Waking up from the dream

To know itself the self must be faced with its opposite - the not-self.

Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge - liberation.

And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death.

By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream.

- Nisargadatta Maharaja ‘I Am That’
AlongTheWay, 19 August 2009

The momentum for this Cosmic Game

is created whenever you pretend that what isn't, somehow, is far superior to what is. Although this belief keeps you focused on a never-ending journey towards happiness, enlightenment, etc., it also guarantees that you will never reach a point of permanent satisfaction and peace. Why? Because this whole notion of being on a `journey-to-fulfillment' is actually the secret method that the desperate ego uses in order to survive in the face of personal annihilation by Consciousness.
 
In other words, as long as the ego stays more focused on making the `journey,' it can continue to avoid disappearing entirely in the blinding realization of the true identity of the mystic `traveler.' This frenzied activity around pursuing enlightenment helps the ego to maintain a sense of personal doership. When what is not present is perceived as better than what is present, the precious reality contained in this very moment is inwardly resisted. However, Consciousness has no opposite, it's the only thing that's present, and it can never really change into `what isn't.'
 
It just is what it is. However, by pretending that `something else is better,' the ego hopes to
survive by enthusiastically pursuing the disowned `other.' Of course, the cosmic joke, is that the ego is caught on a selfgenerated treadmill because it already `is' what it is looking for.
 
The valiant struggle to be enlightened secretly protects the ego from being exposed as the phantom it truly is. As long as the search continues unabated, the searcher is validated as being separate from the very thing that he is searching for.
 
But, in Truth, we can never really run away from ourselves because we already are who we are
running from, and we already are where we are running to.
 
-Chuck Hillig
NonDuality Highlights 3264

If you but cease from useless conceptualizing

you will be what you are and what you have always been.



- Ramesh S. Balsekar, "A Net of Jewels"

AlongTheWay, 11 August 2009