Me/rupture not-me
Every instant, everything we designate outside our consciousness that appears real to us, endowed with a reality that’s autonomous and exterior to our own consciousness, everything we perceive outside ourselves through the window of our thought, all that is hallucinatory. This hasn’t one atom of reality. It’s a purely imaginary phenomenon. They’re subjective effects that your sleeping consciousness surreptitiously turns into a reality that’s autonomous and separate from you. That’s the nature of the hallucination. To sense your past, the past in general, or the future, or Paris, or the cosmos, as something real, as realities separate from you, is to hallucinate like the madman who walks down the street talking to a phantom interlocutor. The fellow has lost his marbles because he has turned a purely subjective and unreal effect into objective reality. All this should show you the extent of what must be eradicated. All this shows you the extent of the immensity of what must be put back into the heart of consciousness to be dissolved there.
Once this enormous conversion takes place, there’s nothing wrong with jiggling a marionette and playing. But one must absolutely perceive that my future, my death, me producing the thoughts I’m in the process of producing, the diplodocus, Charlemagne, etc. are nothing but marionettes jiggled by my mind by virtue of a horrible spiritual sickness that pounced on me a billion years ago; my soul no longer feels its own fingers jiggle the marionette and treats it like a stranger. Thus, you must deny the undeniable everywhere it rages, that is to say, in the totality of your range of perception.
The destruction to be accomplished is phenomenal. One cannot attack the dream in fragments. When one wakes in the morning, the dream disappears all at once. Thus, it’s necessary to annihilate everything, to pierce all the eyes of thought in discovering, at the same time, that one has never seen with any other eye than that of thought. That, therefore, is the work I would demand you do, and it’s imperative to do it well. For either this work is accomplished and you become who you are - your own truth, the infinite value in the heart of what was once called God - or else you don’t continue calling into question this universal destruction, and you’re ruled by Ignorance. It’s as simple as that.
This manoeuvre successfully accomplished, acts like an exorcism. What we consider reality asserts itself like an obsession. The cosmos is nothing but a little bubble that my soul is blowing. Thus, it’s necessary to burst the bubble. The life of the person caught up in the state of ordinary consciousness unravels at the centre of the subjective bubble he never ceases to blow above his head, a forgery of the universe that includes the thinking subject. He evolves in the interior of the thought of self, that’s to say that he begins with a thought of thought, this thought of thought beginning a thought of the world and of time. When things click, this bubble bursts like a soap bubble. In reality, the usual state of consciousness has no solidity and can burst at any moment.
How do you break the bubble while you’re inside it? The question is, in fact, the following: are there parts of the bubble where, by preference, the attack should be made? The diagram of the hallucination is: me/rupture not-me. Me, poor little shivering subject, and the gulf that separates me from all the rest that I perceive as not-me. Everything that happens inside the bubble is reducible to the equation: me/rupture not-me. If the enormous chaos reigning in the heart of the bubble is hard to reduce to a single thought, that doesn’t apply to the above equation in which, with a certain degree of concentration, with reflection, with meditation, one can recognise as pure thought - all thought never being more than an effect of the fundamental, unreal you. In order to reabsorb the hallucination in such a way that it appears in its true mental nature, that is to say as nothingness, a first method would consist of making an attack at the very heart of the dream. The central rivet of the hallucination is nothing other than the absolute belief in myself in the act of producing a thought, of dreaming of this or that. Whether my thoughts are happy or sad, it would appear that I can’t place the objective reality of the situation into doubt: I am there and I secrete an inner world, yet my mood swings, and I question myself about the existence of the awakening, about my chances of getting there or, quite simply, of boring myself silly; all that has no real existence. There’s a paradox here: having no power over your own inner states, you endure them. You’d prefer not to worry about anything while, at the same time, establishing that the generative thoughts of worry resist you. You can’t easily chase them. Yet, that means that, while having the intuition that what you are is not reducible to your thoughts (“I worry” necessarily supposes the existence of an “I”), you confer on the latter the fact that they resist you, an objective status. In other words, the usual state of consciousness has the characteristic of an extraordinary madness: having the presentiment that at the centre of myself there is only myself while, at the same time, being certain of the presence at the centre of myself of a not-me - as a matter of fact, if the worry wasn’t from the not-me, I would be able to reabsorb it and not endure it. The most interesting way to accomplish this is to question the reality of what happens within me now, immediately, right away.
