[Dialogue continued from yesterday]
Seeker: So the goal must be to destroy the ego.
F.: Now you’re going to join Quixote and race about tilting at windmills? Can you destroy a mirage? The ego is the false “I.” How can you destroy something that is not real? The illusion that the coiled rope in the darkened corner is a snake disappears when the light shines upon it. There's no freakin' snake that needs to be killed! All you have to do is see the lies that you've believed and then see the truth. One act of enlightenment is to see your false roles—those roles your body is playing because persons played with your “mind.” All Quixote needed—in order to end all his seeking and fighting and foolish racing about—was to understand that what he thought he was seeing was, in fact, just an illusion. The most you can accomplish when regarding a mirage is to see clearly that it's a mirage and to understand that what appears to be something real is nothing more than an atmospheric refraction by a layer of hot air that is distorting reflections. So it is with ego, and so it is with the “mind”: reflections are distortions of reality as the “mind” wrongly processes what it only thinks it is perceiving correctly. The most that you can accomplish when regarding ego is to understand that it is nothing more than a mental defense mechanism that is distorting reality as your personas seek perpetuation and gratification in the relative existence...and then eternal continuity afterwards. It's all nonsense. All roles and ego-states and their accompanying egotism are fictional and cannot last. Your world is a dream. Find what it's like not to be in the world. In reality, you aren’t in the world at all…the world is in you—in your “mind.” That imaginary world is constantly changing in your view, so happiness comes and goes for you. What you are being invited to realize is that state in which there is no change. You’re attached to mutable conditions while wanting those mutable conditions to be immutable. How impractical. How “crazy,” to use your word. Because the consciousness has become so corrupted, you only want to speak of this “world” that you’ve dreamed up via your imagination (and “their” imagination) and to find perfect, uninterrupted happiness in it. That’s like taking a “journey” to Arizona in order to follow a long, straight “path” through the desert in order to find a mirage, believing that if you can just fix yourself firmly within that mirage that you'll be happy. What a setup for disappointment and misery. Know that all disappointment and misery is rooted in some mirage, in some false identity that you have assumed and that has endless, but imagined, needs. You are fixated in an imaginary world that you have been told is real when it is totally fictional. You are not seeing that uniform state in which there are no fathers or daughters, no “you” and no “I.” What you are calling “goals” are nothing more than the desires of your false identities. Ego-states can never be satisfied. They always need more, but you cannot see clearly because of the degree to which the consciousness has been corrupted.
Seeker: And how has my consciousness been corrupted, according to you?
F.: Via impressions—or samskaras—as my teacher called them. Here’s an analogy: imagine you’re at the beach, a few yards from the water’s edge. As you walk, you leave behind impressions of your feet. Are those impressions real?
Seeker: For the moment, yes.
F.: Really? What’s real about those impressions? They are only space—nothingness, emptiness—that seems to your eye to be “something” when in fact they are nothing. Will they last?
Seeker: They’ll last until the tide comes in and washes them away.
F.: So are they an actual form, or just a temporary space that appears to have shape and form?
Seeker: OK...they’re temporary.
F.: So it is with everything you think you see. It’s only an appearance, and appearances are distortions, and distortions trigger misery. You look at the body called “floyd” and all that is there is a space, but you think you are seeing some thing. It is emptiness…nothingness. Just a handful of elements with air and energy temporarily circulating through the space. Remove the moisture and those elements won’t even fill a small urn. Realization is like the wave that can come along and sweep away all the false impressions on the beach. Realization makes you aware that the nothingness that you’ve always taken to be something is not that thing at all. Those impressions were never real. You mistook an empty space to be something, and that’s what persons do all day long, all month long, all year long, year after year after boring year. Most spend their entire existence convinced that their perceptions are the “right” perceptions when if fact they have never seen anything “rightly.” They suffer from one false impression after another, not unlike all the impressions in your “mind.” Footprints in the sand appear to have some shape or form, just as with mirages in the desert which appear to have a shape or form, but the reality is that all impressions and all mirages are just a part of the fiction of the “mind.” To think that the false is real is insanity. To think that your impressions—or anyone’s impressions—are accurate is insane. Perceptions are the very product of insanity…of the bastardized consciousness.
Seeker: So you’re saying to give up…that there’s no way to stop pain and escape misery and find happiness?
F.: The elements have combined to provide a space, a plant food body, in which the consciousness can temporarily manifest and through which the breath can temporarily circulate. Which of those three components is capable of experiencing the pain that you speak of and want to avoid?
