Why Lazarus Laughed,
Wei Wu Wei Living should be perpetual and universal benediction.
Doctrines,
Scriptures,
Sutras,
Essays are not to be regarded as systems to be followed.
They merely contribute to understanding.
They should be for us a source of stimulation and nothing more.
Do not let the sutra upset you.
Upset the sutra yourself.
And in advising,
If you meet the Buddha,
Turn aside and look the other way.
Such statements shock the sense of reverence inculcated by the devotional religions.
But their meaning,
Their aim,
Their importance are evident.
The ego.
Policemen disguising themselves as thieves in order to catch themselves.
Knowing that no such thing as an ego can exist,
But continuing to talk and think about the ego,
I.
E.
As something still believed in,
Is like someone who decided to go for a journey,
Packs his luggage and then never leaves home.
That of which we need to rid ourselves,
To transcend,
Is a false concept whereby we assume that entities exist.
How can a figment of imagination have any effect on anything that is not itself a figment of the imagination?
Therefore,
Any effect resulting from an act of will,
Subject to the ego concept,
Can only be as imaginary as itself.
Blaming a human for what he does is in accordance with the same process of logic as blaming the door when it bangs or an object when it falls to the floor.
It may be useful to re-emphasise that not only the protagonist,
But everyone who appears in our dreams is the dreamer of the dream.
This should be obvious enough,
But until thought of and tested,
It is apt to be denied.
Whatever name and apparent identity is attributed to dream personages,
It can be readily be perceived,
Not merely theoretically,
That such persons are not in fact the individual's dreams as they were or are,
Even in memory,
But the projection onto those names of a concept of the dreaming mind utilising just sufficient traits drawn from memory to give some verisimilitude to the attribution of identity.
Whatever name and identity the dream figure is given,
He is always based on psychic elements of the dreaming mind.
Our life is an elaborate analysis of a moment.
I am conscious,
But I cannot be conscious of myself.
On the phenomenal plane,
We seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
On the numinal plane,
We know the absence of both,
Which is bliss.
The mind is a moon.
It has no light of its own.
It is lit by the sun.
Everything you behold by moonlight is lit by the sun.
Everything you behold by moonlight is lit by the ultimate subject.
That is the whole world of appearance,
All manifestation.
The mind is a reflective force field and its force is the subject.
An eye cannot see itself,
Nor can the mind conceive the force by which it conceives.
When that force is directly experienced,
The mind light is obscured as it is the moonlight when the sun shines directly.
When the sun shines,
The moon mind loses all its importance and its activities become inconspicuous and innocuous.
The reflective force field fades in the light of the real.
The past is a memory,
An idea,
An object of consciousness.
The future,
An image,
Another idea,
Another object of consciousness.
The present,
Which we never know until it is past,
Is therefore also an idea,
A notion,
An object of consciousness.
None of them is real.
Each is imaginary.
Time does not exist.
The eternal present,
The now moment,
The interval between thoughts,
Which we normally never perceive,
Alone is real.
I am all the time.
I am not this and that.
This and that are never I.
Nothing is mine,
Possessed by me.
I am everything.
The individual is apparent but inexistent,
Like the reflection of the moon in a puddle.
Buddhism is a way of life.
Is it not also a way out of life?
Really the simple fact of consciousness is consciousness itself and reality.
The fact of being conscious is being is real,
Is the only self there is.
The only you is what you do.
There is no doer,
Only an action.
How could there be an actor and action?
Action involves time and there is no one to act.
Therefore action itself is actor.
It follows that purpose has no place in a relative world,
Since there is nothing to be overcome.
Nothing has an aim.
Nothing is achieving anything in reality.
In fact,
Nothing is moving.
That is just illusion,
Which proceeds from the dualistic outlook that creates the notion of time.
The Bhagavad Gita insists the work must be performed for its own sake and not for its result.
The Tao Te Ching and Zen say the same thing.
Taoism,
Advaita,
Mahayana all know it.
All say that in their own way.
Spontaneity bypasses the processes of the conceptual mind.
Our ubiquitous error lies in mistaking concepts for reality.
For instance,
Our idea of a body,
Which is only an idea for an actual body.
There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the reality it may have bears any resemblance to our concept.
Spontaneity is just acting directly.
Direct action on the part of the reality that we are.
Instead of indirect action,
That is action,
Attributed to the instrument that transmits it.
The instrument,
The psychosomatic apparatus,
Carries out the action subject to the concepts of time,
Space and duality,
Which are its limitations.
But the action alone exists.
There is no actor.
And the only begetter of the action is our reality.
Do we remember that the absolute and the relative are also a pair of complementaries?
It follows that neither can exist independently of the other,
And that everything relative is inherently absolute.
A hierarchy of dualities may be convenient for analytical purposes,
But it would be unnecessary to suppose that it actually exists.
We may be sure,
Therefore,
That the subject-object duality,
Which we are,
Is also directly the absolute and the relative.
And since the absolute is divisible infinitely or not at all,
Each of us is the absolute absolutely.
