Journey to the Abstract

We work with the representations most of the time and not the actual thing.
Let go of being open and let go of being closed.
We are trying to study and quantify an ever changing universe. But this attempt/paradigm to quantify itself is one among infinite paradigms.

The absolute truth is nothingness/nothing. So the potential in absolute terms is infinite. If there is no absolute truth, then everything we are witnessing is only a play among infinite possibilities. Even my capacity for understanding and its potential is part of the play. So it is impossible to understand the absolute truth or get there using thought or a particular questioning method. There are no answers, because an answer implies there is a question. The absolute truth is infinite and therefore nothing. All the things are only appearances in the absolute truth. Every experience is real as an appearance but absolutely its one among infinite potentials. So thats where you can let go of all appearances. There is only direct experience. Everything else is a holding on of some sort. The question of what should you do? You can do anything, it makes no difference ultimately. Absolutely there is no time and space even. So all this is a play/game and no thing is THE THING. The real thing is No-thing and it is not even a thing. A thing is an appearance inside it. That it, is not even an object. It just is and has no qualities since qualities appear as a form of it. To speak about it in language, I have to use the word ‘it’, but actually it is beyond/transcendent of everything and is the substance of everything that appears to me now.

The physical world can be studied forever, but its only one of the possibilities of the infinite. What difference does it make, whether I study the physical world or my mental imagination potentials. They are basically the same thing, a particular kind of movie.

There is a truth that is imposed on me called the external world which is basically expectations – body, social, physical laws. Not able to consistently meet expectations or exceed, results in anxiety, fear of punishment, further denial, getting indebted, getting attacked, marginalized, ostracized. Creates fear of survival. But what has to survive? This Frame? This mind? This state? This experience flavor? What difference does it make if the absolute truth is nothingness.

The only thing that needs to be observed is a 100% change. If an object changes from state A to state B, 100%, and if this change is observed, then irrespective of how often this magnitude of change occurs in time, the object has already proved that its essence is nothing. 100% change = proves 0 essence. What is essential does not change. What is essential/essence by definition = unchanging. If nothing is unchanging and if everything is changing whether now, later or when in time does not matter. If memory is strong enough and expansive enough to witness a 100% change in all of awareness, then the non-essence of all content is instantly proved. The ‘find out: who are you?’ question is meant to take you to the realization of non-essence, which happens when observation refines itself enough and sees clearly that 100% of change can happen. 

The external world is an appearance in consciousness and not a true reality because: Ask the question, where is the external reality appearing – Ans: In the screen of consciousness. If I close my eyes, the external reality disappears immediately from input. Which means, in the screen of consciousness, the external reality has disappeared. If I open my eyes again, again it appears. 

External reality itself in fact is a concept in the mind based on sense memory and conceptualization. Even that is an appearance in the screen of consciousness which can disappear as easily when you do the exercise of imagining green color filling your mind space where you see nothing but green in your mind’s eye. When you do this exercise, if you do it properly and completely, during the seconds you filled green color into your mind’s eye, even the concept of external reality disappeared.

A persistent appearance (external reality) does not imply its real. Its still only an appearance as einstein said “Reality is an illusion, a persistent illusion”.

The best analogy would be, to think the external reality is real, is like saying, a character that appears on the movie screen is real. Only the screen is real, not its contents. So maybe our real nature is like a dreaming organism, which can create this dream that we are in right now. In which case, you are not really looking at plastic, metal, another human being, a plant, a life-form, a rock and so forth. What you are REALLY looking at is particular forms of consciousness/knowing.

Control at the base level is about controlling experience. Not controlling other people, not controlling animals, machines and so forth. Real control is control of experience. This is because controlling people is also control of a certain part of experience but it is paltry in front of real control of all of experience itself. People who control other people are like blind men. They cannot see their own projections is what are controlling them, when the more intelligent thing they could do is control their projections directly instead. It is extremely inefficient to control other people. It just makes life unnecessarily harder.

Enlightenment is not ecstasy. It is not knowing everything there is to know. It is not becoming a world leader. It is not becoming a savior of 1000s of people. Neither is it service to anyone or any group. Externally there is literally no difference between an enlightened person and non-enlightened. The one who knows himself is enlightened, the one who does not is not. Its like a marigold that knows its a marigold is enlightened. A marigold which thinks its a rose is not.

