I Looked for My Self

Often when we hear the masters speak about emptiness, stillness, awareness, pure space, openness, etc. our minds can create a copy of it, a concept….
Bentinho Massaro, Insights into Awareness- a collection of articles

I wrote what follows a few weeks ago. By the end of it I was so disgusted I never posted.
Now I realize it was kind of a nice letting go, a nice STOP.
I gave up trying to see that an “I” does not ultimately exist.
Giving up proved to be a nice stepping stone.
So, let me post that old inquiry now. Failure is good and it went like this:

The Looking
A friend keeps urging me to “just look and see.”
I’ve been meaning to ask exactly what she means by those words, realizing you must be pretty knot headed if you’ve reached the point of needing “look” and “see” explained.
Dick and Jane could do it.
Spot, the dog, could probably even do it.

And, it’s not as if I haven’t tried.
It’s just that is hasn’t led to any huge revelation.
Recently, I copied her instructions down leaving room for me to try and “Look & See” at each step of her description. Below her words are in bold.

i looked for my self, within the direct experience of the present moment.

OK, Present Moment.
Who’s sitting here? Body, mind, thoughts, fingers – none of that is me.
That’s the vehicle I drive.

I am what is here all along, all along, birth to death.
I am who feels the typing, the wind, the anxiety…
Who?
What?
“What” is far more accurate. That is obvious.
“What am I?”

There is a gap, a huge, huge gap, between me and everything else.
I am on one side. All That is on the other.

The gap seems to warrant attention, more so than the now ancillary “me”
It’s as if the banks of the river (me and that other) are not the essence of the river (the gap).
The banks are not what you really need to notice, not when the River seems more real and water is the river’s essence.

And the Gap?
What is the Gap?
The gap is nothing, yet the word is totally misleading.
This nothing almost pulsates with so many unspeakable qualities.

The gap is what holds everything: both “me” and All That Other.
I never really noticed that!

Attending to the gap is like dropping water on a dry sponge.
Instantly there is expansion, twisting, a spreading out in all dimensions.
The Gap is all pervading.
The Gap comes out my eyes, except it’s no longer shaped liked Gap.

In some Klein Bottle twist of Nothing - Gap is Everything:
“I” as individual am Gap.
“All That” out there is Gap solidified.
Gap is Nothingness become alive.

Maharishi told us once, “Never try to bridge the Gap.”
Now, I think you have to fall into It.
Let It swallow you.

And still, I am a “me.”
‘Cause I drive around inside this body, mind, thoughts, feelings.
A “Me” walks through this oceanic Gapness, curled back upon and through itself becoming something out of nothing, just as much Me as the sparrow over there.

… Or, maybe I’ve read too many books and all I’ve come to is a concept, not direct experience.

i looked for the looker.

And I found the “non-orientable” Klein Bottle of Creation
which is the Looker (me) and the Looking.

But see, this is what my friend said:
and what was found?
nothing!
there's nothing there. it isn't A nothing, that is somehow experienced.
it is instead that there is no findable me.
everything else is right here.

I’m not sure that it matters.
But, I do like the picture of the Klein Bottle that I labeled.

A Double Movement

mouette insectes
Originally uploaded by olivier gilet

Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality.
Pride is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be.
Thomas Merton, The New Man.

Merton is speaking of Adam’s pride. And his words are almost “throw away” wisdom as he proceeds on to the explanations I carefully underlined in my 1961 Mentor-Omega paperback book, the pages of which are now quite yellow, fragile and ready to crumble.
Merton continues:

Adam’s sin was a double movement of introversion and extraversion. He withdrew from God into himself and then, unable to remain centered in himself, he fell beneath himself into the multiplicity and confusion of exterior things…
Adam turned human nature inside out and passed it on in this condition to all his children…

Each of us has the task of turning the thing right side out … and the task is by no means easy.

That phrase, “a double movement of introversion and extroversion” has stuck with me through the decades, as I’ve tried to turn “the thing right side out.” It has been by no means easy, or perhaps more accurately, quite a measure of my pride and insatiable need for unreality.

Seven years ago or so, I was delighted to discover the Taoist text entitled, “Turning the Light Around.” It described a technique that I realized I could perform. A practice that if performed for 100 days promised that I would become immortal.
I lasted about 10 before things just got “too weird.”
Unreality is so ingrained in me as Real.

The words also invoke contemplations I mentioned not so long ago - the strange twisting inversion of consciousness I discovered as I tried to diagram the flow of creativity throughout Creation. Our minds can travel “from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest,” in Maharishi’s jargon. To me, this journey forms a kind of Klein bottle – a geometrical object that you can imagine but not build since a Klein bottle requires four dimensions. (Oddly, it’s surface passes through itself without a hole. Is this a metaphor of transcendence, I have to wonder?)

So, my ears perked up the other night as I listened to Eckhardt Tolle on the true nature of space and time:

Go out on a clear night and look up at the sky…What appears to us as space in our universe perceived through the mind and senses is the Unmanifested itself, externalized. It is the “body’ of God. And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be, is not just out there in space – it is also within you…. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension…
What you perceive externally as space and time are… the two essential attributes of God, infinity and eternity, perceived as if they had an external existence outside you. Within you, both space and time have an inner equivalent that reveals their true nature, as well as your own. Whereas space is the still, infinitely deep realm of no-mind, the inner equivalent of time is presence, awareness of the eternal Now.
The Power of Now, Chapter Six, The Inner Body

The teachers of enlightenment speak of two a two-step process.
First, it is necessary to wake-up to your own true nature. Know your Self to be unbounded. Second, the ego must dissolve into an awareness of unity.

Maharishi clarified the distinctions between Cosmic Consciousness and Unity Consciousness. Adyashanti speaks of awakening as the first step to becoming fully enlightenment. And Merton, has this double movement – pulling the senses out from identification with the world, becoming re-centered in the self and then melting into God.

People don’t seem to speak of Merton anymore. So, let me end with more of his words. More phrases that have stuck with me all this time.

For Krish:
If we would return to God…we must reverse Adam’s journey, we must go back the way he came. The path lies through the center of our soul.

Here he echoes Tolle’s instruction that the inner body is a portal into Being:
The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into Being. But that visible and tangible body is only an outer shell…In your natural state of connectedness with being, this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible inner body…to “inhabit the body” is to feel the body from within… and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form.

For Becky:
The sense of being “carried” and “drawn” by love into the infinite space of a sublime and unthinkable freedom is the expression of our spiritual union with the Father…[Son and Holy Ghost (to put it in the Catholic)]

For Dan:
When the light of God’s truth begins to find its way through the mists of illusion and self-deception…the false self which we inherited from Adam begins to experience the strange panic that Adam felt when…he hid in the trees in the garden because he heard the voice of the Lord God in the afternoon.
If we are to recover our own identity… we must learn to stop saying: “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid.”

OK – I’ll sign onto Dan’s passage too. And end with this one, which I really like:

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself… If that is who he thinks he is, then he is already done for, because he is no longer alive, even though he may seem to exist.
Actually he is only pushing the responsibility for his existent on to society… he assumes he is a person because there appear to be other persons who recognize him when he walks down the street.
Thomas Merton, The New Man, Spirit in Bondage.