Author: martyn

All intelligence is a modulation and expression of the Great Intelligence. Just as a single leaf is no less tree than the branch or the trunk or the root. All is tree, all is creative intelligence.

Knowing the nature of one’s Being is sufficient to end suffering. In the light of our nature as boundless awareness, suffering is but a passing play and display of ideation and sensation. But on its own level the experience is real and can’t be dismissed with mere intellectual knowledge alone.

The difference between suffering and not suffering is the presence of the higher perspective. Problems aren’t solved, they’re transcended.

As Jung said:

“…the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.”

Also E.F. Schumacher:

“Divergent problems cannot be killed, they cannot be solved in the sense of establishing a “correct formula”; they can, however, be transcended. A pair of opposites—like freedom and order—are opposites at the level of ordinary life, but they cease to be opposites at the higher level, the really human level, where self-awareness plays its proper role. It is then that such higher forces as love and compassion, understanding and empathy, become available, not simply as occasional impulses (which they are at the lower level) but as a regular and reliable resource.”

While still in duality the seeker experiences the sense of in-and-out. It’s either absorption in the bliss of the Self in, say, meditation, or it’s the relative misery and unsatisfactoriness of day-to-day life predicated as it is on a sense of separation and authorship.

So the problem of duality isn’t solved on its own level, it’s solved by introducing the larger experiential context of boundless, formless awareness. By going beyond (or prior to) the duality and recognising that the seeming polar opposites in fact arise from and are part of this greater unified wholeness.

From the new perspective the old problem of duality no longer exists as such. Thus the solution is a new way of being, a new experiential perspective. In truth, even a new psychological perspective can radically change one’s experience of reality, for better or for worse. But fundamental recognition of one’s true nature is the real foundation for a life in freedom.

Liberation is the essential nature of what-is. Thus-ness or such-ness. What-is is inherently perfect exactly as it is. But suffering can arise within it as a function of judgements regarding what-is.

Two things to note here:

One — without mental judgements, relief from suffering is experienced.
Two — in time, even with judgements freedom is found to be present.

These are stages of the seeker moving from duality to nonduality. At first one finds relief from afflictive mentation in the gap so to speak. The first crack, the glitch in the Matrix, that space of silence that’s experienced when one thought has ended and another has yet to arise — a gap of peace is there when the mind is silent.

To most people who have lived their lives in and as the thought-stream, the glimpse of the gap is a profound revelation. It might happen spontaneously or it might happen in meditation or some other spiritual practice. And this silent, thoughtless space is such a great relief that it’s pursued as the end in itself. And this is perhaps a fair conclusion to make.

So, more and more the seeker pursues this experience of inner silence, but also makes a subtle mistake of the intellect. And that is the belief that thinking in itself is the problem, that only silence is truth and peace. Consequently when thinking happens suffering is present.

Fortunately this is a progressive realisation. First the gap is recognised and becomes the goal of meditative practice. But later it must be recognised that this gap isn’t itself a pole of a duality, opposite to thinking, but the ground of both. That the nature of the gap, the experience of silence, is where the thoughts arise from and appear in. And so abiding awakening is the recognition that the ground of silent, empty awareness is ever-present experientially, with or without the presence of thoughts, sensations, etc. (aka content).

Later the content itself is known to be nothing but consciousness also. That there’s no duality, no separation of subject and object. A singular, boundless wholeness. the unity of silence and dynamism.

So the progressive development of recognition and conception:

The gap (in and out) >> the ground (abiding silence) >> all one (unity of subject and object).

The biggest obstacle to this recognition is grasping based on fear, and is often unrecognised as such. Because the dualistic identity is constructed from impermanent phenomenal ‘parts’, we believe that we are some ‘thing’. So when through (often, but not always) spiritual practice we begin to see or at least suspect that the permanent existence of what we take ourselves to be is under threat, quite understandably the psychology kicks in to resist this. Fear of annihilation is a powerful reactive force and so any attempt to look at those places that would undermine one’s perceived existence is often violently opposed.

So the challenge for the ego- or thought-based seeker is to be willing to question and inquire, first and foremost.

The good news is that fear or not, the ego-based self isn’t permanent or real, and it’s not so much that the ego needs to be destroyed, as many claim or presume, but it simply must be seen from our true nature. In this nothing is lost except our limiting views of ourself. We discover that we don’t exchange the small self for the big Self, we just recognise that we are and always were the big Self and that the small self is also part of our expression. Win-win. Both/and.

All this happens and nothing is really being done, just conscious awareness coming to bear on the true nature of reality. “The seeing is the doing”. And from the perspective of awareness, it’s all just happening spontaneously. Life wakes up to life. Bit by bit, or sometimes all at once. And our conceptions and understanding are part of this process. They develop and unfold sequentially along with the Self-recognition.

What is important is clarity and the willingness to update one’s mental models in the light of experiential truth, however unwelcome or inconvenient to one’s present understanding or vested interests that might be. And so awakening is a radical commitment to truth, a fundamental orientation to reality itself. It’s not personal although it shows up that way at first.

“To find out what is, discover what isn’t.”

And vice versa.

So find a thread, an edge, a crack, then work on that. All lead to the wholeness. Find an in and pick away at it. Enlarge it, open it up. Until you’ve scratched it all away, shed all that you’re not, and you’re standing free, uncovered, raw, Thus.

One of the Buddhas epithets is the Tathagata, the one who has come (or gone) to Thus-ness, one with the already perfect. And so this is worth noting to those who imagine enlightenment to be some sort of superhuman attainment. It’s simply the living awareness of the nature what-is, as what-is. On a personal level it shows up as energetic openness, non-resistance, non-grasping, and the deepest acceptance.

So when seeking liberation, don’t stop short with the in-and-out of the gap, or the manageable duality of subject and object, of the Self as just pure consciousness or emptiness. The true I AM is ALL, awareness is subject and object, divine and human, as One.

— Martyn

We have this powerful imagination and it’s mostly used for envisioning futures, and that allows us to plan, coordinate, cooperate. But when we believe our imagined scenarios to be reality we can suffer them too. I believe the great challenge of our species is to learn to manage this mental functioning, to be able to discriminate better what is real and what is imagined. Because it sounds simple and obvious but we really have trouble with it.

Often when we really start to look and inquire into the nature of our ‘problems’, almost invariably it’s not about what’s actually real in the moment, it’s that we’re relating to an imagined situation or a concept as if it were true now. When we discover that it’s not true, when we re-establish a direct relationship with the reality of the present moment, the ‘problem’ as such goes away.

Now the faculty of imagining futures is a human super-power and not something to be demonised or discarded. It’s eminently useful. But believing an imagined scenario to be true is like watching a movie and taking it to be real-life. We enjoy movies precisely because we believe them just enough to feel the drama, the excitement. We ‘suspend our disbelief’ and this gives us some room to explore imagined worlds.

But when we constantly weave narratives in our minds and imagine possibilities and invest them with our belief as if they were real or will become real, then we get into trouble. We have to be careful what we believe to be true, and just because some future vision in our own or our collective imagination seems likely, possible, or probable, it still doesn’t make it real.

The fact is we’re terrible at predicting the future even while we imagine so many variations of it. And we often get possessed by vivid visions that despite their plausibility are no less unreal and bear no resemblance to what is or what will actually come to be.

But we love our visions and our imagined futures. They orient us and give comfort because the alternative is not-knowing. In regard to the future, we truly and simply don’t know what will happen. Anyone who says they can predict what’s coming are lying or deluded. Our best extrapolations are based on pathetically limited data and modelling. But we get fixed on certainties because the alternative is terrifying to a mind that wants to ‘know’.

And then we collectively orient around ‘credible’ visions because the more people who are on-board, the more credible it seems and the more comfort that gives. I’m not suggesting we throw away our capacity to deal with possible future scenarios, but like forecasting weather, they’re extremely limited in their predictive power. So we need to be extremely cautious to what degree of CERTAINTY we attribute, and be mindful of our tendency to blind ourselves to reality in favour of comforting illusions, the illusion of certainty in this case.

Again we’re back to this essential issue that causes most of our trouble — that we have trouble distinguishing reality from imagination or conception. We believe things to be true that aren’t for all sorts of reasons. Often those reasons aren’t because we lack the capacity for discernment, it’s rather that we’re invested in some delusion because it serves a psychological or emotional purpose.

It’s a sad fact that our relationship to truth and reality suffers because there’s something we don’t want to face or admit, because somewhere in us we FEEL STRONGLY about something, and we don’t like that. We can’t handle strong feelings. So we’d rather avoid reality than face our feelings about it. It’s as simple as that, we’re scared. And if we’re not convinced then just go and prod some of our certainties and see how we react.

Political views, religious views, social views. How do we react to others who challenge them or have opposite views? Often it’s defensive, like we’re being attacked. Angry, which is often more defensiveness as anger is often unmet fear. So there’s fear at the bottom of it, no matter how we frame it to ourselves. And the more attachment and clinging we find, the more reactive defensiveness, the more anger — the more fear is underneath it all.

So what are we frightened of? Of losing something, of experiencing something?

Bottom line it’s the fear itself. We spend our lives avoiding it, denying it, we warp reality itself just to not face it, to not let it in.

Mastering fear is about humility rather than control. It’s about acceptance not denial. Fear is a response to the unknowable and uncontrollable nature of reality. But it’s also just a feeling. And to allow a feeling to direct our every action is to miss out on so much life.

The answer is to make friends with fear. When it comes we let it in, we let it be, and when it’s ready, we let it go. Like all feelings, even fear doesn’t last.

So we can practice — let it in, let it be, let it go. All in its own time. And notice any resistance as it appears, not trying to control anything. Let it be. This is how we can deal with all strong emotions and feelings. We practice this allowing and noticing. We might notice the inclination suppress or avoid, or to act out. We just notice.

In this noticing we find that we’re the vaster space of being in which the feelings come and go. We don’t have to push or pull, we just notice, and in noticing we’re bringing awareness to what’s here. And in bringing awareness we find that we ARE that open awareness that’s the space for all to come, to be, to go. Even resistance is part of that coming and going.

It’s like this we learn that fear and anger and sorrow come and go like weather in the vast open sky. So mastery of these strong and often afflicting feelings is the very opposite of control. And when they arise they cease to afflict us. Even if they’re turbulent and strong we know they can be allowed to be and they will pass away.

When we no longer need to avoid ourselves, when we no longer need certain feelings or emotions to be absent, then new possibilities open up for us in life. Places, people, situations, ideas, that we’d have denied and avoided open up to us. Life becomes a wholeness again, a continuum of possibilities that we’re free to experience.

— Martyn

When all falsehood falls away, what remains is truth. What we can then say about that truth may take lifetimes to articulate, but there is, here it is, ringing loud and clear as reality itself.

A big part of the truth is discovering that we are the very heart of experiencing, that we are knowingness itself. We are awake, aware sentience. This is such a fundamentally world-shattering discovery, even while it’s also the simple recognition of what we are and have always been. So it’s a “wow!” but also it’s, “of course, I always knew this”.

What I find difficult is that this ‘state’, which isn’t even a state but our common experiential ground, is not understood at all by mainstream culture. It’s either seen as something exotic or impossibly rare, or it’s dismissed as nothing at all, mere imagination or even delusionary.

The real trouble is it’s what’s considered ‘normal’ in regard to human self-knowledge that’s delusional. Our conditioned understanding of ourselves is based on demonstrably false premises and assumptions. ‘Spiritual’ tools such as meditation and self-inquiry progressively identify and dissolve experientially false beliefs about the nature of what is, unwinding and discarding the conditioned ideas which act as a veil to the apprehension of our true nature.

So who are we in this all this, what are we, what is this true nature? Well, we’re that which knows, the one that apprehends, the witness, essentially. Now it’s here we run the risk of allowing the ‘duality of subject and object’ to sneak in the back door, by imagining that once we’ve discovered ourselves as the formless witness, that the content is ‘something else’, something ‘other’. But if we ask a simple question we can see better the nature of what’s going on.

The question is: when we consider the nature of mind in our own experience, is the mental content OTHER than the mind? In other words, does the mind CONTAIN content, or is the content MADE of mind, an intrinsic aspect of what mind is?

