The Greatest Paradox

More on love.

I have been thinking a lot about Love since your blog..I even got asked to do a talk about it...I know you always say that what people come to describe as love cant really be love..because it results in suffering. And that the only true meaning of love must be synonymous with consciousness or Adhikaranam. So I have three questions...

 Looking forward to your truth as always.

A)how can someone challenge or deconstruct their false beliefs about love?

Hi Louis,  A)  The two best possibilities I can see are to learn to understand completely what this word ‘belief’ actually means. It seems that this should not be too difficult yet it turns out to be extremely difficult. The reason for this is that this question about the meaning of belief involves the meaning of all beliefs. So many of our beliefs are so deeply embedded and ‘believed’ that questioning the word belief requires a lot of preparation or work that involves questioning all beliefs. There are some beliefs that most people will never question because to question them would mean questioning our sanity. The other possibility is with love itself and involves a sort of paradoxical intention by starting with the premise that we or the ego is not able to love. If we can accept this then the possibility of finding what love actually is is greatly increased.  As with the first possibility this is a belief that most will find deeply unpalatable or repellent. The ego is completely unable to love and so if we believe we can love and this is not true it becomes impossible to correct. We are not the ego and so in order to find what love is we must first find what we really  are. Sorry no easy answers to this question.

b) what connection do you think there might be to the feeling of love and consciousness?

B) Feeling or physical sensation is very close to consciousness and therefore love but again the problem is that thinking and believing anything automatically diminishes our ability to feel or know our own physical sensation experience of reality.

C) I have read that Oxytocin is the love hormone. It increases trust and bonding behaviours both between individuals and within groups. This seems to have resulted from evolution, to improve survival. But as we become more conscious of our survival mechanisms, as we challenge our faulty belief systems based on survival, do you think we can move beyond survivalist strategies and survivalist biochemistry? 

C) Yes, the words want, expect and create are deeply connected if we could synthesise these three meanings into one we would begin to understand that what we want is actually what we expect and what we expect is what we came to expect based on experiences and conclusions formed early in life. Whatever we want or expect is created through the medium of consciousness, seen from this perspective our lives are a self created prison where we create every detail of our life experience and then completely forget what we have done. Through meditation or self enquiry we can diminish our self induced amnesia and remember the whole of what we have created and why we created it. Suffering is the key because in suffering we see the greatest paradox, if we can accept that what we have is self created then why would we create suffering? For me there is no doubt whatsoever that we do in fact create our own suffering . Biochemistry is created from what we believe not the other way around.

Ray

Love and Power, a question

Hi Ray,

I wondered if you could help me get my head around something. Is it possible to love power? Or does power not actually exist? Is it just a belief? 

Hi Nick, power was the focus of my attention during the period when I was training for psychotherapy. To understand your question it is necessary to understand the two words you used, love and power. Both these words from the point of view of the ego tend to have no meaning or highly distorted false meanings. The origin of love is consciousness where all that is is composed of the same substance, there is no place or meaning for division. In Sanskrit this is referred to as Adhikaranam; this means substratum which is that which underlies everything. It is the substance of the Absolute , which is pure consciousness. In the world love is loaded with meanings that we find palatable these meanings are very limited and tend to have no lasting meaning which means that these meanings or beliefs do not work they break down when we hit the unpalatable. Power I take to be a potential rather than a belief although it is belief that drives this potential. If the belief applied is untrue or negative in any way then the power that is created is false power and like love does not work or results in suffering. Most examples of power seen in the world are created by beliefs that have an obvious or implied negative contained in them and so again do not work. In terms of potential it is possible to create true power, this could only occur if our conception is free from negatives and is aligned with consciousness. This is usually what I refer to as keeping your word. Keeping your word implies the above conditions of being free from all negatives and aligned with consciousness. In essence this would be truth. In this sense power is truth and it is certainly possible to love that.
Ray

Questions and answers from the last post

Kite
Could you please interpret what you have written in the blog as to how it relates with the ego. How does the false sense of self come about when making these false assumptions using knowledge.

Ray
The false sense of self (the ego) is created by the simple act of believing whatever false assumptions we may hold. This is very subtle yet very powerful, the best analogy I can think of is when the gears of a car are in neutral nothing happens (consciousness) when the gears are engaged there is movement. You could say that the intention to move is created by the disturbance we feel when we are still. We do not engage the gears because there is somewhere to go but because we (the ego) cannot tolerate stillness (consciousness).

Kite
Perfect! that metaphor makes a lot of sense. Of course pure stillness is consciousness. Although the word stillness has been used so often in religious and spiritual circles, the essence still remains. Consciousness is perfect stillness and all movement is temporary and abstract and therefore synonymous with belief and therefore illusory. Is that true? And if so the next obvious question is the whole point of this search: How do we remain still?

