view by our emotions and thoughts.
Enlightenment is none other than the undistracted recognition of our non conceptual present fresh wakefulness.
In the end, recognition is effortless, but it takes initial effort to not give in to distraction, laziness and self discouragement.
It takes intention and if it’s there, the rest will follow…like the pointing out instruction.
Simply recognize your nature in whatever you experience.
Filed under: Awareness, Fresh Present Wakefullness, impermanence, wakefullness | Tags: Awareness, enlightenment, fresh presence, fresh present wakefulness, rigpa
Innate nature, fresh present wakefulness, intrinsic awareness, empty cognizance, egolessness (rig pa) underly our busy thought driven self.
It is a wakefulness that is not conceptual.
It is usually obscured from our attention by our thoughts that we seem almost to live in or through.
It is valuable if recognized and invaluable if realized.
There is a space between our thoughts and surprisingly that’s more our identity than the preceding or following thoughts.
Another way of approaching this is to search through our awareness for our attention.
Where is our attention?
Our attention is usually what clings, seeking identification with what it wants and shunning what it doesn’t want.
Clinging is what obscures(veils) our underlying awareness and nature (rig pa) from view by our attention.
It short circuits “letting it be”…”letting go”…”letting flow”.
Even if we don’t go with the flow, the flow goes with us.
A finger writing on water lets the words liberate as they are written.
Enlightenment matters, because we need to look in the right place in order to learn to know the knowing of one that is the knowing of all.
We spend more than a bit of time trying to find security in a way that finds change threatening.
How can we realize change and the mystery as our friend and not our enemy?
Resistance to change comes from clinging, clinging to form.
Form is what we live with but it is more of a Disneyland exhibit than something we can take comfort in.
If we search for our true nature we cannot find it in form.
We come into form and we go out of existence (from form).
This impermanence is difficult to accept.
“Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: Not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid. The intention behind grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable. ” Sogyal Rinpoche
We can find security in change by letting go off grasping…and by letting go ( we let go of ego).
Fresh Presence 