Seeker: The body.
F.: No! Not the body and not the breath. How can you know that? Suspend consciousness and a doctor can cut your body open and play with your heart. He can even cut that heart out and put a different one in, and the body will feel nothing as long as the consciousness is suspended. Only the consciousness can feel, and with that consciousness placed into temporary abeyance, no pain is experienced. Similarly, all misery is in the “mind”—the corrupted consciousness—only. It’s all a figment of your imagination, and actually results from the imaginings of your various personas that think they need something or someone to exist. And it is those personas that imagine they are feeling misery and unhappiness when the counterpart they need to exist is not behaving as the personas demand. All personas require a co-dependent counterpart for their imaginary existence to continue: “husband” needs “’wife” to exist, “employee” needs “employer” to exist. If a persona does not have that co-dependent counterpart, then a person will imagine he’s dying. That “mind”-pain is based in an illusion. “Employee” must have a job to exist. Lose a job and “employee” thinks he’s dying. Is he? No. What is disappearing? A false impression, a false role. Any imagined pain around the loss of an ego-state is concrete evidence of how thoroughly persons identify with their personas. If you Realize, then everything imaginary—including imaginary personas which imagine that “your” pain and misery are real—can disappear…can dis-appear. Sanity will return when you Realize that mirages can experience neither happiness nor misery. Now, dinner’s ready, so adios.
Only the sane move freely through the relative existence, and only a person who Realizes (and is thus finally out of his/her mind) can be sane. Only if freed of the “post-life” nonsense that was dreamed up by men thousands of years ago (and that is now taken by most men and women to be the truth) can one be sane. To buy into the nonsense that “after death this happens to the ‘good’ but that happens to the ‘bad’ ” will trap persons in the misery of the duality of “good vs. bad” during the relative existence as well. The discussion ended:
Seeker: Wait. Just one more question. So what’s the bottom line?
F.: What’s the bottom line?! I wish you were here so I could throw you out! Go back to the beginning when I said that you have been fooled but not by Me. As a Realized teacher pointed out, “Those alone who understand that I, the Absolute, am beyond the states of being and non-being realize my true nature, and all others are fools.” I’m gone. Goodbye. [Please enter the silence of contemplation.]
Seeker: So the goal must be to destroy the ego.
F.: Now you’re going to join Quixote and race about tilting at windmills? Can you destroy a mirage? The ego is the false “I.” How can you destroy something that is not real? The illusion that the coiled rope in the darkened corner is a snake disappears when the light shines upon it. There's no freakin' snake that needs to be killed! All you have to do is see the lies that you've believed and then see the truth. One act of enlightenment is to see your false roles—those roles your body is playing because persons played with your “mind.” All Quixote needed—in order to end all his seeking and fighting and foolish racing about—was to understand that what he thought he was seeing was, in fact, just an illusion. The most you can accomplish when regarding a mirage is to see clearly that it's a mirage and to understand that what appears to be something real is nothing more than an atmospheric refraction by a layer of hot air that is distorting reflections. So it is with ego, and so it is with the “mind”: reflections are distortions of reality as the “mind” wrongly processes what it only thinks it is perceiving correctly. The most that you can accomplish when regarding ego is to understand that it is nothing more than a mental defense mechanism that is distorting reality as your personas seek perpetuation and gratification in the relative existence...and then eternal continuity afterwards. It's all nonsense. All roles and ego-states and their accompanying egotism are fictional and cannot last. Your world is a dream. Find what it's like not to be in the world. In reality, you aren’t in the world at all…the world is in you—in your “mind.” That imaginary world is constantly changing in your view, so happiness comes and goes for you. What you are being invited to realize is that state in which there is no change. You’re attached to mutable conditions while wanting those mutable conditions to be immutable. How impractical. How “crazy,” to use your word. Because the consciousness has become so corrupted, you only want to speak of this “world” that you’ve dreamed up via your imagination (and “their” imagination) and to find perfect, uninterrupted happiness in it. That’s like taking a “journey” to Arizona in order to follow a long, straight “path” through the desert in order to find a mirage, believing that if you can just fix yourself firmly within that mirage that you'll be happy. What a setup for disappointment and misery. Know that all disappointment and misery is rooted in some mirage, in some false identity that you have assumed and that has endless, but imagined, needs. You are fixated in an imaginary world that you have been told is real when it is totally fictional. You are not seeing that uniform state in which there are no fathers or daughters, no “you” and no “I.” What you are calling “goals” are nothing more than the desires of your false identities. Ego-states can never be satisfied. They always need more, but you cannot see clearly because of the degree to which the consciousness has been corrupted.