So we find that ‘knowing’ and ‘known’ are just nominal, notional aspects of an indivisible wholeness.

I know this can seem abstract, but the problem is we suffer our false conceptions about reality. It’s the chasm between reality and our conditioned views is where our discontent and misery thrives.

Our conditioned views are what we’ve been told and accepted as true. Whereas our living reality is what we’ve discovered to be true in our own experience.

As so what is truth, reality? It’s that which can withstand all critical and experiential scrutiny, that which is irreducibly self-evident. It’s the liberating insight into the nature of mind.

Now when we say ‘mind’ we usually just go to that little cave inside our head and think that’s it. We have this limited body-centric notion and it’s completely wrong and utterly limited — ironically(?) — by its own conceptions of itself. The whole point of spiritual practice is to learn to look without preconceptions at the nature of self, mind, reality, experience, and recognise what it is instead of what we — often erroneously — believe it to be.

So when we really look into the nature of mind we find that it’s not contained in a body, we find that it’s boundless, open, non-local, formless, and that the ‘body’ is just an amalgam of sensations, memories, thoughts, that appear in mind, or awareness.

According to the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, when we apprehend this, then ‘small mind’ or personal mind, becomes ‘big mind’ or awareness itself. When the mind’s limited conceptions about itself are seen through and its — our — boundless nature is revealed as having been already always present and true.

This is awakening, nothing added, nothing attained, no bells or whistles, simply the unreal ideas of reality seen for what they are, and the reality of our already-existent boundless nature recognised as our living truth.

— Martyn

Conscience is a strange thing, it’s intuitive, it’s felt. When we’re in tune with it it’s bliss even though its dictates might be difficult to follow. But when we’re not listening it nags and emits a sense of unease. It’s like a Geiger counter that makes odd erratic noises until it picks up the signal, then it becomes increasingly coherent until it finally rings clear and true when it finds its goal. And like the old game of ‘warmer and cooler’ we need to tune into it by feeling our way, asking our feeling whether we’re further away or closer to that sense of rightness which is ours alone, our particular sense.

Because that’s the nature of conscience, we each have our own, and any two people in the ‘same’ situation might have very different authentic responses, a different intuitive sense of what THEY should do or not do.

So conscience is a ‘sense’. It might speak to us in words or it might not. But it’s better understood as a kind of felt sense of knowingness. And whether that shows up by communicating a rightness or a wrongness, a yes or a no, it’s experienced as a species of intuitive knowing that is prior to and more intimate than any mental or intellectual considerations.

Of course this makes it very difficult for the mind to accept and justify on its own terms, and so it becomes a question of which faculty we trust and follow. But in order to let go of the mind we have to recognise where its limitations are, then maybe, just maybe, we might trust our deeper sense.

This intuitive sense is key to living in flow. So flow, intuition, conscience, Self, and bliss, all converge at the same place. The biblical word for ‘sin’ is a crude moralistic translation of the Greek word ‘harmartia’, which is an archery term that means ‘to miss the mark’. And in regard to living our truth, to hit the mark is to identify this centre of intuitive knowingness and live from there. Its to be a stream-enterer, and it’s to be truly sovereign.

The sad fact is in this life at this time we often have to fight for that sovereignty. Most people live by the mind because the mind can justify anything and so we can use it to let ourselves off the hook when we to start to fear and cling. But the conscience knows, and that still small silent voice, that pre-eminent sense of truth will let us know. If something is wrong we’ll know it and if something is right we’ll know that too. But whether we listen, and not just listen but follow, is up to us.

The problem is that the mind offers endless justifications in support of its conclusions but the intuition offers none, just its own sense of non-conceptual knowingness that must be taken on trust. Which is a big ask for the mind. Fortunately we can begin to experiment with this intuitive guidance system. If we’re not familiar with it we can listen and follow once in a while and see what happens. We can tune in and try out some low-stakes decisions before we up the stakes. In time we’ll discover that this sense is connected to a deeper, broader knowledge and wisdom and is a far better guide to our well-being than the mind.

And this is not to say to abandon the mind. When we live from our intuitive heart we find that its wisdom includes the functioning mind, but it becomes a useful servant instead of a poor master.

So when we’re listening and following our intuitive sense we’re in flow and our faculties are all stacked up. It’s the manifest becoming properly aligned with the unmanifest being and it’s experienced as bliss. Now I know ‘bliss’ is a word that’s prone to misunderstanding and is often conflated with simple pleasure. But perhaps bliss is better understood as that sense of well-being or rightness when we’re in this groove, this flow. And we all know what it is and that’s the thing. We can speak about it, we can reference it and have words for it, and we can understand it because it’s real and it’s common to us.

It feels better to live from our conscience, our intuition, even though it sometimes calls us to do difficult things, to make decisions and take actions that aren’t always easy and comfortable. Because it calls us to a higher order of being and living.

“But HOW do I know?” asks the mind.
“I just KNOW” answers the heart.

That’s often not a sufficient answer for the mind. My answer to that is to TRY. Experiment with trusting our intuitive knowingness. Learn to identify it, and listen to it when it makes itself known. But importantly, try following it, and then see how things go. And in this way we learn whether it’s trustworthy or not.

Yes, it’s a leap of faith in a way — acting on some SENSE of knowing —  but if we continue to give the mind precedence it will never concede. It’s up to us to try a different way.

Use your words, they say. But recently I saw a sunset that was so sublime words couldn’t even get near it. The subtlety of colour and form of the endlessly changing expressionist painting in the sky, the deftest touch, the impossibly tender sensibility of the creator. There’s really nothing I could say that could begin to describe it in a way that anyone else could experience what I witnessed.

So words fail absolutely here, and in so much else. And to think, this brief sweet sunset was just one partial, momentary, fleeting expression in an infinity of space and eternity of time, from one single perspective. Such staggering creative intelligence and beauty on an unfathomable scale. What an artist — bravo, Maestro!

And so we put too much hope in words, too much weight. We imagine they carry all that we need to know, or at least the most important parts. But think of a lover’s breath on your skin or an infant’s tiny fingers held in your own; try to describe those moments and those feelings in a way that another can feel them too. It’s impossible. The experience of one single moment, this moment, any moment, is utterly beyond description. So if we think that the truth that we seek can be contained and communicated in a few lines of verbal code or even a vast tract, then we are pitifully mistaken.

But it’s good to recognise this, it’s good to try this on and see it for ourselves. Because then we might see that we may be looking for truth in all the wrong places, and we might start to pay attention to the experiencing itself rather than our rather paltry thoughts about it.

So why bother talking at all? Maybe just to say, “look at that sky!”

— Martyn

We are opaque to ourselves. We don’t know why we do the things we do, what our deep motivations are. We just act first and explain or excuse later. It’s how it works, how we work; act first, the mind accounts for it later. Which makes sense as we were pre-verbal as living organisms for the vast majority of our evolutionary past, and we also start our individual lives with no words, no symbols or conceptions.

If thoughts were so essential we wouldn’t be able to move or function without them at all. We’d just be wide-eyed blobs waiting for that first glimmer of conception, that first word that would get us moving. But we see animals motivated and functioning, and in infancy we express our preferences and move in the world before conception is even conceived of.

It’s as Nietzsche observed, that we’re living beings before we’re rational beings. The verbal, conceptual mentation that we consider so essential to our functioning, that we mostly believe drives us entirely, and even think this layer IS us, is in fact a secondary emergent layer.

This layer certainly has tremendous functional utility. The emergence of language and symbolic representation was THE explosive Promethean moment that unleashed our unique species-level creativity and cooperation, for better and for worse.

But it’s the power of representative layer of reality that also leads us to unhappiness. When we confuse the representation for reality itself then we can suffer it. Particularly in regard to self-identity. By way of example, we can confuse our concept of a tree with the reality of a tree and not necessarily suffer that. I mean, if our conceptual idea of the tree is so completely divorced from the reality of it, then acting out the ensuing expectations might cause problems. If our notions of ‘tree-ness’ included things like permeability then we might expect that we can walk straight through one, and so we’d find that we literally ‘bump into’ the reality of the tree.

But it’s when these representations are mistaken for self the suffering really begins. If our false ideas about who and what we are include things that are vulnerable, incomplete, broken, unworthy, etc. and we believe those notions, then we suffer them even though they’re false.

This is not new, I know I’ve written about this before, about the mechanism of mistaking conceptions for reality particularly in regard to self-identity —

That concepts and symbols are a representational non-primary emergent ‘layer’ of reality, that when taken to be reality itself — aka believed — can result in the experience of psychological and emotional suffering.

Anyway, I’m trying to derive or distill and communicate the essential issues in regard to human suffering and happiness, no biggie right 😉

Now some profound thinkers in the psychological field focus on ‘meaning’ as the foundational concern, but I’m not sure that I agree. At least in regard to ‘articulated’ meaning. But it may be that the the structure of something resembling ‘meaning’ might be embodied in a pre-articulated way, that our worldviews might well be non-conceptual even while they’re structural. And therefore, stated worldviews are mere articulations of that embodiment. Something like that.

This somewhat comports with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s dictum that all states of consciousness have specific physiological correlates. But it’s important not to put the cart before the horse and say that states of consciousness DEPEND on physiology. This would be to posit physiology as first-mover when it’s only the manifestation — aka visible effect — of the unmanifest functioning of consciousness itself. To state otherwise is to mistake the cart FOR the horse.

Because the domain of phenomena is inert in a sense. That is to say it has no ‘life’ of its own, even though it IS life, it has no animating force, as it itself is the animat-ED.

It’s ironic that the REAL is in fact the very inverse of what we hold to be ‘real’ in the conventional world. The real REAL is that which is permanent, never-changing, ever-present, and here’s the counter-intuitive kicker — formless. Because all forms pass away and have no intrinsic existence or constancy, the term ‘real’ in regard to them is only relative, contingent.

But the real power and revelation lies in exploring the nature of being for ourselves. Because we can’t take anything for granted. It’s not sufficient to accept the nature of reality on faith or authority, or faith IN authority. Because it’s been my experience that for the most part many who claim to have authoritative views have not inquired or explored as deeply enough, that when pressed on their foundational axioms and ‘knowledge’ they don’t always withstand the scrutiny of inquiry. And I’m talking about the nature of ONE’S OWN subjective experiential reality, so by definition it’s something we must all do for ourselves. So take nothing on faith, or rather take nothing on another’s faith to be true in any absolute sense.

This is the way to truth, reality — we question everything, inquire into everything, and question the questions. And ultimately, or even primarily, we question and inquire into the questioner. And we don’t stop short or we’ll get stuck on some relative truth or identity. If we start down this road, go all the way.

So we don’t comply, we don’t merely comport. We dissent, we go our own way, not out of petty contrarianism for its own sake, even though that can be a powerful tool. But we inquire into the nature of being first-hand. Starting right here and right now, with ourself, with the nature of our subjective experiencing itself. What is it, how does it happen, where, to whom? What’s the nature of thinking, sensing, experiencing? What do these words even relate to?

So we look to see what is real and true, in ourself. Because where else? That’s all we’ve got, all human culture and knowledge is just an aggregate of first-hand reports of subjective experiencing. That’s it. And all the views of others are in fact showing up as OUR first-hand subjective experience. So what do we or can we know except our own experiencing? So we take that seriously, we make it our primary concern. Because if we want to make sense of reality we first have to make sense of ourselves.

— Martyn

It’s the now that counts. It’s the present-moment that is most ‘real’. The rest is memory and imagination, which both have tremendous value of course. But THIS IS IT, this is the place of power, this is where all the action is. NOW. And so much of that power is dispersed when we miss it, when we fail to be-here-now. In time we’ll come to recognise that we’re actually always here and now, that all notions of past and future, all conceptions, all sensation and mentation appear in and as this LIVING NOWNESS.

This is the great saving truth of life, that our freedom is already in place. We’re never not free, could never be anything less than free. But the mind weaves tales of bondage and enthrals us with very convincing and engaging stories of limitation, unworthiness, incompleteness. But the moment that those stories are seen for what they are we find that the truth is RIGHT HERE as our very being.

