ANNOUNCEMENTS
[Walter Driscoll asked to interview me in order to preserve on video some of the latest modifications and evolutions in the versions of the message offered here since 1989. He would label the discussion, “Unlearning with Floyd Henderson.”
Please note: For those who have a problem hearing what is being shared, the video offers a fairly accurate set of closed captions which some listeners might want to activate.
The interview is available for viewing by clicking on video “NUMBER THIRTEEN” in the column to the right. Also, by clicking on NUMBER FOURTEEN,” visitors can also see the introductory discussion on non-duality on Walter’s non-duality site and then a Q and A session which followed.]
1. [See the offer in gold text following this post for details on how you can watch a retreat on video which includes a detailed discussion of all of the steps on the path as used by Maharaj]
2. Here, with those who are still driven to talk about “god,” the “Son of god,” the “Holy Spirit,” “Buddha,” “Krishna,” etc., etc., etc., the invitation to them is to view those as verbs, not nouns. See the green text after today’s post for the full meaning and implications of that.
3. A newer video (“Number Ten: Awakening Together Satsang, March 2018”) has now been added in the far right column of this page, offering the opportunity to view a recent 2018 satsang session with Floyd being interviewed by Regina and Jacqueline of “The Awakening Together Group.” (See the details in the blue text after this post.)
4. Some prefer paperback books even if they have to wait a day or so to receive it and have to pay more for a printed book and its shipment. Now, 10 paperback books by Henderson are in print and available in two anthologies through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and over 40,000+ booksellers around the globe including in the Americas, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, Spain, Brazil and South Korea. See the end of this post in red text for details.
5. Would you like to have us send to someone as a gift from you a copy of any ebook in our inventory?
6. You may purchase a Floyd Henderson Shopify Gift Card here for someone and offer recommendations for the books in Floyd’s store which might be of assistance to them.
7. You may click here to visit Floyd’s bookstore which offers both digital books and paperback books which deal with non-duality, non-duality-based fictional adventures, recovery, and financial budgeting.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS
The Foreground and The Background
and
The Unicity Beyond the Apparent Multiplicity
The Foreground and The Background
To further illustrate the pointers offered yesterday, consider the view from a window of the apartment often used during visits to one of my two favorite parts of Italy, namely, Tuscany (with the second being the Veneto region where Venice is located).
In the foreground of the scene laid out before my apartment in Malgrate Castle (temporarily closed)
I can see from my upper-story window preparations being made to harvest crops; to continue work on a new house being built; and some people driving away from the small community below to go to work or to shop at the market in a nearby town. Down the road to the right, people are waiting to catch the local bus to the mercato in nearby Villafranca; someone in a white van approaching from the right is making a delivery.
In the foreground, drivers are conscious of obstacles and intersections and traffic signs and lane markers. It appears that there are do-ers and it seems that they are doing. In the background there is a portion of the landscape that is covered with trees;
then, farther in the distance are mountains and beyond those mountains there are clouds high in the sky; other low clouds are nestled in the valley below the castle, hovering in the valley between the castle and the mountains. I can see those clouds only by looking down. Finally, the open sky is beyond all of that. Beingness, rather than doingness, is the case in the background.
Now, you’re invited to (a) determine the ways in which the foreground might represent consciousness manifest and to (b) determine what the background might reveal about awareness.
Next, for purposes of illustration, take the foreground in the scene to represent the I-Amness and the background to be the I AM THAT-ness. Take the foreground to represent consciousness and the background to represent awareness. Note that consciousness involves being conscious of (something) so consciousness is always, ultimately, about duality: “this” is conscious of “that.”
Thus, the seeker who thinks he / she is fully realized - that is, free of belief in any and all learned ignorance which was taught and free of all beliefs dreamed up by influencers and passed down from one generation to the next - and who thinks she / he is the unicity because he / she “knows ‘the True Self’” is mistaken.
That seeker might think she / he is “Self”-realized, but that which truly is is beyond self-ness, Self-ness, beingness, non-beingness, and even anything that is erroneously thought to involve so-called “Self-Realization.”
Reality is beyond “conscious-of-ness” and is therefore a state of zero concepts and zero awareness. In that “state,” awareness is not even aware. Awareness during the manifest can only happen if the consciousness has been unblocked, if the mind has been purged, and the consciousness has been restored to its original, pure, universal state.
But all of the happenings in the scene's background of unicity (as well as all of the supposed happenings which are occurring via the manifested, dualistic consciousness in the foreground) are only possible because of the energy of the sunlight breaking through the clouds in the background.
