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: 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: 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.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Awareness, fresh present wakefulness, rigpa
Thanks Giving 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 real nature.
Now what might that be?
The things that take our attention away are distraction, laziness 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 stay there?
If we recognize fresh present wakefulness as our real nature then there is nothing to do but rest in it, free of concepts and thoughts.
Filed under: Awareness | Tags: Awareness, dzogchen, enlightenment, liberation, realization, rigpa, thought free wakefulness
To gain that worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. – Bernadette Devlin
There is one thing that comes to mind.
It is AWARENESS.
This can be complicated because what we perceive as awareness is likely thought.
There is a fresh present wakefulness that underlies all the chatter that we think of and that we take for our identity.
It is a powerful thing to realize.
It takes more than a glimpse to have a lasting effect.
It takes desire and curiosity and practice to become free from our consuming thoughts and perceived identity.
The importance of realizing thought free wakefulness is beyond measure: It is the recognition of our real nature and access to the wish fulfilling jewel(the knowing of one which is the knowing of all).
It is for the realization of this (rigpa) that it is worth losing everything else.
Everything else is illusion.
When wakefulness is obscured by thought or anything it is hard to do the next right thing.
Any bias, false belief, delusion, distraction, strong appetite will produce the next wrong thing.
Since each step produces more steps a wrong step has a cascading effect.
Wakefulness is not from within thought.
Wakefulness is non dual.
Thought is dual.
We are mostly in thought which holds us in a repeating loop tape.
Do you know thought free wakefulness?
It is never very far away.
We wear blinders like a horse with leather blinders but our blinders are our old thoughts that are carried in our normal mind.
Maybe it is our normal mind itself that is the blinder.
Our deeply held beliefs that we cherish create a filter through which our experience of life is interpreted.
It’s difficult to avoid fragmentation because our intellect is partial but our underlying nature is not.
It is difficult to avoid judgement about what we like and what we don’t like as it happens in our unfolding life.
What is our nature?
There are many things to do but there is one that we must know and it is our own nature.
This may entail contemplation. That’s because that requires more letting go than seizing.
The difficulty with this question is that:
That through which we think we know is limited and we can’t see it.
The reason that we can’t see it is that our underlying nature is not an object of thought so it is not that which the normal mind is capable of knowing.
That may be why koans frustrate the normal mind as well as those who try to understand them through it.
The benefit of knowing our own nature is huge. It is like the knowing of one that is the knowing of all.
Most of the time we look for the answers on the outside but that is not where we can find them.
Footnote A kōan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chán (Zen)Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding- Wikepedia.
“Freedom from the known” is a book title by Krishnamurti that has challenged me for some time.
What this means is not formlessness but freedom from reacting in a predictable fashion to the flow of life as it occurs. The power of selecting the next right thing to do is more easily realized if the familiar surroundings of habit are removed. Some times familiar surroundings and situations may be comforting. But do they lull us into comfort that leads to complacency that leads to a lower level of attention and possibly a less desirable decision and result?
After all what is habit(uation) but the creation of the feeling of a well formed function (wff) which means there is an automatic response ready to the next stimulus that might come from a lower level of alertness. If we react in a predictable fashion to a set of stimulus is that a problem? Not necessarily unless it leads to a less desirable decision. An example of this might be when someone pushes our psychological buttons and we react from past hurt and experience. In general it is better to be fully present and not react from some repeating loop tape of the past.
Can living in the present moment work without creating operator fatigue and less than optimal decisions.
Looking at politics today if things happen slowly with distant consequences does habit deaden us to understanding their cause and effect in essence lowering our guard of what we find acceptable and what we find unacceptable?
This is a yes or no question.
If you recognize your nature then the work is to stabilize that recognition.
If you don’t recognize your nature you are in good company but the result is suffering. There is something called the pointing out instruction which might be a later subject.
Know yourself and to your own self be true. Not so simple.
We start by knowing ourselves as our thoughts, but our thoughts run from one to another and it becomes quite confusing.
Thoughts are not the real problem if we could let them go. The trouble is that we identify with them by clinging to them.
Shakespeare said “nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so”. That is pretty non judgemental.
Contemplation can help loosen the identification with the thoughts one is identified with.
So does liberation.
Not being stuck in old thoughts takes work.
Our real nature is a fresh present wakefulness that underlies thought.
Since we are so identified with our thinking conceiving mind we don’t realize that there is much more than this fragmentary perspective.
That which is much more is not an object of thought so our thinking mind cannot recognize it.
Fresh Presence 