Which is not to say that the human world and all its shenanigans are wrong or a mistake. It is what it is, it’s part and parcel of the truth of life. Like a novel or a play or movie, life tells stories about itself that allow us to experience and enjoy any number of things from many different perspectives. But then pain and suffering come along, and the stories become a source of misery.

Talking about suffering is treacherous terrain. There are traps here even for the wary and so I don’t want to go blundering in and setting them off. The reality and nature of pain and suffering is at the very heart of our concern as conscious beings. Our own, and because of our self-awareness and capacity for empathy, others’ too.

The trouble is we don’t really like to get too close to our suffering, we can be like wild animals caught in a trap, and while we’re in pain it’s very hard to consider things like causes and remedies. In the distress of our suffering we can often violently reject even the suggestion that there might be an antidote.

When we make the profound discovery that resisting what-is causes suffering, the possibility of peace appears. Freedom is the real acceptance of what must be. Non-resistance is therefore optimum. But it’s feelings that we resist most of all, this is what we fail to allow. We’re not avoiding the world and its situations, people, and events, we’re resisting the feelings that arise in in relation to all that. It’s our own feeling-level that we have trouble integrating. If only we could learn to accommodate that, give space for that.

The feeling level can get intense and so we try to suppress it or avoid it. We don’t trust that given full rein it won’t destroy us, that it won’t overwhelm us. So we’re conditioned to keep a lid on it, to not to show it, even to ourselves, and to not risk being wild and out-of-control. And so we suppress and avoid, or go the other way and get hooked and indulge.

In reality there’s no resisting what-is, no escaping the reality of this moment. We can get contracted and tense, and it’s this tension and unwillingness to accept what’s here that adds a layer of misery to our experience. So we let it be. Not because it makes us spiritual and all that guff. We let it be because in doing so we suffer less, because it’s the functionally optimal response to the flow of reality. We surrender our resistance to our feelings because this surrender is self-interest, it’s sanity.

Once we’re in perpetual non-resistance to our feelings there’s nothing that can bother us, nothing we need to avoid, we’re free. Free from the need to hide or avoid or suppress or dull. So we let that feeling level in, make peace with it, allow its ebbs and flows, its rises and falls. We just let what naturally comes come, and what goes go. Breathe, release, relax.

To do this we can’t ignore what we’re feeling, we have to let it in, allow ourself to feel and give it our attention. And if we’ve been ignoring or avoiding this part of ourself for a long time it might be unfamiliar and a new habit. We can start incrementally, just begin to un-tighten, release and relax a little when we notice resistance and contraction. Just move in that direction. In time that becomes more and more open and less contracted until openness becomes the spontaneous natural condition of our being.

Our inner feeling level can fluctuate considerably, and the energetics can sometimes be challenging. But no amount of resistance, avoidance, contraction, clinging, or indulgence, can do anything to ‘improve’ the experience. Our freedom is in letting it be what it is. We can certainly make it worse by doing the things listed above. But in this complete allowing, we’ll find what was previously afflictive becomes blissful. Funny that.

— Martyn

Lately I see a big part of the spiritual scene is about a kind of ‘radical humanness’. And I’m all about owning and including our embodied nature and not denying it one bit. But this can also be the back door to re-identification and the denial of the miraculous and mystical truth of being.

Yes, the truth is THIS, in all its mundanity. But this mundane, human reality is MADE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, a radical and extraordinary discovery. I think we’ve got to get better at holding two perspectives FULLY at the same time.

To maintain that the truth is ALL ABOUT our spiritual nature, awareness, is to miss our humanity. But to discover that nature and then say, no, it’s only about the embodiment, is also to live a half truth. The way is both/and not either/or.

And so for me it’s a big ‘yes’ to my everyday humanity in all its humdrum ordinariness, including all of its emotional, psychological, physical and social dimensions and challenges. But at the same time I live the reality that it’s ALL made of the primordial divine consciousness and is grounded in the deepest mystery. Can these two realities co-exist in the living moment? Hell yes. They do, they are. And neither need diminish or negate the other. In fact both together constitute a wholeness greater than the sum of these apparent parts.

In light of this dual but unified truth, I find that the only way the human me can authentically relate to it all is humility, gratitude and love. I mean, all the other stuff shows up too – anger, sadness, frustration and the rest. But as my finite human nature reflects on itself as an expression of my infinite boundless nature, I’m just in awe, struck dumb by the miraculous and unfathomable mystery of what is. That it should also be so ordinary and unremarkable ironically only makes it all the more extraordinary.

What a trip is this human life. We’re swimming in mystery, but we take everything for granted, we take it all at face value. We think we know what it all is, where it came from. But when we scratch the surface of our presumed understanding, we find the unknowable infinite smiling back at us.

— Martyn

Among other things, spiritual awakening is the trigger for radical release, the popped cork that frees up the suppressed energetics held in place by the egoic self. So post-awakening there can often be — but not always — a strong and sometimes lengthy release of embodied trauma. Many people experience this to varying degrees, but many don’t and they wake up without skipping a beat.

For myself, I spent a large part of my life in persistent, afflictive emotional pain. And it took decades to untangle what was going on. From my current perspective I’d say the main reason that it remained persistent for so long was because my main strategy of dealing with it was avoidance. I avoided it because it was painful, scary, but mainly because not for one moment did I consider that turning towards it, meeting it and allowing it deeply, could be a rational and helpful thing to do.

Why was this? Well in terms of meeting and healing our embodied traumas — and we all have them — our social, familial, and cultural conditioning is utterly incapable of guiding us. It points us, nay trains us, to go in the exact opposite direction of what’s needed. For me, and for many, these conditioned strategies of avoidance and suppression are only abandoned when the suffering exceeds the capacity of the strategies to handle. And one day, instead of running away, for the first time we find ourselves turning to face what we’ve been avoiding for so long.

So what was it that I was avoiding? Difficult emotions for sure. But mainly is was strong energetics, I want to say IN the body, but that’s not it. The body IS energetics; it’s not that there are sensations in the body, but the ‘body’ is made of sensations. But anyway, I began to turn my awareness ‘in’ towards the sensory-energetic field of experience, which in practice meant allowing what was present to be, noticing ‘resistance’, and meeting and welcoming and releasing every new ‘edge’ of contraction as it arose. I say it was a practice, but in fact is was just surrendering to the only place of relief, a razor’s edge of attention and surrender.

I haven’t very written much about this aspect of the work because it requires the articulation of subtle internal dynamics of felt experiencing that don’t easily lend themselves to description. Not for me anyway. But one way to look at this is that this Being is both noun and verb. We can discover through self-inquiry and introspection, broadly speaking, that there is a groundless ground to us, that we ARE, we exist. But when we get to the heart of that sense we find that it’s formless, awake, awareness.

Some can get waylaid in this emptiness, believing that this is the final destination, having transcended the messy forms, the world, our human nature. But it’s not the end of the story. The verb of being is ever-present as the fullness of the flow of experiencing, the ever-transforming nowness that requires the moment-to-moment integration of the multilayered embodiment. This occurs spontaneously post-awakening.

But years of avoidance and suppression and non-processing of emotional stress stores in the body-field as trauma. For me a releasing was happening somewhat before awakening, but once the body identification dropped as my primary identity the mechanism for suppression went with it. The result was that I experienced — and still do to a lesser extent — the periodic emergence of turbulent energetic arisings; trauma release. These ‘disturbances’ surface in my energetic body to be released, dispersed. This I’ve come to see is a natural process of ‘purification’, releasing and unwinding energetic knots and their emotional and mental correlates, but conditioned egoic structures usually inhibit its effectiveness. It’s a messy, difficult, ugly business sometimes.

This is why I’ve come to believe that the identification of our fundamental existential ground as the field of open-awareness is the powerful precursor and facilitator of the release of embodied trauma. But I also know that trauma release itself can be traumatising or at least destructive. Awakening for many is followed by a period of great upheaval, it’s not all sweetness and light, and shouldn’t be taken lightly; it can often be a lot worse than what preceded it, for a while anyway. But I feel it’s like a spinning electric fan; once the wire’s been cut it might still go round for a while but ultimately without any added power it winds down.

Lastly I want to say this.. that awakening, with its processes and descriptions is an imperfect ‘science’. It shows up in so many different ways, but we can observe commonalities and themes that reveal themselves across time and in many individuals. And this is me thinking aloud on all this, reflecting on my own and others’ experience.

This is my ‘work in progress’ and a continuous unpacking. Like life itself I offer no final answers, no absolute end points. No one thing I write will be a complete picture of even a single aspect of my experience and perspective, which I’m also discovering as I go. What I’m doing here is just an imperfect, ongoing, good-faith exploration of the nature of our lived reality.

Love, Martyn

There’s not a lot of Unity in the Bible, not on the surface anyway; you have to really go looking for it, and even then. But the Kabbalah is a rich map of reality. It shows that from the most abstract unmanifest divine truth, a sequential unfoldment or manifestation occurs. But even so, all this unfoldment happens WITHIN the wholeness of Being. There’s no question of anything OUTSIDE of the Absolute. Unity is non-negotiable.

As for the Vedas and the Upanishads, even when talking about God they remind us to know that WE ARE THAT.

It’s the notion of separation that’s so pernicious. Because one of the ways it shows up in our ideas about ourselves is this idea that we’re ‘apart’ from the divine nature, separated and outside it somehow and we have to reconnect or get back to God. But it’s just not true, there’s nothing OUTSIDE of the Absolute Being, all that is is contained within it.

It’s like the student who asks the teacher “what is God?”, and the master replies, “what ISN’T God?” (We can swap out God with consciousness if we like.)

And this is a good exercise to explore. Notice whatever your attention lands on and ask, “is this not God?” The sky, the chair under you, the light, the colour blue; ask, “is this not also God?” And also in the sensations you feel and the thoughts that arise in your mind, are these not also God?”

And to completely close the gap of imagined separation, the very act of noticing, the awareness that you are that ‘knows’ — is this not also God?

The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart made this leap to the Unified view of man and God when he said –

“The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

So to perceive separation is to imagine it only, it’s to believe a mere conception. And therein lies our problem, we privilege thinking over experience and we don’t test the veracity of our beliefs against our lived experience. This habit starts early, before we could even think as such we were handed a bunch of conceptions about the world and who and what we are, and we believed them without question, and life based on this becomes our way of being. This is conditioning and it has a life of its own, we’re conditioned by those who were conditioned before us, as they were, and so on.

But sooner or later we start to bump up against reality proper and we notice that the consensus reality we’ve internalised doesn’t comport well with the facts on the ground. And that gap between what’s real and true experientially and the beliefs we have about it start to become untenable, and this is where suffering is born. Even if that suffering is just a nagging dissatisfaction, a sense that something’s not quite right.

This is what the Buddha called ‘dukkha’, and most translate it as ‘suffering’. But it can also be translated as ‘unsatisfactoriness’. So conditioned life is ‘unsatisfactory’, or put another way, life in its conditioned state in incapable of satisfying.

But it’s not LIFE ITSELF that’s the problem, it’s CONDITIONED EXISTENCE, it’s the embodiment of false views of reality and the actions and self-reinforcing behaviours that this leads to, and the inevitable sense of wrongness that follows.

It’s like if we truly believed that the sun rising was ‘wrong’, that it really SHOULDN’T BE that way, then every time it rose we’d feel terrible about it and spend our energies trying to fix and and stop it. We’d maybe be scared that life was broken somehow. And so like that, because we’ve given a belief priority over reality, we suffer. But we suffer the belief, NOT the reality. And when we accept the fact that the sun rises as natural and inevitable, there’s no suffering, there’s just what is.

Reality, the truth, is what’s real and true before we impose our beliefs and conceptions on it. But it’s not obvious what that is until we ‘do’ it. It’s why ‘no-mind’ is so important in enlightenment teachings. The experience of a mind free of thoughts, judgements, descriptions, gives us a glimpse of the ‘thing in itself’, naked being, Zen.

But an empty mind isn’t the end in itself, because thoughts themselves don’t make us suffer, it’s the BELIEF in them that does that, and in particular it’s the false and limiting thoughts in regard to ourselves that cause most trouble.