Ray
There is a zen parable in which the question is raised by two monks 'is it the wind that moves the flag' a third monk says no it is mind moving. It could be said that nothing moves except the mind. The only way movement can be seen and verified is with the mind. How do we remain still? thats easy just put the gear in neutral - if only it were that easy. Do you remember me telling you the sequence of events after the collapse of beliefs. Without beliefs I became aware of an intense fear, all my internal sign posts were gone. All the internal stories I had used to give meaning to my life were gone. Suddenly I realised that if there was fear there there was still belief and understanding that belief is never true I finally understood that fear is a belief based on something that is not true, suddenly the fear was gone and has never returned. When I look back over my life I see that the biggest shifts came when my fears were revealed and understood. All movement (stories) revolve around fear. From almost drowning to the collapse of beliefs fear was the critical element that needed to be understood, there were many other instances in my life where fear was instrumental in my understanding going deeper. For many fear is something to move away from but for whatever reasons it seems I was not allowed to move away from it but instead was forced to go into it. Your question had the effect of dominoes falling in my mind each one connected to fear. This is why it is so difficult to be still, how can we be still when we have so many fears? Remember fear is not something real it is ultimately a belief that is not true. Become aware of all the fears you hold and then consider the source of all fear - if there is fear there must be a source.

Truth and Understanding part 2

Once it is seen that no symbol or language can be used to express truth we are free to examine with a truly open mind whether or not an idea or belief is useful or not. Knowledge is based on assumptions that something is true or it is false. Either of these conclusions would be wrong. True or false cannot be proven as the language these words are composed of can only ever have the meaning we choose to give them. Meaning will always be decided by individual preference. Any preference must be conditional, that is it must be based on whatever knowledge we have accumulated through our individual life experience, which by its nature will always be different from another's experience. Who is to decide which of all possible life experiences will lead us to the correct conclusion. Knowledge based on assumptions can only lead us around in circles forever replacing one belief with another, non of which can ever be true. All of history is composed of this process.

True understanding is equivalent to consciousness.

False understanding creates an illusion whereby consciousness is hidden.

True understanding occurs when beliefs are seen to be illusions that may be useful or not.

When this is seen/understood the illusion dissolves to reveal the truth.

The truth is that which remains when the illusion dissolves.

This is consciousness.

Truth and Understanding

Understanding comes in many forms or levels. There is the mental or thinking level with its associated mental form of beliefs. It is very important to understand this level fully. If not it is difficult if not impossible to get to the other levels of understanding. The mental level is an abstract level where ideas and meaning are used and created. Abstract means not actual; something that does not exist in reality, it is usually related to something that does or may exist but still cannot be said to exist in reality. The meaning of the word ‘truth’ in sanskrit gives some idea of what I am saying about the mental level of understanding. Satyam is the word for truth in sanskrit and is composed of two roots words or syllables sat and yam. Sat means being or that which is or that which exists. Yam can mean ‘excellence of’ or my preference which is ‘perfect’. So truth is being or that which is perfect. Perfect means complete nothing can be added or taken away from it. Adding or taking away is what the mental level tends to get involved in.  Everything that is not a belief is true is another way of saying everything that is a belief is untrue and does not exist. The next level of understanding is the body and its physical sensations this level came before the mental level and its development took many millions of years longer. All the sensations of the body together are concerned with being in the world. Our senses give us physical contact with the world, not only is it older than the mental level it is much more truthful. When we touch something very hot the understanding is immediate, it cannot be said to be complete but compared to the mental level is vastly superior. I say it is not complete because although we understand immediately that something is hot we still may not understand the truth or all that needs to be understood. I am referring to a much deeper level of understanding that is not just concerned with whether something is hot or not but is concerned with reality itself. The idea of hot (mental) is very different from the reality of hot (physical). Pain is a product of physical sensation (hot) and mental understanding in the form of beliefs such as ‘I don't like it’ or it shouldn't be like this. These beliefs relate to many other beliefs such as who or what is this ‘I’. Suffering or pain is usually the result of mixing and misunderstanding the mental and physical levels of understanding without access to the understanding that goes with consciousness. This access is denied only because we are so fixated on the mental and physical levels of understanding. We are fixated/frustrated because these are the only levels of understanding available to us without consciousness and the understanding that goes with it, we neurotically bounce from the mental to the physical and vice versa getting more and more caught in the web or our own imaginings.