Seeker: And how has my consciousness been corrupted, according to you?
F.: Via impressions—or samskaras—as my teacher called them. Here’s an analogy: imagine you’re at the beach, a few yards from the water’s edge. As you walk, you leave behind impressions of your feet. Are those impressions real?
Seeker: For the moment, yes.
F.: Really? What’s real about those impressions? They are only space—nothingness, emptiness—that seems to your eye to be “something” when in fact they are nothing. Will they last?
Seeker: They’ll last until the tide comes in and washes them away.
F.: So are they an actual form, or just a temporary space that appears to have shape and form?
Seeker: OK...they’re temporary.
F.: So it is with everything you think you see. It’s only an appearance, and appearances are distortions, and distortions trigger misery. You look at the body called “floyd” and all that is there is a space, but you think you are seeing some thing. It is emptiness…nothingness. Just a handful of elements with air and energy temporarily circulating through the space. Remove the moisture and those elements won’t even fill a small urn. Realization is like the wave that can come along and sweep away all the false impressions on the beach. Realization makes you aware that the nothingness that you’ve always taken to be something is not that thing at all. Those impressions were never real. You mistook an empty space to be something, and that’s what persons do all day long, all month long, all year long, year after year after boring year. Most spend their entire existence convinced that their perceptions are the “right” perceptions when if fact they have never seen anything “rightly.” They suffer from one false impression after another, not unlike all the impressions in your “mind.” Footprints in the sand appear to have some shape or form, just as with mirages in the desert which appear to have a shape or form, but the reality is that all impressions and all mirages are just a part of the fiction of the “mind.” To think that the false is real is insanity. To think that your impressions—or anyone’s impressions—are accurate is insane. Perceptions are the very product of insanity…of the bastardized consciousness.
Seeker: So you’re saying to give up…that there’s no way to stop pain and escape misery and find happiness?
F.: The elements have combined to provide a space, a plant food body, in which the consciousness can temporarily manifest and through which the breath can temporarily circulate. Which of those three components is capable of experiencing the pain that you speak of and want to avoid?
Seeker: The body.
F.: No! Not the body and not the breath. How can you know that? Suspend consciousness and a doctor can cut your body open and play with your heart. He can even cut that heart out and put a different one in, and the body will feel nothing as long as the consciousness is suspended. Only the consciousness can feel, and with that consciousness placed into temporary abeyance, no pain is experienced. Similarly, all misery is in the “mind”—the corrupted consciousness—only. It’s all a figment of your imagination, and actually results from the imaginings of your various personas that think they need something or someone to exist. And it is those personas that imagine they are feeling misery and unhappiness when the counterpart they need to exist is not behaving as the personas demand. All personas require a co-dependent counterpart for their imaginary existence to continue: “husband” needs “’wife” to exist, “employee” needs “employer” to exist. If a persona does not have that co-dependent counterpart, then a person will imagine he’s dying. That “mind”-pain is based in an illusion. “Employee” must have a job to exist. Lose a job and “employee” thinks he’s dying. Is he? No. What is disappearing? A false impression, a false role. Any imagined pain around the loss of an ego-state is concrete evidence of how thoroughly persons identify with their personas. If you Realize, then everything imaginary—including imaginary personas which imagine that “your” pain and misery are real—can disappear…can dis-appear. Sanity will return when you Realize that mirages can experience neither happiness nor misery. Now, dinner’s ready, so adios.
Only the sane move freely through the relative existence, and only a person who Realizes (and is thus finally out of his/her mind) can be sane. Only if freed of the “post-life” nonsense that was dreamed up by men thousands of years ago (and that is now taken by most men and women to be the truth) can one be sane. To buy into the nonsense that “after death this happens to the ‘good’ but that happens to the ‘bad’ ” will trap persons in the misery of the duality of “good vs. bad” during the relative existence as well. The discussion ended:
Seeker: Wait. Just one more question. So what’s the bottom line?
F.: What’s the bottom line?! I wish you were here so I could throw you out! Go back to the beginning when I said that you have been fooled but not by Me. As a Realized teacher pointed out, “Those alone who understand that I, the Absolute, am beyond the states of being and non-being realize my true nature, and all others are fools.” I’m gone. Goodbye. [Please enter the silence of contemplation.]