As false notions go, “I am the body” is the bottom-most block in the Jenga stack, and the one that leads to the most suffering. This is the root idea upon which the superstructure of our suffering is built. Get rid of that one bad idea and the whole tower comes crumbling down. But as I said, it’s not enough to just not think it; that might give a moment of relief, a welcome glimpse of its absence, but when the thought returns so does the attendant confusion and suffering. But when we truly see it’s falseness of our limited view of ourself, then the belief in it naturally falls away and we’re free, whether the thought arises again or not.

This process is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. But in this case it doesn’t matter which came first; either we first recognise our boundless nature and then as a consequence the “I am the body” belief falls away, or the belief drops away and our true nature is revealed.

Either way, truth dawns and freedom reigns. ❤️

— Martyn

Do I have an overarching thesis?

Yes. It’s that our nature is Divine consciousness and our forgetfulness of that reality makes us suffer. Now ‘Divine’ is a very particular word and I use it in the sense that it pertains to the supreme being, the absolute, ultimate intelligence, the source of all. And ‘forgetfulness’ is another particular word. We could equally say ignorance, as in unawareness, also non-recognition.

So I’m saying that when we discover or remember or recognise who and what we are we’ll be happy, free, and have a life full of meaning.

Well that was easy, I thought I’d have a harder time articulating that, can we all go home now?

Well maybe. The problem is until that discovery is made and confirmed as to be our living reality, we’ll continue to suffer and lasting peace and happiness will continue to elude us. And it’s compounded by the fact that in our ignorance and confusion regarding our true nature we mostly don’t even identify the problem correctly. So as they say, we look for happiness in all the wrong places.

Most of the wisdom traditions and the enlightened teachers throughout history have tended to point to the same ultimate reality and have prescribed various ways to approach it or ‘realise’ it. But to a modern mind the idea that ‘everything is consciousness’ is so far removed from our consensus reality that often it’s too radical a proposition to even consider.

The truth is that most people I encounter who dismiss these ideas do so without ever having sincerely explored them, or they have some naive parodic version of spirituality in mind. Arguably this is the shadow of modernity, whose focus on the measurement and manipulation of the natural world, while admittedly fruitful, struggles to account for a foundational non-corporeal reality; even though the truth of primordial consciousness as first principle is blindingly obvious and self-evident upon examination.

“Know That, by knowing which, everything is known”. Chhandogya Upanishad

So the truth is there to be realised, but what stands in the way? Mostly our unwillingness to take a look, to explore the nature of our inner being in good faith on its own terms. And it is hard, because when our cultural conditioning points to the exact opposite direction, psychologically and even socially we have to swim against a strong tide to get there.

It’s been my experience and observation that many people only resort to this ‘turning within’ when all the outward facing strategies have failed. A great many spiritual seekers come to the path because their lives have failed or collapsed in some way. Crisis is a powerful Dharma Gate. Now a cynic might interpret this as desperation and deluded grasping at invisible straws. But it rather points to the final inability of the materialist worldview to provide real meaning and existential satisfaction beyond endless consumption and the promise of being ‘entertained to death’.

But when all strategies of avoidance and temporary indulgence fail or lose their savour, and when we find ourselves in this this living moment without interest in status or possessions, without the comfort of conception, imagination, or memory, then we’re finally faced with ‘what remains’ — our naked being, unadorned, unconditioned, and free.

— Martyn

My sense is that at the very least Jesus was an exemplar to what it is to live in truth, to live in complete loyalty to the dictates of one’s conscience and an embodiment of radical, universal love. But his story also showed in the people around him what the egoic mind would do to hide from that possibility, that rather than look inside and accept the calling to a higher standard, a better way, it would rather ‘kill the messenger’.

I get it, universal love is hard, it’s not all happy-clappy, touchy-feely. It requires personal sacrifice. And not just ‘stuff’, but cherished things like rightness, grievance, partiality. To those attached to the law he showed that love fulfilled the law, but also that love goes further than the law, it’s less about what have to DO, and more it’s about what we must BECOME. Our very way of being must transform.

It’s that metanoia again, which I’d argue is poorly translated as ‘repentance’. But that change of heart is the awakening of conscience that transcends mere compliance with moral rules under compulsion. The law can make us behave but it can’t make us love.

Like this, we’re always being directed back to ourselves, to dig deeper, to uncover more, to deal with the beam in our own eye before we condemn the splinter in our brother’s. The work of love is ours, and it’s hard in many ways, but only because we’re so tightly grasping to that which we need to let go of. And we’re invited to this path of self-emptying, this kenosis because the violence and rancour and fear that characterises life as an ego-mind is such a great burden.

The spiritual path, by any name, is the path or process of uncovering what’s already true about our nature. And so we find that we’re called to give up, or sacrifice, the things that only serve to obscure that truth.

Meister Eckhart describes this process –

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.”

And just to be sure we understand our essential indivisibility with the Divine, he goes on to say –

“God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one ground.”

If the truth of spiritual revelation were the same old “be good or be punished” then we might as well stick with the old law. But that’s not the revelation, it’s that we are love itself, we’re one with the Divine beyond any possibility of separation. But our attachment to our petty temporal concerns obscures our own self-recognition, the noise of our infernal internal squabbling drowns out the presence of the God within.

But when we first glimpse that presence in us, the squabbling mind loses its attraction. And that glimpse of the ‘Kingdom Within’ becomes the mustard seed that when planted grows abundantly. The presence ‘grows’, filling all that we are, all that we know, all that is, with love. It dissolves any notion that anything is other than that. The kenosis empties one’s being of egoic residue and the Divine fills the vacuum, this presence we perceived as IN us reveals itself to BE us. Thus the Mystic Union is fulfilled.

— Martyn

Is our conscience merely conditioning or is it a hotline to our divinity?

Do we follow where it leads? Do we trust it? Is it our lack of trust that makes us suffer? If we trusted every move we make as right and correct, even divinely ordained, or at the very least inevitable, would we be happy and free?

And do we even need to actively trust? Perhaps we could just abandon mistrust, drop the second-guessing and the doubt. Because it’s the mind with all its doubts and stories and judgements that causes all the misery.

But is such mindlessness tantamount to heedlessness, recklessness? Is it sociopathic to live without regret, without reference to good and bad, right and wrong?

This is still a mind-first view. From this perspective even when thoughts are absent the mind still dominates; the belief that the mind runs the show, leads the way.

Better to live from the heart, from our intuitive sense, that tender feeling level that connects us to all. From that level we don’t need to follow injunctions not to harm or to treat others well, we don’t need the mind to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong, we KNOW.

“In love the law is fulfilled.”

This is the divine logic of universal love, that the law becomes redundant. Not heedlessly abandoned but fulfilled and more. Love is that simple, elegant solution to all the problems of the world.

– Martyn

I’ve been thinking about narratives and how they help us make sense of the world, stories that approximate a description of what’s going on essentially.

For me it’s a spiritual story, obviously. Something like; the soul comes to grow and evolve and ultimately to restore its dignity and wholeness and identity with its Divine origin. Something like that. And I’ve always trusted that there’s an inevitability about that, that however digressive and distorted the soul gets, that it’s all for the good, that even the worst experiences can’t help but translate into insight and spiritual growth, albeit eventually perhaps. And I don’t believe this in some naive way, I can’t help but see the trajectory of human life and always the breakthroughs are in the direction of love, kindness, gratitude, acceptance. Of course a person can be utterly consumed by hate and loathing and despair and all that rotten stuff, but always the light of innate possibility and potential is there, waiting to be rediscovered and kindled.

And I know many people die to the body before ever finding any personal redemption from their own misery, but we are birthless and deathless beings, our journey of ascension continues on beyond the seeming materiality of this life.

From the viewpoint of consciousness, spirit, true nature, this world is a waking dream, a passing show. And we in our essence are beyond its grasp and influence even while we play our parts in it. Our work then, and our opportunity, is to discover this truth of our ultimate identity, but also to learn what it is to be both beyond this relative world as eternal spirit, yet also living fully IN it as mortal human beings.

This is the work of discovery, integration, embodiment. And whatever transcendence is realised will be mirrored by the need to include that which has been surpassed.

So the spiritual path isn’t a path at all, it’s a process of transformation leading to its own transcendence.

Transcendence is a tricky word. I think for many it evokes ideas of going out beyond, away from, over there, above. When in fact the transcendence that I’m about here is closer, inner, prior to that which is transcended. We ARE the transcendent consciousness, the field of creative intelligence. Unmanifest, projecting our potentiality as time and space and form. But always beyond our own creation while including all in our being. It’s referred to as That, capital T. As in, TAT TVAM ASI, That Thou Art — That totality of Being. But That is This, is You.

The liberated view knows that I AM, this very consciousness right now that’s witnessing the world, this ‘I’, this You, this Seer, is That singular Divine consciousness from which and in which the world has its being.

We view ourselves with such limited conceptions, we tell such small stories about ourselves. And while there are plenty of flowery words about our true nature, unless we actually examine and discover and experience that nature for ourselves we’ll continue to imagine ourselves as fallen or incomplete or broken or limited. The greater, truer, more essential part of who and what we are is boundless and free. But the union that is the goal of true Yoga is the unity of BOTH absolute and relative aspects of ourselves. It’s not about escape to the transcendent being, avoiding all the messiness and contradictions of human life, rather it’s the living, integrated embodiment of true nature, here and now, in the world.

– Martyn

The tagline on my website says ‘exploring present-moment awareness’ which sounds okay on the face of it, but the truth is I’m not exploring at all; I’m observing, witnessing. I’m not going anywhere or doing anything, I’m not plumbing any depths, I’m not even responding to anything; I’m just here, watching ‘the world’ go by, taking notes as it passes. I don’t need to know, but knowing shows up too. Knowing comes and goes. Doing too, that comes and goes. Being? Well that’s where I am and what I am. Being is am-ness, is-ness. Before even aware-ness.

Maybe.

Who could say such things, who could know such things? Better to keep quiet, we don’t need to know. What a relief that we exist prior to the need to think or to know, that I AM and need ‘do’ nothing.

But the mind bounces between Two Truths. “I’m tired today” it says. And that’s true too. True enough. True on its own level, in its own way. Not untrue, not to be dismissed or gaslighted away. All that is is Truth, capital-T. Don’t deny it, but don’t project permanence on that which passes, don’t expect it to stay, certainly don’t demand that it does. I mean you can if you want, but good luck with that.

Mystery means that which is hidden, but the truth isn’t hidden at all, it’s just unnoticed, ignored maybe. But it’s right here, always. Not deep, not behind anything or inside something. It’s just here, this. But for most it’s habitually overlooked. It’s a blindspot. Most people see reality in a partial manner, conceptually selecting from a list of pre-judged portions of reality. The bits we don’t like are ignored, rejected, denied. We let the ‘good stuff’ in.

But when we leave bits out reality stops making sense. We start wondering why it’s not working properly, why things aren’t going the way we expect them to, but it’s because we’ve rejected some fundamental but inconvenient truths about the way things actually are. For example we don’t like the fact that we’re not in control so we excise that. We don’t like the fact that EVERYTHING is temporary and impermanent so we reject and ignore that. Then we wonder why we can’t hold on to something, or why our clinging and grasping is painful and ineffectual.

It’s like standing in the ocean and saying, “why doesn’t it just stop moving?! I want it to stay put!” At least there we know better. We don’t demand that the unreal be real. And yet the whole field of phenomenal life is an ocean of change and as long as we expect it to be otherwise we suffer.

But when we let go of that need to control or to fix life in place, something opens up in us, some greater freedom, a dawning recognition that we ARE the ocean, and that while all the various individual forms come and go, the ocean itself is constant. We find that an unchanging, ever-present essence is always there, always Here.

So letting go is a leap of faith in a way, but the more we let go the more the truth is confirmed that we don’t need to hold on. Until we find we don’t even bother to grasp or resist, and openness itself becomes our Wayless Way and freedom our living truth.