Enlightenment is the satisfaction of the ultimate deepest knowing. Experiences come and go, but the understanding stays. Sometimes the understanding leaves, but then there is another understanding that stays behind it. This happens all the way until emptiness.

Fear is only of the possibilities you have already seen. Fear is only of the known. It is for a repeating of a possibility in your memory and proportional to how long it lasts. Fear arises when the input interpretation predicts/expects an unpleasant possibility. 

When all that the input interpretation engine comes up with is outputting unpleasant, scary, horrible possibilities – that leads straight to depression.

But if nature is infinity possibility, there must be a way to move out of the hell realms into one of the earth or heaven realms. My fear is mainly getting stuck in some possibility. Now why do I get stuck? Because the possibility manifests with no energy/will/freedom to get out of it. Its like putting a dog in a cage, it cannot free itself by itself. 

Transcendent understanding brings the transcendent qualities of bliss, beauty, love, wonder:
– Bliss is to see this total interdependence and the inherent emptiness/shunyata of all manifest/appearances.
– Beauty is fully inhabiting ‘What is’ with psychic sensitivity and no distortions, concepts.
– ‘Transcendent understanding’ brings about ‘Transcendent love‘. Understanding = Love.
– Wonder is to transcend memory and see things as anew. Seeing the world without the filters of memory, with the fullness of the present. It is when thought does not filter/influence the perception of the present and is rather seen as part of the present (Thought = Memory)

Decay, frozenness, barrenness, flatness, dullness, decrepit, large swathes of stagnancy, lot of inaccessible areas, chaos, confusion, dread (because of momentum in the direction of movement), effort/suffering, hopelessness (because of direction of energy movement), descending into a black hole, fear that it would stay forever (because of the long term nature of it), losing more and more energy, despair (severe dearth of energy to do anything about it), surviving based on little windows of good emotions/connections, bleakness, very poor executive function, getting overwhelmed by chaotic unpleasant forces, burden of expectations, dark skies blocking most of the light, fog everywhere and obscured environment with lots of black holes and stagnancy, spiraling troubles as more and more people react to me with either neglect, condemnation, abuse, disgust, anger, hatred, rejection, misunderstanding and all kinds of negative emotions, making me lose faith in everything because everything is turning against me, body pain, fatigue, listlessness, loss of all kinds of mental faculties, loss of intelligence, vigor, vitality. The world becomes a scary place triggering all kinds of unpleasant possibilities and suffering and a it would take a great struggle to get out of them and may or may not get out – uncertainty. This caused me to stay alone, stop interacting, stop participating in anything, causing a brain starved of stimulation and therefore decaying more and more, total inability to assert myself, numb and and very vaguely aware of my own needs.

What is needed: 
Attention, Help, Support, Concern, Acceptance, Care, Love, Patience, Knowledge, Understanding, Nurture.

I precisely understood my fear:
– I look at duality only for negative experiences. Like I’m in a gray island looking at a colorful island on the other end of the horizon.
– I am afraid to look at the duality from the side of positive experiences. If I am in the colorful island, I do not want to even consider that the gray island is needed. Its as if I am avoiding looking at the background and dissociating from it. Removing it from my conscious awareness. But nevertheless, it still exists and that is what makes my positive experience even possible. In some way, I am unable to fully enjoy the positive experience also because of this blocking I do.
– I try to hold on to positive experiences as if they are real. But they are as real and meaningful as negative experiences.
– This causes me to constantly seeking the colorful island from the gray island, but when I actually get color, I try to hold on to it and get dragged back into the gray island and once again keep seeking it. Even when I have the positive experience, I suddenly tunnel my vision and try to grasp and extract as much as I can from it. This action/desperation actually reduces the pleasure/satisfaction/understanding of the positive experience.
– In other words, in a way I do not experience the positive experience fully, because I do not allow myself to perceive its dual fully. Most of what I have is the mental satisfaction for meeting one of my mental ideas. But beyond the mental level satisfaction, the satisfaction is not for the entire being.
– Also satisfaction comes from understanding. I am not perceiving the whole picture, because I am only understanding the interdependence from one side and not the other and believe that the positive experiences have their own essence somewhere.
– The reason for this belief maybe that I am afraid of the total emptiness/shift, if even positive experiences have no essence. I have understood this fact logically and intellectually. But to feel it/experience this with my entire being, with all my emotions, with all my primitive powers is another thing.
– Actually the separation between intellectual, emotional, primitive instincts, mind and being are just artificial boundary lines we draw in the spectrum of our experience. They are just concepts. Each person would draw the boundary differently, include/exclude different aspects. The reality of it is that, it is just one space just like the land on earth is just land and we divide it into various countries by drawing artificial boundaries. The reality of it is quite seamless/continuous. What I call my intellectual understanding will slowly percolate in my entire being. The intensity of the drive, earnestness to know the truth is a better indicator of how deep a person would reach (as said by Nisargadatta M) vs. whether he is working intellectually, emotionally with mind/body which is kind of irrelevant because they are all concepts and each person categorizes them differently etc.

