MIRANDA REFLECTS, explorations of Nonduality
Today’s quote:
THE STORY OF THE ABSOLUTE
reflections from Sander Schevers:
Once the idea of
an underlying essence appears, it often becomes refined into something more
subtle. Instead of saying that everything is made of matter or energy, some
teachings say that everything is the absolute. Other words may be used.
Consciousness. Being. The Self. The One. The divine. Each of these words
attempts to describe the ultimate nature of reality.
The claim may sound profound. Everything is the absolute
appearing as the world. Everything is consciousness appearing as form.
Everything is the Self manifesting as experience. Such statements often bring a
sense of unity or comfort. They suggest that behind the complexity of life
there is a single, sacred source.
But again it is
worth noticing what is actually appearing. A sound occurs. A sensation arises.
Movement unfolds. None of these events present themselves as the absolute. A
bird chirping does not announce itself as consciousness expressing itself. A
body walking through a room does not declare itself to be the Self in motion.
Rain falling does not identify itself as the divine manifesting. These
interpretations are added afterward. They arise as explanations about what the
events supposedly are. The explanation may feel convincing. It may feel
meaningful or beautiful. But the explanation remains a layer of thought applied
to the event.
Consider a
simple sound. A bird chirps outside a window. The sound occurs. Soon the mind
may say: That is nature. Or: That is life expressing itself. Or: That is
consciousness appearing as sound. Or: That is the absolute manifesting. Each of
these interpretations attempts to describe the sound in a deeper way. But the
sound itself did not contain those descriptions. The interpretations arise
afterward. They rely on memory, language, and belief.
The idea of the
absolute functions as a story. It is a way of explaining the world. It attempts
to give a final answer to the question of what everything ultimately is. But
the appearance itself does not ask that question. The question arises in
thought. And the answer arises there as well. The story of the absolute may
feel satisfying. It may bring a sense of completeness. But it remains a story
about appearances. It is not something encountered within the appearances
themselves.
Without the story, what remains is not mysterious or mystical.
It is simply what is already occurring. Sound. Movement. Sensation. Thought.
These events unfold continuously. They do not require a hidden essence in order
to occur. They do not reveal the absolute behind them. They simply appear. And
the explanations about what they ultimately are arise afterward as part of the
same unfolding.
---an excerpt from Chapter 26,
The Story of the Absolute, from the book, The Center That Was Never There:
Language, Self, and the Absence of an Underlying Essence by Sander Schevers
**********
Miranda Reflects:
From this exceptionally lucid
and provocative book comes one of the most direct and incisive explorations of
the concept of “the absolute,” the belief in a source of ground of being
expressing itself as what appears. This excerpt is not the complete chapter,
and the entire book is one of a relatively small number of books on nonduality
I would recommend and even suggest is essential reading.
There is great resistance to
the suggestion that statements regarding some underlying truth or essence may
only be beliefs, no more relevant than beliefs that all is the biblical God’s
will or that underlying appearances is the Thetan of Scientology. But any
honest look will reveal that all the double-talk attempting to prove such
claims is based on an interpretation made by thought about what simply appears.
If you had never heard anyone explain the true nature of awareness or
consciousness or Brahman, you would never in a million years infer it from the
direct immediacy of what simply is, happening without demanding any explanation.
Of course, even ideas that seem
to float through apparent minds like dust in the wind arise in the same manner
as any appearance and any belief, as innocently as the rain. It is simply
noticed that explanations seem to soothe the sense of separation called the
“me.” They assuage that feeling of being apart from all that is.
Especially when the solidity of
a separate identity seems less and less believable, perhaps after exposure to
the nonduality message or glimpses where self seems absent, thoughts attempt to
salvage an identity by jumping from a limited person bound by time and space to
an infinite and eternal ground of which one is an expression.
You are God, You are
Consciousness, You are Pure Awareness appearing as your seemingly separate,
ephemeral self. You are the little self awakening to the truth that what you
are is actually the Infinite Self. The story is similar to any salvation
religious belief, just as the one who feels they have an immortal soul that has
been “saved” by Jesus believes they have transcended the boundaries of what
simply appears.
But what if there are no
explanations? What if this cannot be understood? What if the very idea of
explanations and understanding are simply artifacts of a human mind/brain
attempting to deal with the unfathomable whirlwind of this, what appears, that
does not place it at the center and strips away its stories of meaning? What if
even the ideas of knowing and truth and reality are simply more artifacts of
human thought?
And what if that is not a
problem to be solved, but the freedom of simply this, just as it is; this sense
of aliveness without any need for a story about what it is and no separate one
who needs to, or even can, find their place in all that simply appears. What if
the only “answer” in all the holy books and the teachings of “gurus” is about
trying to find an imaginary character’s place in a fictional narrative? And if
the book of belief closes, what’s left is what was always already here, just as
it appears, and no further questions remain.
---Miranda Warren
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