– Martyn

Awakening is an ongoing unfoldment of potentials and nothing in particular is guaranteed to stop or go away, even though some things might. It’s the ongoing acceptance, patience, and forgiveness of whatever arises or happens that marks healthful embodiment. But also the true and deep acceptance that anything CAN happen and that nothing that DOES happen is ‘wrong’ or ‘shouldn’t be’.

Fold it all in as you go. This is the transmutation of mud to lotus. First as a practice: enfoldment, inclusion, forgiveness; then as the nature of your being, spontaneously. But even then sometimes attention or effort is called for to continue to include, accept. Be gentle with yourself, forgive yourself for not being perfect, forgive yourself for needing to do some work, even if you think you’re beyond all that. Especially so then.

There’s an enlightenment trap that says “I’m beyond the need to DO anything.” So when something difficult does come up and you need to pay attention more than usual, the expectation that you SHOULDN’T NEED TO leads you to suffer. Instead of humbly, patiently heeding the call to respond to the need of the moment, to actively give love and space to some needy part of yourself that seeks inclusion. Watch out for that arrogance that says that you are forever beyond the need to be human, the need to take action, or to be always free from distress, or beyond the need to care or attend to something in you. There is no perfect behaviour or perfect response. Life, as you, does its best, and in doing so, in letting things unfold naturally, even if that feels like DOING, growth occurs. What looks imperfect is actually perfect and entirely necessary.

Humility – to not put yourself above anything, beyond anything, and to do what you’re called to do without expectation or self-importance, or desire.

Patience – to listen, to endure, forever.

Forgiveness – for your failings, for what difficulties arise, for the nature of being, for others – even though they are your very self, for the possibility that you’re doing it wrong.

And love – always love.

Forgiveness is deep and wide and ever-needed. Forgiveness is medicine and healing.

Forgiveness is letting go.

Forgiveness is kindness to ourselves and others.

Forgiveness is not holding grudges.

I’m not saying that grievance won’t arise in life, but it won’t be cherished, it will be allowed to go. Forgiveness is a great kindness and it’s important to give it to yourself. Forgive yourself for your wrongness, your failings, your ignorance, your weaknesses. But it goes hand in hand with love. And love and forgiveness is all-including – self and other and life itself. All held in love.

Life shows the way. Reality has a way of asserting itself. If you’re stubborn or hard of hearing then that assertion can be vigorous. But experience will continue to call us and tune us in to a more subtle alliance with life and reality. Ultimately the blending of wills occurs, the union of that which was never apart.

We are traumatised beings. Our traumas and conditioning are deeply embodied, enlightened or not. But when awakening happens releasing will occur, and other processes relating to embodied transformation. And it’s likely that this will continue as long as there’s a body. So buckle up and enjoy the ride! Strap yourself in, it’s gonna get bumpy. But thats okay. It’s all good. It can even be exciting and enjoyable, even the crazy bits, the sad bits, the painful bits, in the great scheme of things.

But learn to spot your expectations, they go deep and stay hidden in the shadows. Where there’s a should there’s a shadow. Life will show you, sooner or later, but it’s not always pretty, which is OK in the scheme of things. And better if you’ve fewer expectations. But forgive yourself for having them, you unenlightened wretch! You fallen fool! You deluded creature! You less than perfect, not-so-special one! 😉

They say; fail, fail, fail again, fail better. I say; forgive, forgive, forgive again, forgive better, forgive more. And forgive yourself for your less-than-perfect capacity to forgive. I say this to you because I say this to me. We all want to be special and complete. But can we love ourselves when we’re not? Can we forgive our grievances in regard to ourselves and our failings? Can we forgive life, God, the universe, for delivering to us imperfect feelings and situations and people? Even though ‘imperfect’ is the shadow of our expectation of ‘perfect’, and what a judgement THAT is!

To forgive is to LET IT GO, to let it pass, to not harbour resentment or bile. Which is not to say that it won’t arise, but we stay open-handed, so to speak. And there’s the forgiveness, the willingness to not cling. Forgiveness is the ground, love is the ground. And all manifestations of the ground that play out in the projection of time and space tend toward the nature of the ground. So as sentient beings, on every level, each aspect, we let the essence of the ground penetrate and manifest. We play the game of call and return, of cause and effect. We love and forgive, and fail and surrender. We fight and collapse, we resist and embrace. We dance in and as the opposites. The playground of duality and unity. We walk the Middle Way, embracing all, denying none.

We embrace the Two Truths – absolute and relative – out of compassion for ourselves and others. We don’t demand that suffering be absolute for us to respond to it with compassion, and so we don’t deny or dismiss the misery of delusion. We don’t escape and withdraw into transcendence, rather it becomes the platform for our enjoyment and our love. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Enlightenment, liberation, isn’t a negation or a denial. It isn’t pseudo-intellectual spiritual gaslighting. Love meets the other as ourself. It’s the inclusion of all that we are that liberates us, and it’s the exclusion of some part of us as unwanted that binds us.

‘Neti neti’ is a tool for necessary discrimination, for the seekers who are lost to themselves, who must first discover the Ground. But then it’s the necessary inclusion of all that the ground contains that completes the fullness of realisation. It’s not escape but embrace, not transcendence alone, but transcendence and immanence both as one, not-two.

So walk the Middle Way out of compassion. For the true IS the good, and the good IS the true. And love is wisdom, wisdom is love, and that is beautiful.

Enlightenment, liberation, awakening is all about reality. It’s about recognising what and how reality is, and when we do, resistance to it falls away. It’s about not expecting reality to be other than it is, not wishing and expecting the impossible. And the way to it is mostly about watching and observing and letting life instruct us rather than imposing our conditions on it. Reality always wins out, by definition. This is why the great secret, the great way of awakening is surrender. Peace is found through not fighting with the inevitable, through accepting what’s true and real. Nothing more, nothing less. So call off the struggle.

Resisting reality is like trying to wrestle a mountain; you can thrash and grapple and throw yourself against it and try to pick it up, and because of all the activity on your part it feels like something is happening, that you’re making progress. But it’s only you making all the noise and fuss and the mountain remains entirely unmoved by your wasted efforts. Might as well just stop, relax, and enjoy some peace.

But resistance is a bitch. When things become intense or uncomfortable we try to put the brakes on because of fear and we start looking for ways out and ways to avoid what is. But we’re actually avoiding our feelings and not the situation; it’s our feelings that we find unbearable and intolerable. So it’s invariably the felt dimension of being that we struggle with.

So when we get fearful and start resisting, the idea that ‘this is wrong’ and needs to be fixed or changed comes along to feed the resistance. And so we’re caught up in a self-reinforcing catastrophe of suffering because we go the ‘wrong way’ by trying to escape into the mind. Anything rather than accepting, allowing, feeling. We generally don’t think to turn into the feeling rather than away; to allow and welcome rather than resist and deny; and breathe, unclench.

Listen and be receptive to what’s arising in you. Be willing to meet it without hostility and fear. This is all about meeting the ‘other’ with love, and there’s only an other when we ‘other-ise’ some part of our singular wholeness. Conceptually we isolate and separate something out and then try to push it away, deny it, excise it. That might seem like a reasonable thing to do, except that it doesn’t work and it can’t work. We are one, there is no separation in us.

So much misery comes from avoiding uncomfortable feelings and once we’ve established that as a habit and a strategy, usually in childhood, we’re chased and dragged all over this world by our need to avoid. And on top of it we inflict all horrors on ourselves and others in this effort to get rid of some feeling we have. It’s utterly disempowering as we becomes slaves to our fear.

Here’s a question to explore:

In any given moment what is the way of least suffering? And particularly in regard to challenging or afflictive stimuli, what response is freeing and empowering? Is it to fight and resist and avoid the feeling of discomfort? Or is it to meet the feeling with deep acceptance and allowing? To make space for it, include it, welcome it, make friends with it, and when it’s ready to let it go? And I know if we’ve been conditioned to run the other way, then this proposition seems madness and stokes even more fear. But at some point all the strategies of resistance and avoidance fail and the only way left is to stop and face the living naked moment. And when we finally do this the grief of countless generations will finally have a place to heal, in the warmth of acceptance and the light of loving presence.

However imperfectly and clumsily we turn, when we befriend an enemy, whether inside or out, we not only destroy an enemy but we gain a friend. Thus we win-win, the principle of maximum benefit. So seek the highest, the most full, the most complete, the most including. Leave nothing out, integrate all. This is love.

At its heart this way is about reconnecting with our natural responses rather than continuing to employ the ineffective strategies of our inherited conditioning, which lead only to more and more suffering. Although it seems new and strange to some, this way of acceptance and allowing is the way of radical self-ownership and freedom, and the more we ‘practice’ it the greater becomes our ability and capacity to be at peace with ourselves and the world. We discover that we have and are all space for all experiences and we are freed from the need to avoid anything. We are at home in all places and situations and we move according to our intrinsic knowingness, not according to the need to flee or hide. By allowing all, no feeling has the power to control us, to compel us, thus we are free in every moment. And when resistance is seen for what it is, even that is included in our flowing joy, we are space for that too.

– Martyn

Nothing to see, nothing to do. Just what is.

I, I, I,.. there is no separate I. When you remove the voice that says that you do, or that you can do, what’s left and how does it move?

We abide as Big Mind, as Self. Consciousness is dreaming the world into existence. And who am I? Who are you in all this? In this one consciousness, who is the seer?

Discovering the truth of our being is not an intellectual exercise, it’s not about coming to some conclusions conceptually or satisfying the analytic mind. We must come to directly apprehend our essential awareness-nature.

Fortunately consciousness is always ‘on’, always here, there’s nowhere to go to find it. Existence IS, you are. It is the fact of being. Reality itself cannot be negated, it is affirmed in its own self-evident existence.

Identify your sense of existence, the I AM, settle into your own being, .

It is the root of fearlessness, the home of joy. It is intrinsic peace. The ultimate reality is this aliveness itself; timelessness and abundance are always here, always now, always this.

And as we discover and confirm it as the essence of our being, the sense of separation and doership slips away, life flows freely, and deep fulfilment and peace are realised.

The mind is always empty. Do the thoughts that appear affect the open awareness that you are? Is the ocean any less itself because of the presence of waves? Who are you anyway – the ocean or the wave?

“Neti, neti” negates that which is untrue, that which obscures the truth. What remains, is. It is known by itself, in itself. Emptiness, nothingness, the void – these descriptions fail to assert the essential ‘is’-ness of this. Always here, always existent. Never non-existent, never not-being. But don’t mistake the manifest for the essential, because in the absence of the manifest, in the field of the unmanifest, I Am, consciousness is.

We say mind, awareness, consciousness – but these are all just descriptions. We also talk about letting go, dropping – again these are all descriptions, or at best, pointers to something essential in our own experience.

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The value of bringing your attention to your present-moment experience cannot be overstated. Of all the pointers this is one of the most crucial, because it’s the arena in which the work is done, where that which must be seen is seen. It’s always here and it’s always now.

And even simply remembering to allow your attention to be with what’s present, that alone begins the blossoming of your natural awakening. Perhaps it’s better to say that the fact that your attention/awareness is more consistently abiding in the Now is symptomatic of the natural blossoming of awakened consciousness.

Ultimately Reality is known in its own terms, in its own sentient knowingness when all concepts, descriptions, pointers are gone.

What we’re concerned with isn’t some intellectual model of the cosmos. What we’re concerned with is suffering and affliction in all its forms, and by inquiring into the nature of this suffering we find that it’s essentially a conceptual issue, born of delusion, misunderstanding, ignorance.

So we question, inquire, introspect: who suffers, who is ignorant, who is it that misunderstands? And when the identity and existence of that one can’t be found, what then?

Can there be suffering without a sufferer?

There’s grief in awakening. Grief at the loss of autonomy, grief at the loss of purpose and meaning. Grief at the loss of knowing and certainty, however deluded they were. There’s grief over losing one’s power, and one’s familiar identity.

There’s so much loss in awakening. When it dawns that there’s nothing we can keep, nothing can be retained beyond its prescribed time, and all that we know and love must pass, then a natural grief for all of it can come. And since this knowledge of loss is for all of it, for all time, then that ache of grief is an ever-present refrain, a broken heart, amidst the delight at the miracle and mystery of life.

