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Sunday Morning (55) Falling Awake
If I want to fall asleep, there are some things I can do to improve the chance of that happening. Stop watching the screens, stop eating and drinking, undress, go to the bedroom, close the curtains, lay down the body horizontally on the bed. Mostly I fall asleep then, but there is no guarantee. And sometimes I need to do nothing of the kind and I can fall asleep in the middle of a lot of noise, for instance when watching a movie in the cinema that doesn’t catch on.
With liberation, realization, enlightening, it is quite the same. There are some things that can be conducive for it to happen, and the Buddhist philosophy is most prominent in pointing to all those things in a plethora of prescriptions (precepts), telling monks that they should follow 200 or so rules, and nuns even 300 or so, to become a Bodhisattva, someone who is on the way to achieving Buddhahood (which is the same as liberation, or moksha in Hindu (advaita) philosophy. But in the end, there is no guarantee of liberation happening here. In fact, the majority of all those monks and nuns never find realization. This is not to say there is anything wrong with living like a monk (in a monastery or in the middle of a city), because following these precepts will in many cases improve the personal experience of life, provided they are accepted in freedom and out of joy, and not in some obligatory scheme. But it does not provide a way to liberation at all. There is no way to liberation, because in the end, we all are already it. When in Paris, there is no taking the bus to Paris. Anyone who thinks or tries differently, will never realize that he/she is in Paris – he will only be ever erroneously in the bus on the way to it.
So how is liberation happening? We don’t know. If we knew, it could be taught and learned and we all would go for it. But teaching and learning is for the mind and for the person having a mind. And it happens to be this mind that is the very thing that prevents liberation from happening. For no person ever gets enlightened or liberated. It is not the person that realizes oneness, it is oneness that realizes the illusion of the person and stops feeding it, thereby becoming free of this illusion and liberated from the mind. Being born again it is sometimes called, although the better term would be getting unborn, because there is nothing happening or erected, there is only something stopping (the mind and separation).
It is absolutely unknown and unknowable how this works. It is the miracle of aliveness, and it is exactly as miraculous as live itself. Not less, but also not more. It is cosmic causality at work. There are many accounts of people (animals don’t report this, and if they would, they would have nothing to report because they never went into the mind and never separated) in whom realization/liberation happened. This is not only for the sages in history, like the Buddha or Jesus, it can happen to any ordinary Jill or Jo. Sometimes there seems to be a lot a “preparation” going on, like 20.000 hours of mindfulness or Zen mediation, but in many cases nothing special can be pointed to as an explanation. Live just happened to them and liberation suddenly was a part of that happening.
So it is absolutely bonkers to try and imitate the lifestyle of any of those liberated people in the hope of “getting” enlightened. It doesn’t work that way, there is no reverse engineering in this. But liberation happens, and it happens a lot more than we think. There is nothing to gain for a person from this, because the person will not be there to pick the fruits of it. The mind has vanished, the entire personal experience is gone.
But no one to whom this happened, and I know quite many of them, wants to go back to the personal state anymore. They couldn’t, because there is no one there to want this. But even if it were possible, they wouldn’t do it. The non-personal, liberated, non-separated way of experiencing reality is simply too complete to reject and it compares to nothing. It IS nothing actually, full of complete nothingness. There is nothing higher or better about this way of experiencing reality. It is only a different possibility. It is nothing to be craving for, because the craving is only for the mind and this will prevent liberation absolutely.
Well, it is only with these guidelines and warnings that I dare to invite you to read my story of liberation. And please realize that it is not “my” story, nothing happened and oneness always was. In everyone. Only most people are not aware of it because they believe in the story that the mind tells them. That can be overcome. By no one.
Happy reading, you can find it here.
By the “way”: a lot of other Tales on our website are about this too, in different settings, other words and many different approaches. If what you read rings a bell, but you can’t just get it, read the other Tales as well. The truth is not in the words, but in the resonance that might happen from them. Who knows what is in store for “you”. But be warned, “you” might disappear! Say goodbye to your little self and be prepared to go all the “way”.
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