How dreamlike is this life ….
Bringing experiences to mind from the past – they are like shimmering dreams, with a life of their own, never quite the same, and seemingly not like the experience in the present which seemed to inspire them.
And that experience in the present, which had previously seemed so solid and real – the more I come back to awareness, the less that which seems to appear in awareness has any solidity at all.
It’s funny – you’d think that the more aware you were, the more crystal clear things would get, wouldn’t you?
Vividness and clarity
And yet it doesn’t seem to be like that. Yes, there’s a vividness to phenomena as the mind settles and things are more ‘clearly’ seen amongst the spaciousness of a still mind. Yet as you look, things melt away in that awareness, and shimmer and slide before the mind’s eye. Like mirages, thoughts, sights and sounds seem more brightly there, yet present nothing more solid to awareness than dreamlike illusions.
It’s a strange conundrum, that things appear more bright and clear as mind settles, yet simultaneously they lose their assumed solidity. Simultaneously more there, and yet less there.
And all the criteria used to describe this, and analyse this … also the same way … the sharpness of the intellect, and vision, which brings things into focus, and the melting away of things once in that gaze ….
hmmm …..
This is a little synchronicity for me, too. That was a wonderful quote by Stephen Batchelor to synchronize with your musings. Both of you speak of something that Akilesh and I have each experienced recently – that profound feeling of dropping into and resting in ‘not knowing’. There is actually great freedom here, to release oneself from having to know, from having to figure it all out, and particularly in glimpsing the spaciousness from the vantage point of stillness. If we let go of our need for organization, structure or control a bit, we are able to ‘encounter this mystery’ and find freedom, and a subtle feeling of peace that flows there.
Thank you, Chodpa.
Interesting synchronicity!
I came across this quote today, from Stephen Batchelor:
“As a negation, emptiness can offer no definitive, positive revelation of Reality. As this awareness becomes stiller and clearer, things become not only more vivid but also more baffling. The more deeply we know something in this way, the more deeply we don’t know it. The ultimate ambiguity of experience is that it is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. No matter how well one may know something, at the same time one has to confess ‘I don’t really know what this is.’ One has to let go of the insistence to pin things down in a categorical way. One is invited to encounter their mystery.”