Non-duality, Zen, Advaita, Enlightenment, Awakening -- What's it all about?
It is the dissolution of every answer to that question.
Everything and nothing. The sounds of traffic, the smell of rain, the hum of a vacuum cleaner, the cheeping of a bird, rain splashing in the street, colors, shapes, sensations, breathing, seeing, hearing, thinking, dreaming, waking, appearing, disappearing, being, not being -- this vast, ever-changing, ever-present, boundlessness.
Thought divides this boundlessness up into mind and body, form and emptiness, awareness and content, relative and absolute, spiritual and mundane, enlightenment and delusion, me and everything else. The dividing lines are always imaginary. Reality is seamless.
In the story of my life as a person, something always seems to be lacking. This phantom "me" feels separate and incomplete and tries desperately to get somewhere and become somebody. Finally, this "self" may seek enlightenment, striving for its own disappearance. But what exactly is this self? Was it ever here to begin with?
Is there really somebody making choices and calling the shots, or do "my" thoughts and actions appear here in the same way that the brain, the breath, the wind, the clouds, the trees, and the galaxies appear here?
Who wakes up? Does the mirage wake up from the mirage? Is clarity or confusion personal, does it have an owner, or is there simply weather appearing and disappearing, sometimes clear and sometimes cloudy? Is awakening a future event, or does that word point to the utter simplicity of Here and Now?
This boundless emptiness being and beholding everything cannot be grasped or possessed. Boundlessness is completely inescapable and thus unattainable. This is what you cannot not be. There is nothing else. If you are searching for it, the very searching is already it.
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