We know this poignancy, this pathos, because it’s familiar, it’s part of us, and it’s not wrong. It’s not something to be avoided or excised. We must comfort ourselves and each other tenderly, as we struggle to find the inevitable ground of acceptance.

Sometimes I think this is a twisted culture where it’s so hard to be who and what we are and to express ourselves naturally with our community. Instead we’re trained to take our essence and modify and package it so we can sell it to each other. It’s not so easy to share our gifts and talents freely in natural mutuality, the system demands that we must make ourselves into products to consume. Where once we’d simply enjoy each other’s gifts, now we devour each other’s branded essence, and in doing so we dismember our wholeness and sever the deep, living contexts and interwoven fabric of our wholeness.

I choose to offer myself in all, to all. I refuse to pick off the most usable, saleable portions of my being to package in plastic for others to buy from a cheap merchandiser at the checkout.

”Souls for sale! – but only the choice cuts please. Keep the rest and consider it worthless. We don’t want all of you, just the highlights, just what the market wants today. We’ve no time for whole human beings.”

We’re all TL;DR – we remain largely unread. The system demands it. Skimming is the best we can do.

So what do we do with the unread, unseen parts of ourselves? If no-one values our wholeness, why should we? So we push what’s left into darkness, into shadow. Like icebergs, we reveal only a fraction of ourselves to each other. But underneath, in the depths, we are much more, and so much unseen. And so when we get close to each other, the shadows of our hidden underbellies collide, and we don’t know why. We’ve so forgotten ourselves in the rush to present the acceptable, the consumable, the sellable parts.

We need to take time and give attention to know ourselves as deep and wide. Ourselves and each other. We are more than our ‘best foot forward’. We are more than our highlights, more than our unique selling points.

We can’t let the world reduce us to a partial, standardised output. We are the totality of our being. We are fullness and complexity and nuance. We are light and dark and everything in between. And we are worthy. We are all worthy.

One field of consciousness appearing as everything.

As a seeker I was always sensitive to spiritual ‘presence’. I noticed it in groups of TM meditators, watching Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on videos, yagyas, and the darshan of sages I met, even in certain places such as Arunachala. The energy was there, call it what you will; Shakti, presence, transmission. Back when I started to watch a lot of Satsangs online it was really fascinating that again I could sense the ‘presence’ of the enlightened teacher just as if it were in-person, even when the video quality was poor. Being around this ‘presence’ it was almost like I was ‘being meditated’ and I began to use this ‘transmission’ as a spiritual method.

But it also began to occur to me that the idea of transmission as such was a dualistic understanding of whatever the mechanism was. It certainly couldn’t be bound by time as I understood it, because that didn’t account for pre-recordings. And not by space either, because I was watching Satsangs that were happening thousands of miles away. And the fact that I was watching very low bandwidth stuff meant that ‘it’ couldn’t be traveling though the wires! So perhaps it was more about an ‘activation’ of my own consciousness in the vicinity of a sage, etc. Which is true enough, but still didn’t fully resolve the dualism.

The beauty to me is that any real understanding or description of spiritual transmission is only resolved at the level of unity/singularity. All that is is simply consciousness modulating in its own nature, appearing as seeming forms, and also appearing as a narrative that suggests division and duality, subject and object, all the while remaining entirely as itself. All of it arising as what we call the present moment, but it’s only a conceptual narrative, a story that suggests past, present, future, and distance.

The sage says “no teacher, no seeker, no bondage, no liberation, no world, consciousness is the only reality”.

—

Whether you’re talking about the kind of direct Shaktipat Transmission that I do, or the general ‘presence’ transmission one can experience in the vicinity of awakened beings (Satsang), the first thing to consider is what level of analysis you’re engaging in. Making distinctions about transmitting and receiving and who is doing what are dualistic descriptions and understanding, and they just doesn’t hold water ultimately or bring about Self-realisation. But at their own level they’re useful enough as theoretical exercises and as functional shorthands.

But we can use this dualistic understanding to lead one to the deeper nondual understanding. It’s all consciousness, no more of it any ‘where’ than any other. But here’s the thing – this is all theorising, conceptualising, and these kinds of questions are not liberating to the seeker. Self-realisation is coming to see that all this is a dream. It’s not something you figure out, it just dawns as the obvious reality. And yes, you are in fact already consciousness, but maybe there’s a belief present that you’re a person. And when that belief disappears then the truth of what you already are is obvious and apparent.

So you could call a transmission a ‘relative phenomenon’ that clears away delusion, and functionally in the story of what-is it’s true enough. But that’s a dualistic level of analysis and would be to miss the point. There is no separate ‘relative’; everything is consciousness. ‘Relative’ is just a concept. “Brahman alone is Real”. But for all practical (relative) purposes it’s a transmission given by a giver, received by a receiver with the aim of promoting awakening, the effects of which are often strongly felt.

But these are imperfect concepts to describe reality in so-called relative terms, and are all transcended and resolved when Self-realisation dawns and the singular, nondual nature of reality is revealed.

The problem from a seeker’s perspective is that attempts to understand this are just perpetuating the belief and the effort that there’s something to work out on the level of mind that will lead to liberation. I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of questions, knowledge questions and freedom questions. The former are of the mind and even if answered would do nothing but add to your store of knowledge. The latter kind destroys delusion and leads to complete liberation. I urge you to reflect on the kinds of questions that you ask yourself and others. Are you spending time feeding the mind, or will you free yourself while you have the precious time to do so?

What are we but a self-knowing energetic field of consciousness?
And what is the nature of energy if not a quality of consciousness?

Self-examining our nature, that is, exploring consciousness with consciousness naturally results in the discovery of our formless nature. When we settle in to the direct observation of our essential subjectivity we find that we don’t find any hard edges, fixed forms, boundaries or irreducible objects at the centre or anywhere else.

In regard to self-identity this exploration into the very heart of our own sense of existence reveals no permanent, fixed entity to call ‘me’.

That’s not to say we don’t find any activity in this subjective field of awareness, on the contrary all possible activities arise here as wavelike fluctuations, whose ebb and flow constitute the kaleidoscope multi-sensory appearance we conceive of as ‘body’ and ’world’.

..

So that’s all good and true but I want to express a different kind of voice that speaks to the deepest allowing, to the discovery and dissolution of felt knots and boundaries in our living being. I want to speak of the intimacy of that, the closeness, the place that leads into and beyond any sense of separation in ourself, where IN becomes AS. And the work that is the courage to turn and face moment-to-moment that which we would rather not feel or know in ourselves; the courage and surrender to open ourselves fully to the storm of energetic embodiment; that radical act of complete inclusion and acceptance of all that arises and all that we are. So there’s that.

ॐ

Our trouble starts when we privilege thinking over direct experience. When this becomes an ingrained habit of relating to the world and ourselves even the suggestion to drop out of the mind and into the non-conceptual being can be violently resisted.

But for the sake of our peace and freedom we must learn to let go. Attachment to views, not just specific views but views as such, is our bane. Conditioned grasping to mental artefacts hijacks attention from the richness and wholeness that is being itself.

We’re frightened that if we let go of our orienting notions and nominal identities we’ll have no support to our existence, and that a plunge into no-thing-ness is necessarily a plunge into oblivion. The truth is the very opposite. Releasing our grasping to the conceptual releases unnecessary tension and contraction and allows attention to fully partake of its nature as unbounded awareness. We find there’s no need to cling to a fixed identity, identity becomes little more than dress-up in light of one’s realized Self-nature.

So find out where you’re stuck. What ideas and notions are you attached to? Approach them, explore them. Learn to soften the grasping tension you find there. Learn to ‘let go’ basically. Release the ‘muscle’ of energetic tension, practice softening and opening in your field of felt experiencing. Gently explore the feelings around your strongly held notions.

Because insisting that the world be just as we conceive it, when frankly ‘it’ doesn’t give a shit what we want or think, is insane and futile. Not only do we suffer it but we compound our own ineffectiveness in the face of inevitable and unremitting universal change. Our conceptions are our suffering.

From one perspective we are nodal expressions of universal intelligence, inseparable from the whole. Driven to act like waves are driven by the ocean. Our sense of separation born only from limited conceptions. Partiality of mind seems to disconnect us from our living source.

We must see mind for what it is: smoke and mirrors, insubstantial, passing, impermanent. Else we suffer the misapprehension of the apparent for the real, the transient for the essential. Take away the conceptual layer and what remains? Not even take it away, just notice it as an emergent phenomena not as self-nature. That which notices and knows is Self, is awareness, the being that you are before any conceiving occurs.

Awakening is the recognition of the holistic and singular flow of experiencing; the entirely inclusive and fundamentally unified nature of what is; the nominal subject and object recognized as such – separate in name only.

Existence is pre-conceptual, the thing-in-itself without ‘adornment’; the Uncarved Block, Zen-mind, thusness.

Know That.

In my last post I said that that when it came down to it most people didn’t actually want to wake up. Someone asked for my thoughts on why that might be the case. This was my reply…

In terms of why most people don’t really want awakening/liberation, I’d say that this freedom requires (and is) a willingness to feel everything and a willingness to sacrifice everything for the truth. That’s a lot for most people who mostly figure they can get by in life without needing to pay that kind of price. Most are frightened that if they let go completely they’ll have to change or lose something important to them, they’re fear losing what they’ve got. This may be fear of losing material things but also losing the capacity to function in a certain way, losing status, or losing some cherished ideas. Identity is a big part of it. If you believe that you’re essentially the body and a person who’s in control, then when that idea starts to get radically challenged experientially there can be a powerful threshold of resistance and fear that needs to be confronted and traversed. (See: Fear)

Basically people put conditions on their freedom, which could be described as a complete ongoing surrender to what’s arising as experience; a complete energetic openness and nonresistance to the bleeding edge of the felt experience of being alive. It isn’t mental. Maybe they want some things in their life to change because they’re suffering them, but when it comes to it most are not willing to let go of their attachments, they’re not willing to make the sacrifice of the lower for the higher. People want guarantees before they fall into the endless groundlessness.

Now reassurances are fine and I can say everything will be OK. But only as long as you’re OK with everything and anything. There’s the rub; you don’t get to control the content, you don’t control outcomes. This radical openness and complete absence of control is anathema to most people which is why most people don’t want it. In reality it’s not that you’re giving up control but rather you’re giving up the illusion of control which feels the same. It’s this unwillingness to let go and remain open that’s the not wanting to ‘wake up’, because awakening is the deepest acceptance moment to moment, opening to your deep experiencing not pushing it away or wishing it away. It’s not that all problems will go away but you become free of the affliction of needing life to be any different to what it is at any given moment.

When it comes down to it ‘letting go’ is not something ‘you’ have to do, but it’s only when the willingness to embrace radical acceptance is present can the freefall begin. The trouble is this whole ‘freefall’ thing might not sound too attractive to a mind. And so it’s like “why bother, what’s in it for me?” But the point at which whatever it is that you don’t like or don’t want in your life becomes so utterly intolerable, and when you run out of options to get what you want or get rid of what you don’t want, then the opportunity arises for real transformation through deep acceptance. In that acceptance you find (you are) the spaciousness and capacity for all that is, all that can be. The narrowness of imagined personal limits are expanded and dissolved to accommodate whatever comes. Then you find you’re not existing as only a person, you recognize yourself and live as something more essential, as being itself.

So when people say that they don’t want to feel the way they feel, the irony is that the way to deal with that is to accept the way they feel at the deepest level. They don’t have to go searching for something to feel, they just have to allow whatever is happening in them to flow.

Are you willing to let go of control and accept whatever’s here? Probably only when you finally see that it’s your only option, then you’ll surrender. Until then you’ll hedge. That’s just how it works. It comes only when we’re ready for it, when we’re truly and actually done with all the strategies and the temporary fixes that never stick. This is being available to Grace. And living in Grace is when you’re perpetually surrendered and it’s left running the show. At this point ‘you’ and Grace are synonymous.