Without that background energy manifesting via plants, nothing in the foreground could happen. (Again, as Szent-Gyorgyi said: “What drives life is . . . a little electric current, set up by the sunshine.”) Consciousness could not happen except for the background of awareness, but awareness is, whether consciousness is manifested or not and whether consciousness of “this” or “that” happens or not.
At the atomic and sub-atomic levels of matter / energy manifested as “clouds” and “mountains” and “trees” in the background, awareness is. Yet there is no “one” that is conscious of anything. So it is when the temporarily-manifested conscious-energy unmanifests and is subsequently “re-absorbed” into that field called “The Absolute,” referring to “absolutely pure, unambiguous, unadulterated energy.”
Note too that in the foreground, many things seem to be significant: a delivery must be made on time; people must be at work on time; and food must be purchased in the mercato and prepared and consumed in order for the consciousness to remain manifested in the physical space.
In the background, however, it is clearer that everything is merely cycling and nothing matters at all: clouds come and go; mountains that had formed long ago will someday crumble; and trees that are rising will one day fall. It’s all much ado about nothing.
So it is when abidance happens as the Absolute: what happens will happen, yet “the insignificant” is never misperceived as “significant.” “The foreground of consciousness” begins to unfold in the same way as “the background of awareness.”
That leads to peace and happiness, or at least to contentment. Any faulty perceptions of the type which result in the insignificant being considered significant only happen via the warped consciousness, via the assumption of personas, and via the emotional intoxication that personas generate.
The Unicity Beyond the Apparent Multiplicity
To continue with the discussion of the scene described, the doingness in the foreground is marked by consciousness and a sense of duality. Persons unaware of the unicity believe that they are conscious of some “vast multiplicity” of things: houses, roads, crops, intersections, buses, mercatos, etc.
Being in the actual background of the scene, which includes trees and clouds and mountains and sky and sunlight, there is no sense of duality. Why? There is no “one” to be conscious of anything, yet there is awareness if realized. In what way is “awareness without conscious-of-ness” present in the background?
Observe that there appears to be a variety of “cloud” formations, but see that “the clouds” are not The Real. What is “real,” for the sake of this example, is H20. A series of two hydrogen atoms are conscious of an oxygen atom, but there is no “one” that is present to be conscious of anything.
Consciousness (that is, pure, universal, non-personalized consciousness) is just happening for awhile, so even though there might be talk of things manifested (clouds, tress, deliveries, etc.) awareness is not dualistic in its nature. It is in that fashion, therefore, that the manifested, re-purified consciousness can remain manifested for a time but can function as awareness . . . can abide as the Absolute.
The H20 can manifest in various "forms" or "spaces" which persons try to separate by using such labels as “rain, rivers, lakes, clouds, vapor, water, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snow cones, snow flurries
as well as
snowflakes, snow piles, slush, ice, steam, pools, waterfalls, streams, fog, ponds, hail, drizzle, floods, mist, swamps, oceans, seas,” ad infinitum, but it’s really all one thing, all H20, merely appearing to be different.
(See why persons live in the delusion of duality? See why persons are not “in the world” and why “the world” is in them . . . in their erroneously-perceiving “minds”? See why they take what they think they see to be real and how they try to support “differentiation” through labeling?)
Similarly, consciousness can manifest via the spaces labeled as “plants, animals, humans, birds,” etc., and though it’s really all consciousness manifested, it appears to the non-realized to be multiple and different things. For any perception of rain, rivers, plants, or animals to happen, conscious-of-ness must happen first, and as a result of inaccurate suppositions rooted in distorted perception, the illusion of duality manifests.
As with the “atoms as clouds,” whereby awareness can happen without any “one” being conscious of, so it is as the Absolute. awareness is, even though there is no “one” to be aware of; thus, awareness involves no duality.
In both the foreground and the background of the scene, everything is merely happening; however, in the foreground where consciousness has been corrupted, consciousness takes itself to be something it is not and leads persons to believe that they are making things happen and that they are seeing separate things.
Persons are taking themselves to be “do-ers,” are lacking an understanding of the unicity, and are, therefore, strapped with delusional thinking generated by an illusory “mind."
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
To watch the most recent talk and Q&A with Walter and his guests, click:
Walter Driscoll and Floyd Henderson
To watch the interview when Walter and Floyd discussed the fact that the Ultimate Sickness is a mental / mind sickness and why learning more is not the answer and why unlearning is the answer, click:
