F.: A recent series explained how the mind was once an asset but has now become a liability. That series triggered a number of e-mails asking about samskaras as well as archetypal images. Tomorrow, archetypal images will be discussed. Today, some considerations regarding samskaras will be offered, as explained earlier in the following exchange that is an extract from the soon-to-be-published book entitled CONSCIOUSNESS, AWARENESS, AND THE NATURE OF REALITY (Peace Every Day When Abiding as the Absolute) :
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. If you remove the water that is within the body, then 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 imprinted on "the mind." 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 year. Most spend their entire existence convinced that their perceptions are the “right” perceptions when if fact they have never seen anything “rightly.”
As a result, they will 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 mirages in the desert 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 be “in touch with reality” is to be able to differentiate betwen what is illusion and what is real, between what is delusion and what is truth, and between that which appears to be dualistic as opposed to that which is One and truly Real. Please enter the silence of contemplation.
WORKING ON “THE FINAL PIECE” AND PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER?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. If you remove the water that is within the body, then 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 imprinted on "the mind." 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 year. Most spend their entire existence convinced that their perceptions are the “right” perceptions when if fact they have never seen anything “rightly.”
As a result, they will 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 mirages in the desert 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 be “in touch with reality” is to be able to differentiate betwen what is illusion and what is real, between what is delusion and what is truth, and between that which appears to be dualistic as opposed to that which is One and truly Real. Please enter the silence of contemplation.
