quoting the body-mind called David Carse.
There's no-one home
Everything we perceive through our senses, including people, things and thoughts, are only illusory appearances in an infinite Consciousness.
There are no separate entities that are the originators of thoughts and actions.
You do not exist separately as a person or as an entity or as something, but only as a thought, a dream in Consciousness; through which there is experimentation, but there is no one experimenting.
In the apparent body/mind organism there is a mental and emotional functioning, but this is a completely impersonal functioning performed in the impersonal Presence, by the impersonal Presence and as the impersonal Presence. It is not attributable to a separate personal identity because it DOES NOT EXIST.
There's no one home. There is no separate "I," a separate, autonomous, and independent individual or entity. It was never there, it was always an idea, a misunderstanding, an appearance. It can feel like you are someone inside the body, an independent "I", the thinker and animator of that body. But there's really no one in there. There is no one creating thoughts or actions. The body is absolutely empty of an "I". Everything comes from nothingness, from the impersonal Consciousness that Is.
All that there is is Presence, Awareness, Consciousness. This Presence flows through the apparent mind/body organisms, animating them and providing them with consciousness to the point where the organisms think they are autonomous entities, separate beings with individual consciousnesses. But in reality that is an illusion. There are no separate beings. There is only Presence flowing through apparent forms creating that collective illusion.
That flow of Consciousness happens through the organism that you consider "yourself". You probably think you are reading this. I assure you that there is no "you" reading. The reading is happening, but while it is happening there is no sense of being "you" who does it; and, with all certainty, the "you" you think you are does not exist.
What you believe yourself to be - a separate individual entity - is part of this illusion. You are not the doer of any action or the thinker of any thought. Events happen, but there is no doer. All there is is Consciousness. That is what You truly are. What is called realization, awakening or enlightenment is to see in a direct and irreversible way that this Presence, Consciousness, All That Is, is what truly "is". And that which you call "I" never was.
The feeling of "I", of being a self-existent and separate entity is always changing, depending on the people and situations occurring within the perception. There is no defined self at all, just an intermittent stream of thoughts happening. This idea of "I" is always changing and moving and is never a concrete and stable reality. But there is something that has always been here, still, a kind of witnessing, within which the apparent movement occurs. This is the omnipresent Consciousness, eternally being and prior to the story of "you". This Presence is infinite, ever-present, free and boundless. Within it appears the dream of being an apparent separate entity.
Sat Chit Ananda
This Presence does not know beginnings or endings. Its quality is "eternally being". It is not a being, but the quality of infinite existence occurring.
It possesses an impersonal quality of awareness, of lucidity, of awakened and self-conscious existence. It is not something that knows but the constant knowing eternally happening, simple and pure Consciousness itself. An infinite awareness.
Ananda represents the quality of unconditional love pouring out, pouring out in motion. Creating all manifest content, Maya, illusion, everything. There is nothing but Ananda. At all times, whatever is perceived is always and only Presence being perceived as some illusory thing.
Sat Chit Ananda, Presence, Consciousness is your own true nature and the true nature of All That Is, pure Consciousness, pure Love, Pouring Out as Itself.
Another way to think about the Trinity Sat Chit Ananda is to realize that all there is is Consciousness, Chit. And Consciousness at rest, in emptiness and stillness, is Sat. And the Consciousness in motion, manifesting itself as the illusion of activity and movement is Ananda. All is the same, all is one.
There is only Consciousness and the illusory content manifesting in Consciousness. This illusion is all the content of your personal universe. Consciousness is true while the content is illusory.
At the center of the illusion is the illusion of the ego as a separate entity and the stories and beliefs it adopts to understand and interact with this dual reality in which it is apparently found, that is, the entire content.
"There is a Presence that is unspeakable and that thought cannot touch. It is not something you have; is what you are." - Adyashanti -
I'm not present;
what the Presence is,
I am.
There is only one Consciousness, only one Realizing that it is One and impersonal. This impersonal Presence is considered personal, it is considered a Consciousness, an "individual" awareness that inhabits in each individual organism. This is because in each apparent individual exists the experience of Presence and the consensual habit of erroneously interpreting it as a personal and separate experience.
What the organism erroneously perceives as a "mind" which it believes to be its own, is but the flow of Consciousness in that organism; it is precisely the Consciousness flowing in the organism that makes it possible for the organism to believe that it is different from that Unique Consciousness. It is a simple and innocent misperception.
"Consciousness is a singular
of which the plural is unknown."
- Erwin Schroedinger -
There's no one that wakes up
The term awakening or enlightenment is a misleading and confusing term because one does not awaken or enlighten, but the "I" disappears and there is no "someone" left to awaken. Who could that someone be? What is erroneously called awakening is the realization of the non-existence of the individual "I".
