Also Thusness (my spiritual mentor) just wrote today to someone:
Hi
David, thanks for sharing.
First there is the direct apprehension of Clarity/Awareness.
Next is recognizing the apparent separation of clarity and appearance caused by a seeming perceptual knot.
Then
there is resolving of this separation and what’s left is appearances /
phenomena / cognized, seen, heard, tasted, smelled and sensed
It
is interesting that the resolving of the separation for your case is
not by way of subsuming into an all-encompassing non-dual
awareness/space; however the overcoming of the center/agent can arise
(from my experience) by:
1. By a prolong training in a state of no-mind.
2. Seeing through the center that the center has always been assumed, it is extra. In reality it does not exist.
3. Seeing through that the fundamental nature of the perceptual knot itself
4. A combination of above
Do you overcome the center by any of the above or by a different approach?
..........
Hi David,
Nice meeting you too and thanks for sharing your experiences…felt a little nostalgic after knowing your Taoist background.
Your
description of the little girl’s stare is beautiful. The stare cuts
through not only one’s discursive thoughts but also pierces through the
living Presence (the first level of koan of one’s original face) and
right into the fundamental essence of anatta. Even from your mere
description, there is still the wordless transmission of headlessness
that penetrates deep into one’s bone marrow and boils the blood. The
stare preserves the lineage that is beyond words. Thank You.
For
me, the initial insight of anatta was mainly what I have stated in
scenario 2 -- seeing through the center that the center has always been
assumed, it is extra. In reality it does not exist.
Up
until this point of anatta, I was very much a non-conceptual advocator,
less words more experience. I have heard of the word “Kong
空”(Emptinesss) numerous times but never exactly know what it truly
meant. The idea of Emptiness struck me probably “2 years later when I
came across the chariot analogy of the Buddhist sage Nāgasena. There
was an instant recognition that the analogy is precisely the insight of
anatta and anatta is the real-time experiential taste of the “Emptiness”
in relation to self/Self except that it is now replaced with “chariot”
in the example.
The
insight was huge and I began to re-examine all my experiences from the
perspective of "Emptiness". This includes mind-body dropped, the
impression of hereness and nowness, internal and externality, space and
time...etc. Essentially a journey of deconstruction, that is, extending
the same insight of anatta from the perspective of emptiness to all
phenomena, aggregates, mental constructs and even to non-conceptual
sensory experiences. This led to the taste of instant liberation at
spot of not only the background (self) but also the cognized, seen,
heard, tasted, smelled and sensed without the need to subsume either
subject into object or object into subject but liberates whatever arises
at spot.
The
deconstruction process reveals not only the taste of freedom from
freeing the energy that is sustaining the constructs (in fact tremendous
energy is needed to maintain the mental constructs) but also a
continuous formation of a perceptual knot that blinds us in a very
subtle way and that relates to scenario 3 -- Seeing through the
fundamental nature of the perceptual knot itself. Seeing the nature of
perceptual knot involves in seeing clearly certain very persistent and
habitual patterns that continues to shape our mode of knowing, analysis
and experience like a magical spell. The perceptual knot is the
habitual tendency to reify and Emptiness is the antidote for this
reifying tendency.
The
journey of emptying also convinces me the importance of having the
right view of Emptiness even though it is only an intellectual grasped
initially. Non-conceptuality has its associated diseases…lol…therefore I
always advocate not falling to conceptuality and yet not ignoring
conceptuality. That is, strict non-conceptuality is not necessary, only
that habitual pattern of reification needs be severed. Perhaps this
relates to the zen wild fox koan of not falling into cause and effect
and not ignoring cause and effect. A koan that Hakuin remarked as
"difficult to pass through".
Not falling, not ignoring.
A word different, a world of difference.
And the difference causes a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes!
A long post and time to return to silence.
Nice chat and happy journey David!