Awakening is Not Just About a Quiet Mind

So one of the things about awakening experiences is that they're not just a matter of quietening the mind.

That in and of itself is not enough.

Cows,

After all,

Have a pretty quiet mind,

But they're not awakened.

Children have a sense of wonder and excitement at the world,

But they're not awakened.

Not in the sense that I'm talking about.

Awakening is a matter of a quiet mind,

Seeing things as they really are,

Seeing things with an understanding that this is how things actually are.

This is what it actually is.

What I'm seeing here,

What I'm experiencing here,

This is of the nature of things.

This is how the world works.

It's seeing with understanding.

It takes a quietened mind to see with understanding and to understand how the world is unfolding,

That the world is unfolding,

That me and the world are unfolding together,

That what happens within me and the way in which I am processing what is happening is intimately involved in what is happening as it were outside of me,

Although at the time inside and outside don't really make sense as categories.

But one sees oneself as unfolding with the world,

Unfolding with the universe all around.

Now that understanding of dependent arising,

Of conditionality,

Of the way in which things emerge in dependence on prior conditions and change in dependence on prior conditions and therefore are interlinked with one another intimately in a kind of vast universal butterfly effect where every single act is influencing every single event and yet no event has any substance or thingness or selfness behind it.

That we'll talk about when we discuss conditionality and what it really means.

But for now just to say that it's not just a case of quietening the mind,

It's not just a case of stilling one's thoughts.

Those stilled thoughts,

That quietened mind needs to come to the experience with an intuitive grasping of the idea of conditionality.

So there are some really key ideas that one needs to get hold of and needs to reflect on repeatedly to really allow them to penetrate deeply into one's mind so that when the mind quietens one comes to see things in a way that is actually in line with how things really are.

Awakening is seeing things as they actually are,

Experiencing things as they actually are.

And that as they actually are-ness is that everything is fleeting,

Everything is transitory,

Everything is connected to everything.

There's no selfness,

There's no thingness,

There's no stickiness anywhere.

And it's truly wonderful.