I ask, “What is truly there?” It says, “Don’t speak of me.”
From chaos springs the seeking of calm. From hunger, the seeking of food. Out of ignorance, the seeking of enlightenment. The swing runs after its opposite, but the closer it gets the less it is impressed, the more they look alike.
Things meet halfway, thirst after water and water after thirst. Neither chaos nor perfect calm, neither ignorance nor enlightenment, is the goal but rather all that happens in between, where the boy and the image coincide in the mirror.
The seeker of truth will realize that his seeking was unnecessary and the truth an empty idea.
To strive after something, one must first notice it as a thing to strive after, one must believe in distinctions.
One who resists against the hands of a clock will be cut in half, and the two halves will forever be seeking and passing each other without recognition.
True seeking must culminate at the futility of seeking, for in complete disarmament all that appeared as the other will cease to be; forms will cease to claim the Being that always belonged to the heart.
And all this too is another misleading fragment; the fool side of the wise will fall into the trap of anticipation, a something to be done, another reading, another meditation, another transcendent thought, a change of states, etc.. As if true things depend on anything other than themselves; as if there were any conditions of realization; as if realization was an event.
But nothing needs to be done and nothing needs to change; to desire to change one’s state of consciousness is to have misunderstood it all; that place has no place; that is not a state among other states; there are no words for it, for no one has ever spoken it. There’s no path to it; there is no one that knows it and no one that doesn’t know it.
Resistance and contraction are the principles of appearance. When not even a muscle twitches, things are realized to be here rather than out there.
NOEMAYA 
I would have to work hard to understand this piece. This is about something that cannot be grasped. I would like to see this written is less abstract form. Can this be said more simply? Perhaps not.
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I cannot see it expressed any simpler as I see it. Working hard to understand goes against the spirit of the idea of a pathless journey; that would amount to insisting on a map to translate things into our particular frames of reference. Sometimes there are no maps and if things don’t land immediately, perhaps it’s meant for another time or another state.
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I guess it depends on who a piece is written for?
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Must true seeking culminate at the futility of seeking? Why not at the futility of a certain approach to life? Allen Wheelis, “The Seeker” (novel) himself, bequeaths:
“Knowing how to live is oneness with the world. I die of the hunger of oneness. I find it never. I read about it, and the words are ghosts. Dharma is not for me, nor ‘the way’ of Lao Tzu. I feel it in the patience of trees, the wind in their branches sighs about it. I hear it in the rote of the surf and the song of the lark. I see it in animals and in children. I touch it but cannot make it mine. Mine! I’m trying to grab it, I suppose, ravage it back into this moated castle, and that’s the trouble — this division of everything into self and others which I can’t escape because it’s not something that limits me, it is me.”
Contrary to what others might argue, this separate self, this “ego,” is not mere illusion. The experience of alienation is real. And what might be the point of it?
Radhakrishnan, whose birthday is tomorrow (hence “Teacher’s Day” in India), acknowledges that “All suffering is due to a second, an obstacle; [but] all delight arises from the realization of something withheld, by the overcoming of obstacles, by the surpassing of the limit.” “The play of the two,” he adds, “is the life of the universe.” Jaspers went so far as to say that “What is not realized in communication is not yet, what is not ultimately grounded in it is without adequate foundation. The truth begins with two.” “And Life laughed. Because it finally remembered. The one who was hiding and the one who was seeking were never two. They were one Being, playing both sides of the game. God had split Himself in two — just to have someone to talk to.”
“Maybe, [Amanda] Gefter speculates, we don’t live in either a first-person world or a third-person world, as implied by idealism and materialism, respectively. Maybe we live in a second-person world, and the fundamental entity of existence is not ‘I’ or ‘It’ but ‘You.’ ‘The second person always deals in relations,’ Gefter explains, ‘because every ‘You’ implies an ‘I’ interacting with the ‘You.’ This view ‘is definitely not materialism,’ Gefter says, ‘but it’s not idealism either.”
What are you striving after here? You tell us: “NOEMAYA, a blog for sensitive souls and fellow life travelers, strives to spread the word about the presence of an eternal center, a source of infinite bliss and wisdom, that lies in the heart of every human being.”
“We need not trouble ourselves about the etymology of the word,” Radhakrishnan advises. “To us, it is clear. Brahman means reality, which grows, breathes or swells.” “Sometimes it is argued that it is of the very nature of the Absolute to overflow and realise possibilities. The great symbol of the sun which is used in Hindu thought, Plato’s system and Persian mythology signifies the generous selfgiving and ecstasy of the Absolute, which overflows, and gives itself freely and generously to all. Timaeus says in Plato that the created world is there because the All-good wants his goodness to flow out upon it. The Indian figure of lila makes the creation of the universe an act of playfulness. Play is generally the expression of ideal possibilities. It is its own end and its own continuous reward. The Absolute mind has a perfect realm of ideal being, and is free creativity as well. Though the creation of the world is an incident in the never-ending activity of the Absolute, it satisfies a deep want in God. The world is as indispensable to God as God is to the world” (Radhakrishnan).
Anticipation need not be a trap. There is always something of Oneself to share, and there is bona fide joy and excitement at the prospect of doing so. The result of true seeking? “Thus at last the Ego, the mortal immortal self — disclosed at first in darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe — finds its true identity. For a long period it is baffled in trying to understand what it is. It goes through a vast experience. It is tormented by the sense of separation and alienation — alienation from other people, and persecution by all the great powers and forces of the universe; and it is pursued by a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable. The hour of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds at last its own true being” (Edward Carpenter).
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I hardly hear you my friend. There’s so much of others in the things you say, quotations, big names, etc.. I am not interested in any of those people or their experiences; big names have stopped to mean much for me. I am curious what is truly yours if you were to drop all of inherited ideas and ideals and influences. Looking forward to hearing about you.
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There’s nothing of others in the things I say — at bottom there are no others (How can a nondualist disagree?). Names can distract, sure. But as to what is “truly [mine],” your curiosity here must always remain, for you are interested in a figment. If somehow, magically, I could “drop all inherited ideas and ideals and influences” I should be akin to the American feral child “Genie Wiley.” “The Stoic’s perception of man’s weakness was not radical enough. He failed to see that the [individual] mind in itself is empty, dependent on what is put into it…” (Jaspers).
Do you really believe that you have decided what you are interested in? “And never forget the crucial point: the facts about whatever we hold dear—our highest values—are themselves very much a product of the memes that have spread most successfully. We may want to claim that we are in charge of what our summum bonum is to be, but this is mystical nonsense…” (D. Dennett).
In an episode of “Closer to Truth” (titled “Why Believe in God?”) host Robert Lawrence Kuhn faces some tough questions from an English Anglican priest named Sarah Coakley. She forces Kuhn to confess that his utmost desire is not to believe in God but to avoid fooling/duping himself. She is on point, observing, “You seem to be operating with an extraordinarily individualistic notion of the intellectual life, in which you and you alone are responsible for everything you do and think…you have this rather strange, abstract, arid vision of, a sort of space in which you would be completely uncontaminated by any previous authoritative figure.”
If you hear little/none of this, so be it. Perhaps it’s meant for another time or another state. When Dr. B. guesses it depends on who a piece is written for, there is ultimately only One candidate. You refer to me as your friend. I am inclined to think of you as my brother. Arguably neither of us is in the state to transcend or go beyond these congenial names for “another.”
As always, thank you.
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