~ Stephen Jourdain, Radical Awakening: Cutting Through the Conditioned Mind
Once this enormous conversion takes place, there’s nothing wrong with jiggling a marionette and playing. But one must absolutely perceive that my future, my death, me producing the thoughts I’m in the process of producing, the diplodocus, Charlemagne, etc. are nothing but marionettes jiggled by my mind by virtue of a horrible spiritual sickness that pounced on me a billion years ago; my soul no longer feels its own fingers jiggle the marionette and treats it like a stranger. Thus, you must deny the undeniable everywhere it rages, that is to say, in the totality of your range of perception.
The destruction to be accomplished is phenomenal. One cannot attack the dream in fragments. When one wakes in the morning, the dream disappears all at once. Thus, it’s necessary to annihilate everything, to pierce all the eyes of thought in discovering, at the same time, that one has never seen with any other eye than that of thought. That, therefore, is the work I would demand you do, and it’s imperative to do it well. For either this work is accomplished and you become who you are - your own truth, the infinite value in the heart of what was once called God - or else you don’t continue calling into question this universal destruction, and you’re ruled by Ignorance. It’s as simple as that.
This manoeuvre successfully accomplished, acts like an exorcism. What we consider reality asserts itself like an obsession. The cosmos is nothing but a little bubble that my soul is blowing. Thus, it’s necessary to burst the bubble. The life of the person caught up in the state of ordinary consciousness unravels at the centre of the subjective bubble he never ceases to blow above his head, a forgery of the universe that includes the thinking subject. He evolves in the interior of the thought of self, that’s to say that he begins with a thought of thought, this thought of thought beginning a thought of the world and of time. When things click, this bubble bursts like a soap bubble. In reality, the usual state of consciousness has no solidity and can burst at any moment.
How do you break the bubble while you’re inside it? The question is, in fact, the following: are there parts of the bubble where, by preference, the attack should be made? The diagram of the hallucination is: me/rupture not-me. Me, poor little shivering subject, and the gulf that separates me from all the rest that I perceive as not-me. Everything that happens inside the bubble is reducible to the equation: me/rupture not-me. If the enormous chaos reigning in the heart of the bubble is hard to reduce to a single thought, that doesn’t apply to the above equation in which, with a certain degree of concentration, with reflection, with meditation, one can recognise as pure thought - all thought never being more than an effect of the fundamental, unreal you. In order to reabsorb the hallucination in such a way that it appears in its true mental nature, that is to say as nothingness, a first method would consist of making an attack at the very heart of the dream. The central rivet of the hallucination is nothing other than the absolute belief in myself in the act of producing a thought, of dreaming of this or that. Whether my thoughts are happy or sad, it would appear that I can’t place the objective reality of the situation into doubt: I am there and I secrete an inner world, yet my mood swings, and I question myself about the existence of the awakening, about my chances of getting there or, quite simply, of boring myself silly; all that has no real existence. There’s a paradox here: having no power over your own inner states, you endure them. You’d prefer not to worry about anything while, at the same time, establishing that the generative thoughts of worry resist you. You can’t easily chase them. Yet, that means that, while having the intuition that what you are is not reducible to your thoughts (“I worry” necessarily supposes the existence of an “I”), you confer on the latter the fact that they resist you, an objective status. In other words, the usual state of consciousness has the characteristic of an extraordinary madness: having the presentiment that at the centre of myself there is only myself while, at the same time, being certain of the presence at the centre of myself of a not-me - as a matter of fact, if the worry wasn’t from the not-me, I would be able to reabsorb it and not endure it. The most interesting way to accomplish this is to question the reality of what happens within me now, immediately, right away.
~ Stephen Jourdain, Radical Awakening: Cutting Through the Conditioned Mind