I invite you to let this in, because what I’m talking about isn’t some flowery words for the mind, it’s the living reality of your being and in order discover true and lasting peace you need to sacrifice the old and familiar patterns that may well be comforting in a way, and let yourself blossom into the freedom of a new way of being.

Sometimes it seems there’s a whole generation of people who are perpetually triggered and always tense. They live in a state of constant reactivity. They’ll often report the reasons are things like systemic injustice, racism, sexism, etc. And so their anger and agitation is justified. Maybe so.

As a generation Millennials (and Gen-Z) are not unique in their exposure to stressful stimuli, each generation has had its reasons to fret. For the Boomers it was civil rights and Vietnam, for Gen-X it was the hopelessness that typified the Cold War and the inevitability of nuclear annihilation. That same apocalyptic perspective is freshly clothed in the current climate crisis. For most people the everyday struggles of life itself; work, health, money, family are an inevitable source of tension.

Now I’m not going to get into the veracity of the issues, rather I’m interested in our response to them, as the need to deal with problems small and large is part and parcel of the human condition.

Getting to the root of not just specific problems but problems as a whole is the ideal approach. If we’re going to solve problems and also stop creating them needlessly we need to change our consciousness as well as our thinking. This means waking up. And not just in a political or social way, but all the way; nondual, transpersonal, spiritual awakening.

But I’ve come to feel that most people don’t really want or aren’t ready for this awakening. They need a bridge, and intermediary stage to lead them from their current malaise or overwhelm to the possibility of more ease, more peace, more capacity. They’re not ready to let go of all their perceived problems, they’re more interested in trying to fix them directly. Fortunately many teachings offer a way to more intelligence, more creativity, more energy, etc. Practices such as yoga, meditation and mindfulness for example.

Maybe it’s a trick this progressive path, this path of evolution. Is it disingenuous to offer it up as such, knowing that it results in its own transcendence? Is it a lie to not disclose the whole truth of where it’s heading or is it skillful means?

Ramana Maharshi was asked by Paramahansa Yogananda what was the means of liberation, what was the method. Ramana replied that it depended on who was asking, because the level of consciousness of the person would determine the appropriate approach for them. He said that there can be no single, universal prescription for Self-realization. Of course this doesn’t mean there are none, or that there are, practically speaking, infinite ways. It means there are many and one should pick the correct practice or method at any given stage of one’s evolution. Ultimately all methods are transcended. Because there can be no doing if there’s no do-er.

My point is whatever the method, however long and winding our path might be, we’ll never be happy and free of affliction or able to face our problems fearlessly and compassionately until we discover our true nature, the Self. And that true Self is not a perfected person of some kind but consciousness itself, the field of infinite intelligence and creativity. This is what we already are, we only have to recognize it.

So in regard to the problems of the world the question of do we fix them, accept them, or transcend them; it seems to me the answer is all of the above.

Awakened mind is the impersonal sentience and not the contents of awareness. Even the sense ‘I am’ is known by this awareness.

But who can say how this thing works? Getting into a technical analysis of the structure of consciousness and the nature of awakening becomes an exercise of intellect, and therefore true enough on that level but not Truth – capital T.

That Truth just can’t be spoken, it’s beyond description, beyond analysis, beyond intellectualization. It’s beyond any method you could employ to attain it, and yet the living reality of it is always present as the totality of experiencing.

So I could say that the ‘I Am’ isn’t it, but if you identify it and abide as it then the fullness of liberating insight will dawn. But the fact is the recognition of this fundamental reality self-generates spontaneously.

You see it’s really difficult to talk about the spontaneous and uncaused nature of being, of truth in terms of doing. Scratch that, it’s not difficult it’s just not true, it’s like describing the growth of a tree in terms of the personal actions of the tree, what a tree wants, and anthropomorphic projections aside it just doesn’t work that way.

I’ve seen seekers go a bit crazy when faced with non-dual maxims such as “you can’t do anything” or “there’s no one to do anything”. But this is as much to do with the personal addiction to autonomy and self-determination as the apparent riddle that is non-dual exposition.

Awakening is about seeing not doing, recognizing not achieving. And like waking up from sleep, waking up to one’s true nature is a spontaneous affair. Even saying something like “be present, be aware” as an injunction to act is misleading, but it’s a good sign when that happens with more frequency.

Bottom line, if you still think you’re doing it you’re mistaken. The person has to be transcended. And since the person can’t transcend itself, it’s the introduction and recognition of the non-personal being as the subject that does it. From there the person is seen for what it is, a mental construct. And all this is happening on its own as part and parcel of the dreamlike nature of consciousness.

Awakening or liberation seems to occur at some point in time when ripeness is present. But when it does ‘occur’ it becomes apparent that liberated mind is all there is, and to even speak of a past and a path is a concession to a mirage. A mirage whose existence is so fleeting and nebulous that it can barely be said to exist at all, and whose suggestions can be likened to an imagined world in a story.

So at the risk telling a nonexistent person in the nonexistent world what to do, I say this; drop all efforts, identify the empty, observing awareness that you are, and remain there, as that. At some point, if fortune smiles, all sense of separate existence and doership will recede. What remains? You tell me.

Is nondual spirituality nihilistic?

Desirelessness, powerlessness, emptiness.

Sacrifice, surrender, formlessness.

Are these more fundamental than, say: fullness, all-possibilities, bountifulness, unboundedness, bliss?

It’s all well and good focusing on the qualities of mind required for the apprehension of silence. But this emptiness is full, this fullness is empty.

All around me I see fullness, I see rich intelligence and abundance manifested.

This Leela may be transient and not what it seems but it’s also a garden of joy. The futility of attachment is true, but what a bounty of appearance, what delightful forms the formless assumes!

This life is thick and dense with wonder. Every glance and glimpse is a living tapestry of beauty. Each moment a masterpiece is created anew, only to be supplanted by another a moment later. Such prodigy, such excess! Incredible, astounding.

Everywhere I look, more and more. An endless parade of impossible delight.

Life is both emptiness and fullness.

This was the Maharishi’s great exposition:

200% of life; 100% silence and 100% dynamism.

We had lost the ground of fullness, the silent source, pure potentiality. Without healthy roots the plant withers. But when the roots are attended to the plant flourishes, blossoms.

The risk of nondual ‘understanding’ is the inner life is cultured and the outer is denied; fullness is viewed with suspicion while the emptiness is idealised.

Both are one. This is the balancing of true nonduality, of unity. Holding the opposites without denying one or the other, refusing to concede to a false dichotomy.

The fullness Is, let it in. Be the boundless space AND the kaleidoscopic dance, both. Where are you not?

“Water the root to enjoy the fruit”

Denying the richness, beauty and wealth of creation is both futile and unnecessary. All is welcome. The Kingdom is founded on the Spirit. the Kingdom is the gift of Life.

Right now as I write I’m sitting in a country garden of exquisite beauty. Birds are flying and chirping, blossom is beginning to burst forth on the trees. The sound of running water whispers in the air. The sun shines its light and warmth, lush green and spring colours are all around. The air is fresh and fragrant.

Yes the boundless silence is the ever-vigilant ground of all, but it also dances in endless variety of expression. A self-created vision of light and life and blissful exuberance.

Aham! I am! I am alive. Aliveness in all its wondrous possibility, Is.

Birds fly, river flows, sun shines, grass grows, blossom bursts. I draw a clean breath and sip my strong coffee. Gratitude pervades my being. This world, this fullness, freely given, is a miracle; an endless, flowing mystery of being and becoming.

Know your Self and the world is yours to enjoy.

200% – you don’t have to choose.

Shiva and Shakti are One, the mystic marriage of silence and dynamism. Fullness and emptiness; reality is a paradox to the mind but self-evident to the awakened Heart.

Don’t hide in the transcendent, don’t hide the light of being under a bush.

Established in Unity, radiate the light of life in all its glory, in all its rich variety and seeming multiplicity. Deny nothing.

The Great Tao, the torrential Grace of the Divine, the body of Christ.

The world is Brahman; Brahman alone is real.

So thank you for this fullness, thank you for this emptiness, thank you for I AM.

Who am I thanking? Who am I to thank?

A-ha! The Mystery and the Miracle.

OM

When the awakened view dawns it becomes apparent that everything we experience points to it, and always did. It’s the recognition that each moment is a Dharma Gate, the opportunity to realize the nature of what-is and it becomes fascinating and fun to see how the consideration of any given domain or field of knowledge offers an opening to its own origination and indeed the source and nature of phenomena in general.

The following is a brief exploration of three different propositions in the domain of science and technology and how each has at its heart the same unanswered question.

“May You Live In Interesting Times”

We might, if we were sufficiently curious and attentive, notice that the issues that we face in our modern scientific age urge us to question and explore the deepest nature of ourselves and of reality itself. The relatively recent emergence of rapid and accelerating technological development has introduced us to new and previously inconceivable propositions and possibilities to consider. New discoveries and developments prod at our imagined certainties about the nature of ourselves and the world. Venerable conceptual models of reality are being revealed as the insubstantial notional constructs that they’ve always been. Our brave new world is inadvertently attesting to the impermanence of ideas long believed to be concrete – ideas about reality, identity, truth.

As an example, advances in genetics and medicine, along with exponential progress in robotics and artificial intelligence, herald the prospect of the human as-such transforming beyond its evolved biological form into some kind of biotechnological trans-human being. Such a radical prospect begs the question: if the body isn’t fundamental or essential to my continued existence, then can I really BE this body? And if I’m not the body essentially, then who am I, what am I?

Another recent theory is that we may all be existing in some vast, cosmic simulation; an idea that is being taken so seriously that some leading thinkers suggest that the likelihood that we exist in ‘base reality’ is billions to one against. And if life as we know it is a stimulation, then who or what am ‘I’ that is experiencing the stimulation? When the simulation ends, including (presumably) the projection of a body and personality, do we wake to find ourselves to be a contemporary human, a future human descendant, an alien on a digital day trip, a neural blob in a jar, or some other type of aware intelligence? What exactly is the nature of our existential ‘base’ reality?

Perhaps the most subversive threat to the materialist status quo is from the perspective of quantum science, in which the necessity for the presence of an ‘observer’ is so fundamental to the existence of a phenomenal world, that it simply doesn’t exist without ‘someone’ to know it. But what is the nature of this essential observer, without which the universe couldn’t be?

Each of these examples brings the question about the nature of our true identity into sharp focus; if we are not the body, and the world that we experience is not permanent or substantial, then where and what are ‘we’ in all this? What came first, the world or I?

In our investigation into the world ‘out there’ we find that even when we look outwards, we inevitably find the need to turn our attention to where we are looking ‘from’ to comprehend the way of things. We have yet, in the modern world, to collectively apply the scrutiny of our scientific curiosity toward exploring ourselves as the essential subjective principle upon which the world depends.

The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ isn’t so hard, it’s just so ubiquitous as that it’s overlooked. It’s universally available for anyone to observe directly for themselves. The simple act of observing awareness from awareness reveals its nature and the nature of the objective phenomena that appear in it. It reveals itself as the first principle, self-existent, unconditioned.

This is old news; Masters of scientific introspection from Wisdom traditions have been reporting their findings for millennia and into the present day. Modern science has yet to fully embrace what I believe will be the transforming exploration of our times: the discovery and recognition of our true nature as consciousness by means of direct observation of awareness by awareness. The radical discovery that the universe is a ‘dream’ appearing in a singular, universal mind.

I’ll leave it to the scientists to do the math, to describe the details as best they can. But the lived experience and liberating benefits of knowing oneself as the ground of all being and becoming is the birthright of all. We need only to start looking for ourselves.

– Martyn

Many of our words and concepts, we think we know what they mean, when often our understanding hangs short of the great depths of being that we miss. Our recognition stalls at the conceptual and clings there instead of plunging into the open experiential oneness that upholds and contains all.

So words like ‘love’ can be like objects, known and quantified and limited, instead of experienced and recognised as the very ground and essence of our being, the ultimate resolution and fulfilment of all our longing and the very fabric of life itself.

Love is the prime substance, but what do we know of it? When we say “love” do we comprehend the fullness, the all-encompassing quality of it? Not just the feeling or even the action, but ‘that which is’?

