“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, July 12, 2012

Awareness--It's Just There

"Awareness is not something that needs to be manufactured: when there is a gap, awareness enters into us. So awareness does not require a certain particular effort. Such an effort is unnecessary. Awareness is like a wind. If you open your doors and windows, it is bound to come in."
Trungpa Rinpoche



2 comments:

Henry Warwick said...

or, awareness is an illusion produced by your brain. Awareness is just another part of Maya. Ignore it, and keep going.

Anonymous said...

"awareness is an illusion produced by your brain. Awareness is just another part of Maya. Ignore it, and keep going."

My illusion seems to disagree with your illusion. As far as I can tell, the only thing that the brain 'produces' is orderly-but-meaningless patterns of biochemical discharge. To say that we should ignore awareness ignores the fact that ignoring something intentionally is itself a feature of awareness. To say "and keep going" implies that there is somewhere outside of awareness to keep going to.

My illusion of awareness does seem to agree with the original post, however. Indeed, awareness is not an ingredient which is added to an unconscious void - it is the fundamental coherence, the sole 'fabric of everythingness' which is revealed subtractively or 'algebraically' (algebra in its original sense; from Arabic al-jebr* meaning “reunion of broken parts”).