an encounter dialogue

Professor Enlightenment was silent and said nothing.


Conditionality then arose suddenly and asked Professor Enlightenment: "What is the mind? What is it to pacify the mind?"

[The master] answered: "You should not posit a mind, nor should you attempt to pacify it—this is called 'pacified.'"


Question: "If there is no mind, how can one cultivate enlightenment?"

Answer: "Enlightenment is not a thought of the mind, so how could it occur in the mind?"


Question: "If it is not thought of by the mind, how should it be thought of?"

Answer: "If there are thoughts then there is mind, and for there to be mind is contrary to enlightenment. If there is no thought, then there is no mind, and for there to be no mind is true enlightenment."


Question: "What 'things' are there in no-mind?"

Answer: "No-mind is without 'things.' The absence of things is the Naturally True. The Naturally True is the Great Enlightenment."


Question: "What should I do?"

Answer: "You should do nothing."


Question: "I understand this teaching now even less than before."

Answer: "There truly is no understanding of the Dharma. Do not seek to understand it."


Question: "Who teaches these words?"

Answer: "It is as I have been asked."


Question: "What does it mean to say that it is as you have been asked?"

Answer: "If you contemplate [your own] questions, the answers will be understood [thereby] as well."


At this Conditionality was silent and he thought everything through once again.


Professor Enlightenment asked: "Why do you not say anything?"

Conditionality answered: "I do not perceive even the most minute bit of anything that can be explained."


At this point Professor Enlightenment said to Conditionality: "You would appear to have now perceived the True Principle."


Conditionality asked: "Why [do you say] 'would appear to have perceived' and not that I 'correctly perceived' [the True Principle]?"

Enlightenment answered: "What you have now perceived is the nonexistence of all dharmas. This is like the non-Buddhists who study how to make themselves invisible, but cannot destroy their shadow and footprints."


Conditionality asked: "How can one destroy both form and shadow?"

Enlightenment answered: "Being fundamentally without mind and its sensory realms, you must not willfully generate the ascriptive view (or, "perception") of impermanence."


from ‘Treatise on the Transcendence of Cognition’

the apocalypse of aum dada

I took a ride this afternoon and was almost hit twice by oncoming cars swerving into the wrong lane.

It appeared to be a message, repeated, and if I didn’t get it, there’d be a third one I wouldn’t be able to get—it would get me.

I knew what it meant almost as soon I realized they were messages—surrender is not a negative movement.

It begins as such, when one begins to realize one’s sense of self, that egoic sense of I, is purely a conceptual one.

It is at this level one uses the thorn to remove the thorn, that is, one uses the mind to remove identification with the mind.

This is the yoga of wisdom, and it is in its nature, negative, a neti-neti approach. Who am I? Not this; not this.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, though, also emphasizes the positive result of such a negative and self-destructive approach.

Once the objects of this self-identification are removed, the I am this or this or this and so on and so on, only the I Am remains.

This pure “I Am” is all there is, pure non-conceptual self-existence; it is the only thing that cannot be denied.

And the whole world is its creation! Mind has always been its tool although the mind ran away with world.

Ultimately then, the surrender of the egoic self is not so much a surrender as it is the unavoidable awakening triumph of I Am.

Since the egoic self is just shifting conceptual identifications entirely mind-created, there is really no one there to surrender.

This is why it is said all one can do is understand. The understanding of the falsehood leads to a natural lessening of self-identification.

One cannot believe in one that doesn’t exist. The power of the false declines gradually until there is a sudden final letting-go.

It is the final letting-go that will appear as something completely negative to the remaining, almost now purely habitual, egoic self.

It is as if it knows it doesn’t exist except in concept, yet still holds on to the habit of that conceptual existence. Maybe dangerously so.

Therefore when faced with some line-in-the-sand kind of action (or non-action), the surrender of the egoic self is a deathlike one.

Alternatively, when vestiges of egoic self are utilized as a finishing tool, it becomes clear the hand that holds the tool isn’t the tool.

Such letting-go then is not a negative movement, but a positive inevitability: the tool surrenders to the hand that’s always held it: I Am!

As always, these concepts are subtle ones, and they are merely words used by consciousness to talk to itself…

in the understanding the ultimate reality of that pointless point of pure awareness is available only to itself—and not its tool of mind.

Jai Guru Deva Om—I Am That.