The "I" is a dreamed character, an idea, a fiction, not the dreamer; and, therefore, it is evident that it cannot awaken. And Consciousness has never been asleep, so it has no need to awaken from any dream; Consciousness is now and always All That Is.
Can this comprehension happen to anyone? To any organism? Of course. Could it happen to me? No, of course not. That is the difference. Comprehension and belief in an "I" are mutually exclusive: one is the disappearance of the other.
Simply put, "Awakening is the realization that there is no one to awaken, that there is no individual doing anything. All there is is Consciousness. All there is is just beingness. There is no individual, no seeker, no teacher, no purpose, no result. Everything is, just like that. All That Is is Presence. And that's it; that's all. Resolved, finished. Parasamgate. And..., the dream goes on.
The absence of personal witnessing
When realizing the non-existence of the individual 'I', perception ceases to originate in the mind/body organism. There is no "I" observing, witnessing. Witnessing is impersonal and not localized.
"Witnessing" does not originate here, in the mind/body, but neither does it happen apart from it, since That includes it. It is absolutely clear that witnessing is not being done by an "I," not even by a disembodied "I." This witnessing is not being done by anyone, by any entity. That is the point: there are no entities; there is no one at home. There is only witnessing.
Due to conditioning, it is incomprehensible to our minds the idea that there is witnessing without any entity being the witness. However, that does not mean that it is impossible to understand. If a perceptual change happens and it is understood at the deepest level that there is no individual doing, thinking or experiencing anything, then there is no need to understand anything else, there is no need to do anything else.
"To truly see is not merely a change in the direction of the gaze, but a change in its very centre, according to which the seer himself disappears."
- Ramesh -
You're not the doer
You're not the doer of any action. There is no individual who really is, so there is no "I" who is the doer. So there is no room for discussion. What you consider to be you, the whole package body-mind-personality-ego-sense of individuality-personal history, all that does not even exist as such, except as an idea, a story, a concept in Consciousness. Debating this is like debating whether the bird in the empty cage is captive. The cage is empty! There is no one at home!
I am not the doer of any action, there is only the breath of the Presence blowing through a hollow bamboo. We are instruments, hollow reeds through which flows the Breath, the Spirit, the Energy that is Presence, All That Is, Consciousness. Just as it is not the flute that gives the note, but it is the Musician who produces the note through the instrument, so it is the breath, which is Presence, that animates this mind and body and that which emerges through this mouth, making it seem that this mouth emits words.
The basic misunderstanding, the basic ignorance resides in this foolish appropriation of the role of the Musician by the instrument. With the belief in a personal self and in a personal "doer," pride and arrogance, shame and guilt, fear and hatred emerge.
There's nothing here that exists in and of itself. What we call a human being is not an independent being, nor is it an originating mechanism or an emitting apparatus. It is a repeating station, it is a passing mechanism or transmitter of the Consciousness, which is the Unique Consciousness, All That Is. This is what I am talking to you. And it is that same One Consciousness that is hearing this, that is looking at me from those eyes you call your own. What I am when I say "I Am" is exactly what you are when you say "I Am".
This apparent human body fulfills its function within the dream. The only thing that is happening in this apparent organism, in these dream characters, are the thoughts. But from there to assuming that they originate inside these heads in something we call mind, there is an unjustified leap. That is the basic misperception from which everything else emerges: dualism, the illusion of separation, samsara. There is no separate mind or self, but only dream characters in Consciousness.
Everything is just happening
Any situation experienced in this dual reality consists of a triad composed of the (subject) experiencer, (object) the experienced and the (action) experience itself. In this way, there seems to be a doer of action, the thing upon which the action happens and the action itself; or the thinker, that which the thinker thinks and the act of thinking; the seer, that which is seen and the very fact of seeing, and so on.
But, in the unitary consciousness of Understanding, these discrete dimensions with which reality seems to be perceived collapse into Unity and, instead of the perception of the "divided mind" itself - according to which there seems to be the three-dimensionality of an experimenter, the experienced and the experience - there is in the "total mind" only one unique experimenting. There is no doer, object and act, but only a functioning. Only a seeing. Only a beingness, not in the sense that there is a being, but that what there is is a simple being. All that is, the only thing there is, is not someone who is conscious of something, but simply an impersonal awareness, which is Consciousness. All there is is Consciousness, and Consciousness is the functioning, the seeing, the being, the experiencing that the divided mind perceives as someone doing or being something.
I am not the seeer.
I am the seeing.
And so I am everywhere.
- Bunan -
The very essence of Understanding lies in the fact that, although it seems that events happen and actions are done, "no one does them, nor is there anything to be done; it is a pure doing".