The last level of understanding before the level where understanding is no longer necessary is where consciousness is seen to be the source of all understanding as well as the part where understanding is no longer necessary. To understand the last level of consciousness we need to deeply understand the first two levels of the mental and physical. Truly understanding that belief is abstract and unreal or does not exist is essential. Once this is understood we naturally find ourselves in the physical level, and without beliefs to confuse this level we naturally move to the last level of consciousness.

Playing by the Rules

What are the rules? We are born and the only rules available are those that are already in place. Our parents teach us their rules, friends teachers and everyone else each has their own personal set of rules. Add to this the rules of the age we live in, the rules of today are not the rules of anytime in the past or the future. The rules presented to us are not consistent we are always in the situation of being dependent on the rules of others who each came to their rules dependent on the rules of others and who those others happen to be. The world as a result of the inconsistency of the rules is in chaos. The first step in understanding this is to see that there are two sets of rules available to us. The first set can be defined as the rules of the ego these are the rules mentioned above. The ego is created through the totality of our life experience which includes contact with the beliefs of others as well as the beliefs we come to ourselves. It seems the assumption is almost always that these rules are the only rules there are. The end result of these ego rules is suffering and it is suffering in all its forms that leads us to the true rules. Suffering is itself the result of believing something to be true that is in fact not true. So suffering in time becomes a precise guide to what is true and what is not. Any trace of negativity in our thinking will cause suffering to occur. As the negatives fall away in the suffering process our mind begins to become free of its own constraints. The negative beliefs can be seen as a series of self imposed limitations. Slowly the mind begins to function according to truth, truth being the absence of self imposed limitations. In other words the first set of rules are naturally released. At a certain point in this process there is a shift from seeing the world, ourselves and others from the perspective of ego rules to seeing all these things without ego rules. This shift is the result of the false rules dropping away not by being replaced with new rules. These new rules come from a very different place they come from consciousness. Consciousness has in the past been referred to by many other names such as spirit, buddha mind, brahman and many others. Whatever the name consciousness is what we really are and although its essence is unknowable in the ego sense there are certain ‘rules’ which become known as a result of this shift. The nature of consciousness is without beginning or end without any gradations of any kind, it has no limits and cannot be changed or improved upon. It is the only aspect of the universe that is absolute. None of the rules of the ego apply to consciousness it is a place where all rules break down it is a singularity beyond any laws of physics or any other rules. We are addicted to rules wether we know it or not and the absence of rules or knowing tends to fill us with dread and so we are compelled to hold on to whatever rules we have and spend our lives looking for new rules. Time, fear, suffering and death can only exist through the rules of the ego. The ‘language’ is the language of truth or consciousness it is a language without words or meaning because words and meaning are always the result of limitation and consciousness is without limitation of any kind. The existence of this language makes it possible to completely understand the ego language not through new beliefs but strangely from the absence of any beliefs. 

The decline of mental health in the West

Suffering

Constraints, Freedom, and the Laws of Physics

From the moment we are born until the moment we die we are constrained. What we choose is always limited and guided by these constraints. The first constraint is that we are born into a human body. While the human body allows us many possibilities it is also constrained in different ways throughout our life. Our constraints are not static they are constantly moving. The world and the time we are born into can be seen as an uncountable variety of constraints. Some of these constraints are genetic; the information that determines the physical composition of our body. This particular information in turn determines much of our activities and interests throughout our lives. We are born male or female with varying degrees of masculine or feminine qualities, some of these qualities we are born with while others are the result of our experiences. We can be constrained by our education, money and power and these we usually get depending on the parents we are born to. We can be constrained by having too much education money or power or too little. It is the particular mix of all our constraints and how they are believed that determines much of how our lives unfold. Most if not all of these constraints are not the result of any choice we might make. We like to think that we are the director of our lives that we can choose what we will or will not do but these constraints tell a different story. It is not possible to choose anything until these constraints are understood and transcended, they cannot be transcended until they are understood. Once understood there is freedom in the sense that our view of what we are is not determined by beliefs or constraints. We can never be free of our body while the body lives but this is not important, what is important is how we understand the mind and the body and their place in the scheme of things. When this is fully understood the mind and the body become secondary to consciousness. Before they are understood consciousness is just a word without meaning. Consciousness is not constrained by anything and so is free. The laws of physics are not different to the constraints mentioned. The mind and the body are constrained by these laws but consciousness is not. All the laws of physics exist because we have a body and mind that is able to interpret the physical sensations experienced by the body and given meaning by the mind. Everything that can be known can only be known according to the computations of these two. These laws of physics are the result of what we believe and as such may be useful or untrue and not useful. Trying to understand these laws with beliefs will always fail. It is only when we can transcend our own beliefs that true understanding can take place. For consciousness there is no place, or time, or bodily experience that is any different than any other.