Monday 25 May 2015

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.