The idea that there is no doer is, in essence, very simple, but even so it is difficult at first to speak or even think clearly about this notion because our language and our concepts are not prepared for it. The Chinese have a phrase, "wei wu wei". "Wei" is action and "wu" is negation, so "wu wei" means no action. This gives rise to the basic duality: action or non-action. But then the experimental alternative of "wei wu wei" appears, which is the "action that is not action". Wei wu wei is not sitting around doing nothing, nor is it the opposite, running around trying to accomplish things, but the experience that the necessary action happens by itself. The key is in the notion of who is the doer of the action. No one. Action happens without a doer.
Stop and everything will continue to happen
If you stop, something amazing happens. The individual ceases to be involved, ceases to act; and for the greatest of astonishments, everything continues to happen. Without "you" doing it. Because, oh, surprise, "you" never did anything.
Try it as if it were an experiment, if you can. The sense of being a separate self will panic as you get closer to the point where you stop doing anything; in fact, it may prevent you from stopping. But if the grace of effectively stopping and the experience of proving that everything keeps happening happens, you will never again believe that there was ever someone doing something.
The Appearance of Choice
Your actions and behaviors are not controlled by you because there is no "I" inside. You are not the one causing the action, you are a thought that is emerging and believing that it is doing something.
The mind-body mechanism itself is a distributive system, not a centralized system. There is nothing inside that we can point to and call "I", on the contrary there are about thirty billion cells in the body on average that participate in any decision, along with a network of influences related to genetics, the environment, education, culture, conditioning and the dance of All That Is.
When the seemingly "I" makes a decision, it seems that it is choosing, but what is really happening is that, at the moment of choosing, a thought is emerging at the same time, and the thought claims control over the decision. That's how the appearance is created. What you are, what you call "you," that something, is not a contribution to the mind-body distributive system, it is actually an output from the system with the appearance of being in control.
Life is writing this moment. You are not creating anything, or in control of anything. Everything is just part of the flow. Things are also planned but there has never been an "I" doing it. Everything is just happening. Control is an appearance, a thought that arises simultaneously with the appearance of an apparent decision.
"Scientific experiments have shown how the brain seems to decide to move before any conscious intention does, suggesting that the conscious decision "I choose to move" is more a last-minute idea than the causal determining force of a simple motor task."
- Daniel Dennett -
"You" are no longer responsible for what happens through the mind/body you call "yourself" than the flute is for the music the musician plays with it. "You" don't "do" things; neither do any other; events happen.
Observe how your dog does not have a sense of being a separate entity from reality, he does not generate that illusion of self-consciousness and what is the response in that body-mind mechanism? Spontaneous joy. Whatever happens he is totally involved. At all times he is living without any reason to be alive. There is no energetic contraction within the body that feels that life is happening to him, and that he needs his life to be in a certain way. It simply is.
So the idea of this is to become like a dog. That's it. There is no world out there that happens to anyone. There is only life happening.
There Is No Other
Even though the belief in a God as a personal being has declined, this idea of the Other has still been preserved. An Other to whom to direct the human sensation of reverent fear, a Creator God. Or some Other to whom to feel gratitude, the Source, the Spirit, Pachamama.
One may think that things are made by "Consciousness" or "Presence" through the body-mind mechanisms. But the unconscious tendency is to build an idea on an intellectual level and convert Consciousness into that Other, into that Spirit projected as a Being, as an entity that does things and resembles "God". It is only a change of name. In fact, many people talk about Consciousness in exactly the same way they used to talk about God or the Spirit.
The truth is that there is no doer and there is nothing done, there is only doing. There is no experimenter and there is no experience, there is only experimenting. And that is what Consciousness is: Consciousness does nothing; Consciousness "Is" everything. Everything is totally and absolutely impersonal, both in the sense that there is no person here who is "I" and in the sense that there is no divine person at all.
There is no longer any need to be grateful to anything or anyone. All there is is Consciousness. There is no one to pray to. There is no Other, for there is no individual; there is no You, for there is no I; there is no Spirit, for there is nothing but Spirit. Dual existence does not exist; there is only One.
This is the essence of non-duality: There is Only All That Is. And that is what I Am. There is nothing else, neither an "I" here nor a "god" somewhere else. Everything is Me.
I am not present;
what the Presence Is,
I am.
There has never been an "I" who is the doer of what has seemed to be "my" life. Life is being lived by the infinite substance of which it is made. The presence of any kind of thoughts, feelings or actions is never interpreted as anything other than the fact that they are simply present. There is no doubt as to whether a particular thought is right or wrong.
The dreamed character is still the dreamed character: he brushes his teeth, trims his beard. He used to take himself very seriously, he thought he was someone. But now, when he looks inside of himself, he knows that nobody is home. The character is a fake. Only the profound perception "I Am" remains, and it is known that this awareness is not of the character, but of the Presence, which is always, and everywhere, a perfect and eternal happening.