An Advaita Vedanta realization, enlightenment, nisarga yoga site discussing non-duality (nonduality), your original nature, and dwelling in the natural state as taught by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
FROM A SITE VISITOR: Thursday, you used the terms beyond the beingness and beyond the non-beingness. Can you explain. Thank you.
F.: Pls. note: Some are reporting strange font sizes and misconfigurations. If that occurs, please click the "refresh" button on your screen. That should address the issue. [Continued from yesterday] If the incense stick example did not provide the understanding being sought, try one or more of these examples:
Mentioned recently, persons think that a steel beam is really just a steel beam until they look at it through an electron microscope, then they see that it is a swirling mass of energy.
The beam was not what it appeared to be. It’s beingness, as erroneously perceived, never even was as it was imagined to be. All beliefs about its beingness were misconceptions. Upon viewing the steel via an electron microscope and gaining a deeper understanding of “the beam,” could it then be said accurately that the beam is suddenly “not being”? No.
Similarly, imagine a couple wanted to have a daughter and a son, but they had only one child, a daughter. Can the son be said to “not be”? That which never was—that which was only a misconception all along—cannot be said to “have been” nor said to suddenly “not be.” That which is real is beyond any concepts dreamed up by men regarding “being” or “not being.”
A fourth example used in past postings to try to clarify the points regarding beingness and non-beingness involved an ice cube. People think an ice cube is an ice cube instead of one of the fourteen or so solid phases of H20. Similarly, in almost every case, they think that what they are seeing is being seen accurately.
Yet if you drop an ice cube into a pan of boiling water and the cube seems to disappear before your very eyes, can you accurately claim that “the cube” (or what you misperceived H20 to be) “now no longer exists”? No. Could you accurately claim that “what was, now, no longer is?” No.
Can you accurately claim that “it was, but now it is not”? No. Can you claim “regarding the cube, there was beingness, but now the cube is in a state of not-beingness”? No.
In fact, do you see that there was never a cube at all but there was H20 that had, at a certain temperature, appeared to take the form of a cube but was not that form at all? Do you see that persons were in error all along when they taught you that what is actually H20 is “a cube”? The same applies every time that they tell you that THAT is "this."
So looking into the pan, post-dissolution, can you say “the cube is”? No. It has shifted beyond a solid state into a liquid state and could soon enter into a vapor state. Yet in every case, the H20 remains. So it is with THAT which is beyond any notions about beingness and non-beingness.
To review, can you say “that which the cube was no longer is?” No. All that can be said factually is, “that which I thought the cube to be was not at all what it really was. The form that H20 assumed temporarily has disappeared, and the beingness (what I thought it was and everything I was taught about an ice cube and what it is) was not at all what it was or is.
You could say, “The real beingness of that cube has been misperceived.” You could also say, “Once the H20 that had temporarily taken the shape of a cube had melted, I was also mistaken to believe that the cube had entered into a state of not-being.”
In regards to “cubes” or “persons” or “this world” or anything else that seems to appear, if the beingness was a misperception, then how could any conclusion about its not-being possibly be true?
When the incense burns and when the “body” part seems to have disappeared and when the smoke part seems to have disappeared, do you understand that the same body of the stick will never be again? Do you see that that same smoke can never be again?
Do you see that the same spark can never be again, but that spark-ness, the essence of that spark, could be again? Do you see that the body was a play of elements and that the smoke was an illusory cloud with no concrete substance? Then see as well that maya is nothing more than the collective sum of all mental projections…the very basis of duality by which “one” is seen as “many.”
The invitation is to understand the state that is even prior to this talk of beingness and of non-beingness. The cube was not really being a cube, and after being tossed into the boiling water, it was not really not being a cube either.
Find out what is real behind all of the mirages that persons (1) take to be real and that persons (2) assume at some point end up in a non-being state. Then you might understand why I am not this beingness, so there can be no non-beingness of anything that never actually was in the first place.
THAT which I Am was not born and is not what it is taken to be by persons; thus, THAT which I Am cannot enter into a state of "not-being any longer." I Am beyond all of that, yet that which is beyond all of that has nothing whatsoever to do with any "self" that has been assumed to be nor anything to do with any "Self" that has been thought to have been.
That which is beyond both beingness and non-beingness neither "has" self-ness nor Self-ness, anymore than the currently manifested consciousness can "have" anything. All pointers to the contrary are merely thorns being employed along the way. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued Friday)