You have to hold the beautiful in you mind to see the ugly.
You have to hold the ugly in your mind to see the beautiful.

You have to hold the insane in your mind to see sanity.
You have to hold sanity in your mind to see the insane.

You do not lose the beautiful when you hold the ugly.
You do not lose the ugly when you hold the beautiful.
They both mutually make each other possible.
The ugly reminds you of the beautiful.
The beautiful reminds you of the ugly.
I was trying to hold the beautiful without the ugly which was impossible because when I tried to do that, I essentially dissociated from all perception of both the ugly and the beautiful.
This caused me to constantly seek the beautiful but even when I did get it I could not experience it because I would try to remove ugliness. But removing the ugliness would also cause the beauty experience to disappear. So I would be left with nothing.

So I would only really experience: ugly in foreground and beauty in background and I keep trying to attain that beauty at a distance. But when I attained beauty I would not get it because I would then try to cut off ugliness but that would cause the beauty to disappear too. So my only complete experience was when ugly was in the foreground and beauty was in the background, which is why I naturally gravitated towards the ugly and feeling most of my life is bad.
Even my behavior would attract the ugly because of my core-belief that beauty has its own essence.So that is the core belief that stopped me from a complete relaxed experience of life.The fundamental dissatisfaction and longing would get fulfilled with this understanding.

To see good in the foreground, you need to have bad in the background and vice versa.
This is the game of duality.
There are basically 2 opposing forms of energy that mutually define/illuminate each other.

But there are also cycles and spirals.
A cycle is the oscillatory movement of energy in the field of energy dualities.
A self accumulating/momentum accumulating cycle creates a snowball effect OR a spiral which spirals outwards.
Similarly, A spiral can also happen inwards.

Inward spiral is of contraction, and outward spiral is of expansion. Again to witness these inward/outward spirals, there has to be a relatively stable background to provide the frame of reference. This background is similar to the stationary object perspective when it comes to speed, acceleration and deceleration.

If I compare this with the relativity of distance, speed, acceleration:
Distance – Duality
Speed – Cycles
Acceleration – Spirals

The light of your attention can be focused or de-focused.
The light of your attention contains all your emotional projections.
This light is what we direct towards the manifest world.

When the light of attention is de-focused:

• When de-focused,  your emotions are not invested in anything in particular but more in abstract themes. 
• You see the forest for the trees and no tree is very significant, or the investment of projections is diffuse for each tree. 
• The analogy for this would be a floodlight like spread of light. 
• No area is exceptionally illuminated, but a large area is covered. 
• Its like a cloud like density spanning a large area. But power output for change at a micro level is low.

When the light of attention is focused:

• When focused, your emotional projections are invested and directed to a single object or small group of objects.
• You see a single tree of the forest in great detail and all your projections are directed towards it.
• The analogy would be a laser like pointed light.
• Its like the density of a small iron ball. 
• Its power output and capacity for change is high.

Each experience is a kind of potential, if this potential is not released, then it waits for a chance to come out and comes out in bursts whenever a window of opportunity is available.

All experience potentials must be released. 
Like my potential for depression, feeling low, disgust, leaving people, apathy, hurt, torpor, feeling attacked, rebellion, feeling victimized, disillusionment, be passive are some of the -ve potentials. 

Also my +ve potentials – to contemplate, to be affectionate, to serve, to cherish, to reminisce, for understanding, abstract thought and so forth. 

All of these are potentials for experience. Even the arising of these potentials and their discharge have to be fully allowed to make way for new potentials. Unexpressed potentials are a kind of accumulation. 

The question I have is, am I supposed to deplete it by allowing myself to feel it for a long time, or will that further solidify that? Both seem to be contradictorily true. Are we born with these potentials for experience  OR are they cultivated? OR cultivated over an existing accumulation of potential?