God, truth, and love are names of the absolute, the divine. And as love always has its origins in the heart, the inner being, then it offers us a direction in which to travel, it sets our compass straight and true.

Love includes, love swallows up enmity and hate. Love can be strong, but never cruel, never unkind. And although it may be that we fail in love, love never fails us, it’s always available and always forgives. How great is love?!

Love is spiritual gravity.
Love is peace. It resolves to unity, non-separation, and freedom. Love is non-grasping, tolerant and kind. It’s patient and secure in itself. All things come to love in the end.

Love is bliss, love is blessing.
Love is fearless, love is courage.
Love is the sun, it radiates warmth and light and draws all beings into its embrace.
All life is nourished by love.

Love will break your heart and smash your world to pieces, it will crucify you. Love brings a sword. But fear not, love cuts you free.

To live in love is to live in joy and freedom and peace.

But we set boundaries on our willingness to love, we create separation where there is none. We guard our vulnerabilities from each other, we hold ourselves in reserve. We don’t trust enough to love deeply, freely. Our own love is limited by the desire for reciprocity and bound by conditions.

But in truth love is neither given nor received, it’s the fabric and substance of being itself, and we live in and are pervaded by its presence. It’s inescapable and ubiquitous. O blessed love! Love seeks no gain because love is all.

Dissolve yourself in love.
No techniques, no strategies, just fall in love with love.

Love is truth, love is beauty, love is good.
Love is not of mind, love is of heart.
Let love swallow the mind.
Mind finds peace in the heart.

But love will challenge you in all ways and test you, for love’s sake.

OM

Good Friday

What must die? All forms, identities.
What is Risen? Life itself, triumphant.

How much of our time do we spend bracing ourselves against the possibility of someone else’s reactivity?

When we fear to break a rule or make a mistake, how often is that apprehension based on the anticipation of having to deal with someone’s anger, sadness, or disappointment?

Bumping into people’s reactive emotions is unpleasant and depending on how much power they hold, dangerous too.

How do we stay open and vulnerable when we’re always braced for impact? And how, when we’re avoiding the possible wrath of others’ displeasure do we pursue the calling of our intuitive heart?

How do we gird for reaction without tightening, without building defenses, or deposing our integrity?

Perhaps the question is, how do we go the way of the heart and deal best with the inevitable pushback from the fear-based beings that oppose it?

Follow the current of true integrity, come what may.

Bare your open, unguarded heart for all to see. Meet the world with compassion and firm resolve to honour the calling of your soul in each living moment.

It may be that we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. So all things being equal, you might as well sing your soul’s song.

Nietzsche spoke of the ubermensch, the overman, who was beyond good and evil. Rumi wrote that “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field”.

The conditioned, rule-based being derives their moral orientation from outside and cannot imagine or trust the spontaneous, living ethic of the awakened heart.

We meet this challenge as much inside as out. Our turning away from our true, intuitive course in the world is mirrored in our inner struggle. The voices of fear and anger and grief rise to deter us from our path in the forms of people and situations in the world, and also as the formless voices in our inner world.

These voices only have the power that we endow them with. The voices of the tempter and the fearmonger. Living from the heart is a path of courage and compassion. It is not the path of indulgence or suppression, it’s the way of what-is, of Truth. And everyone who walks in the Way is a catalyst for the awakening truth in others.

Do you believe it because you see the evidence of it and also find no evidence of it’s opposite? Or do you reject non-doership because you don’t wish to accept its implications?

So what does the evidence of your experience tell you about what-is?

And before you come to any conclusions, have you applied your discrimination, observation, and reason wholeheartedly to the question of freewill and doership? Have you brought dispassion and objective scientific scrutiny to bear, along with real fearless integrity and willingness to accept, whatever the cost, the truth of what you see?

Like a true scientist of the Self, have you endeavoured to disprove what you seek to prove? Have you rooted out your own prejudice and preferences? Not cruelly, but tenderly; but also surgically, methodically. Merciless but kind; like you’re identifying and removing a tumour, with precision and purpose, and all the time the whole procedure is born from and occurs within the context of compassion.

This knowledge is Self knowledge, this inquiry is Self inquiry, and therefore only your own self honesty can deliver the truth. Delusion can only be dispelled when you decide within yourself that it’s untenable and unwanted.

At the heart of matter of being human is the problem of suffering. What are we to do with it, how do we contend with it?

If suffering cannot be accounted for at our current level of understanding then we might ask, as a starting point, if we can at least *admit the possibility* that there could be a perspective that could include it and justify it, and by doing so ameliorate or even extinguish it? Could there be perspective where suffering isn’t suffered? Perhaps some would call this first step faith. Others (perhaps unwilling to consider a wider context) might say blind faith and cruel folly. But to truly account for and confront the existence of suffering, we’re called to step beyond our current understanding, and find some greater context of experience where the full gamut of experiencing can be included and integrated.

The Buddha identified grasping and clinging as causes of suffering. Clinging to ideas and things and people, clinging to desires and identities, to the body and opinions, to any aspect of conditioned existence (the Five Skandhas). The reason this clinging causes suffering is because all phenomena are subject to inevitable and spontaneous change, are empty of permanent and independent existence, and therefore any attempt to ‘hold on’ to anything is an exercise in futility. The tendency to cling is in itself born of the misunderstanding and misapprehension of the nature of reality, avidya. When the truth is fully seen, attachment ends, and with it suffering. Peace and freedom therefore, is to deeply recognise and accept the nature of reality.

Advaita comes to the same or at least fundamentally equivalent conclusions: inquire into and recognise the true nature of reality and the suffering born of delusion naturally falls away.

Looked at in this way, suffering needn’t merely be the presence of random and meaningless misery, but the very inducement to seek its causes and ultimate extinction. Of course adopting this perspective isn’t a rationale for seeking-out or meting-out pain, rather it’s about being awake to the possibility that the presence of suffering (Dukka, unsatisfactoriness) as a Dharma Gate, a way of transmuting and transforming the mud and misery of conditioned existence into the lotus of liberated insight.

I was sitting outside a café with a friend some time ago, and we were talking about ‘consensus reality’ as he put it. He was wishing that he could be free of its influence. I sympathised with his POV but pointed out that we aren’t actually bound by it, and it’s enough to recognise one’s existence as prior to the arising of conceptual frameworks, false notions of reality, etc., to see that were already essentially free of such influences, when another friend, an older lady, came and sat with us.

This lady is a devotee of a nondual guru whom I count among my own spiritual teachers and with whom I spent time at his ashram as part of the sangha. So this friend sat and listened for a while, and after I’d finished speaking she said, with a ambivalent look on her face, “you speak the knowledge very well”. I smiled and made a few more comments in the same vein as before, but I could now sense a subtle closing down of her attention; I got a kind of “I’m not letting this in“ feeling.

It struck me that I’d seen this before, and I’m calling it the ‘not-me-and-not-you syndrome’, and it’s all bound up with what our expectations about what Self-realisation looks like and the contexts in which we expect or even allow ourselves to encounter it. You see, this friend had decided at some level that enlightenment looks like something in particular – mostly like an old, charismatic guy with a beard talking to a room full of devotees. The trouble is that once someone has internalised expectations like these, no matter how much the guru might exhort that “I am That, YOU are that, EVERYTHING and EVERYBODY is That!”, even when faced with the recognition of your own true nature, and seeing it expressed in other, less exotic individuals, this will be dismissed because it doesn’t comport with ideas you’ve adopted about what it will and should look like when it comes.

This syndrome is playing out when they hear someone talking “the knowledge”. I could see it in my friends face as I spoke; that what I was saying was resonating with her, but she was confused that it wasn’t coming from where she expected. So she effectively dismissed it as just words and then shut down her listening apparatus, better to avoid the cognitive dissonance of meeting some regular person who knows their true nature and expresses it but isn’t some exotic guru figure.

Bottom line, one has to see that this whole spiritual awakening thing is about YOU. And that at some point (anytime, now!) you need to RECOGNISE, confirm, and finally ADMIT that you are, in fact, awareness itself, and live as that. And see that this is entirely normal and increasingly common.

If you’re serious about self-discovery, if you’re serious about the truth, then you have to be willing to give up everything you think you know. You have to be willing to question and look at every assumption and become like a clean slate. Because untruth and suffering hides under the rocks of unexplored assumptions.

Here the most important thing is willingness, because without it you’re not going to get anywhere, you’re not going to see what you need to see. You’re likely to be precious about some idea or some concept that you hold, some interpretation that you’ve organised your life around. Because coming to see the fullness of your own being is easy, it’s right here. What’s hard is letting go of your attachments, letting go of your preconceptions and your cherished beliefs.

You might say that the maturity of the seeker is somehow measured or exemplified by this willingness to look, to push through their defensiveness around their notions and concepts. Nisargadatta Maharaj talked about the most important quality of a seeker as being earnestness. And this earnestness is that willingness to throw themselves on the fire if they need to.

Of course this willingness is actually how ‘able-ness’ is expressed. Or stated another way, when spiritual ripeness comes about through Grace, the capacity and inclination to inquire into your true nature arises as willingness, earnestness, sincerity. When this occurs only the real, the true, will satisfy your yearning. You’ll find yourself drawn inwardly to abide in your own silent nature. The things of the world will lose their lustre and charm. When Grace descends it’s only a matter of shedding the remnants of false notions and misperceptions.  And quite naturally false ideas and attachments will drop from your Emptiness like autumn leaves.

ॐ

It’s often the case that nondual understanding in the dualistic mind is the product of ‘secondary mind’, the logical, analytical mind, and not a wisdom emanation from Pure Mind. True wisdom is born directly from Self-nature without reference to understanding. It’s the difference between knowledge born of Self-recognition, and the cogitations of the functional mind and it’s rationalistic outputs.

In a sense one can suffer from the consistency of functional mind as it produces self-supporting arguments and theories that appear complete on their own level, however the nature of such ‘knowledge’ is entirely theoretical and concludes without recourse to direct non-conceptual apprehension. It’s hard to penetrate such understanding because of the strong crystalline nature of its structure, but the absolutist assertions about what-is that are derived from the seat of reason and not from the seat of insight simply don’t satisfy.

But it’s life itself that deposes this usurping intelligence by offering endless exceptions to whatever conceptual framework is held, as the failure to accomodate the ever-fresh, ever-proliferating nature of being becomes the incentive to look beyond concepts altogether. Non-duality as a paradigm is a profound intellectual understanding, and perhaps even represents a kind of ultimate iteration of conceptual understanding as such. But it’s only when ALL understanding is transcended that the living truth is realized. Reference to secondary mind is still available, but is known to be merely relative and conceptual.

Ultimately all appearances are born from Original Mind, and even the notion of delusion is a spontaneous arising. But the belief that the goal of Self-inquiry or the spiritual ‘path’ is to understand nonduality intellectually is delusionary, and the idea that understanding on its own level could be satisfactory is misguided. The development of intellectual understanding will only find its satisfactory conclusion in its own transcendence. That said, a rarefication and refinement of comprehension seems to be a precursor of its own demise, albeit not a immediate guarantee of it.

Transcendence is a leap of faith, a jump into the void, a fall into unknowing. It is the final step from the clifftop, when the freefall begins and never ends. No (apparent) form is stable, so to cling to anything is futile and cause for suffering. Remain in freefall, enjoy the breeze!

Many will cling to understanding as if it were a fixed point in an ocean of change. But understanding is itself relative and subject to change and dissolution. There’s no-thing to rely on. Even Being itself; who can say?

If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. This is the functional mind, this is the mind that calculates and concludes. And it’s fine for building bridges and writing code and following recipes. It’s functional, it describes, it extrapolates from what it’s seen before. But this form of intelligence is nested within total knowledge, the infinite potentiality of intelligence itself, and as such cannot fully fathom or describe its own origins.

Knowing is known on its own level, in its own Nature. It is primordial and self-supporting. It is singular, awake intelligence, it is the universal Subject. The I-I. And no amount of analysis or reason can deliver the lived experience. It is beyond and prior to all such considerations, but is immanent and ever-present as your very own awareness.

“Know that by knowing which everything is known.”

ॐ