Gnosis

ch. 3

CHAPTER THREE BREAKTHROUGH The conflict nexus eventually begets the rational mind and this marks a critical point of breakthrough toward the emergence of individuated holistic intelligence. Some individuals are thoughtful enough to be curious about their existence and its purpose, or to inquire into whether or not there may even be a purpose. Neither searching for nor finding answers to basic questions regarding purposeful existence, and thus not satisfying their primal curiosity and longing, individuals fall into distress, bewilderment, and all the unsatisfactory conditions of anxiety which ignorance sustains. Any individual who is curious about the real implications of purposeful existence must eventually comprehend that all confusions and doubts are rooted in that ignorance. Symptomatic stresses such as frustration and anxiety are generally submerged in the lower subconscious levels of mind and memory where they cannot be confronted or examined clearly. So, in a bewildered attempt to counter the effects of frustration and anxiety, individuals and groups become attracted and attached in identity with various formats of false or partial values, false religions, superstitious beliefs, misconceptions of all sorts, and the inevitable delusive compulsion will further beset them. The pursuit of the false, the insignificant, and the valueless produces thereafter a morose and unhappy life. Those with undeveloped capacity for reason cannot understand the difference, in some cases, between the true and the false, or between the significant and the insignificant. Only through the development of a rational mind can recognition of verities and clear understanding progress. The continuity of conceptual delusion negates any possibility for reason or rationality to be developed; it is the absence of rational thinking which nourishes and sustains the motivation to believe in the dogmatic suppositions of religious theories or pseudo-science without relying on proven facts and established evidence. Individuals who participate in such delusions are seeking to escape from the turmoils of frustration and from the tensions of anxiety and all the afflictions associated with those. People become seekers of a futuristic glorious existence in a faraway celestial realm because they desire to escape their present world of anxiety, fear, gloom, and dissatisfaction inherent in the always temporary and dissolving experiences of seeking an always receding happiness. This is the common mental-set of the average person who attempts to override feelings of discomfort and insecurity with replacements of physical, emotional, and psychological gratifications. All motives for seeking such forms of gratification are obvious manifestations of pseudo-volition directed toward egoic security based on feelings of fear; the seeker wants to counter the fears by adopting hope – the placebo for fear – all of which is dysfunctional and unevolved concept-making. When the individual realizes that his conflict status is nearly perpetual, broken only by short gaps of pleasure or pleasure-seeking and associated temporal fulfillments, then he reaches a critical point in the real progress of his personal evolution. At this point the individual begins to consciously strive with determination to try to understand the real causes and processes which contribute to his afflicted condition. For him this is a new and purposeful motivation of significance which gives birth to a restructuring of thought processes along lines of rational sequence. Sequential, rational thought is active, linear concept-making, and when grounded in established facts and evidence, can correctly observe patterns of cause and effect. These patterns then become more evident and familiar, obvious in the sense observations and reasoning of the individual. Sequential, linear thought eventually matures into the capacity for multi-referencing matrix thinking that can recognize the integral, interrelated functioning of the matrix of existence. Thus, the conditions of conflict in the nexus of the existential matrix induce the individual to seek relief and escape from unsatisfactory modes of existence, and this eventually culminates in an intolerable crisis which begets the rational mind. This crisis is the realization that unsatisfactory and painful existence cannot be ended until the foundational structures and their operative sequential effects that are creating the conditions of conflict are recognized and then interrupted or dissolved entirely away. The origins and structures of any aspect of the conditional nexus can be determined only through rational thinking. The capacity for rational thinking increases in degrees diametrically equal to the capacity for maintaining concentrated attentiveness to specific topics, objects, and events, and how they are related and interrelated within conditioned flux in the totality of the phenomenal matrix. In this manner, skill in purposeful attentive focus is developed, the rational mind takes its birth, and evolutionary progress resumes. Having consigned oneself to the path of progress, it is then concomitant that one meets with great teachers and helpers along the way. These people may be anyone, even the most ignorant and ignoble, yet to one who perceives at a higher level of Gnosis, all are teachers since they represent conditions to be fully understood. Also in one's travels along the way there come to light great and profound texts left from antiquity to those who may in future times profit from the knowledge that great adepts and masters have recorded in them. Most importantly, all the knowledge and instruction one may gain through accumulated learning in esoteric subjects and their pragmatic application in daily living, is the fact that progress is more rapidly made by the acts of subtraction rather than addition. There are many and various obstructions and pitfalls on the way, some so obnoxious as to nearly curtail any further progress – or even set the traveler into a reversal – an entanglement within degenerative activities. The modus operandi of an adept traveler on the way, therefore, is to subtract these obstructions by identifying and realizing their detrimental effects. The most harmful of obstructions are false views. False views are simply eliminated by recognizing their falsity. Nothing has to be added to one's knowledge; no addition need be pursued. All the teachers, helpers, and texts of real value always teach the art of subtraction, transcending delusions. To do this efficiently, one must by necessity learn the art of dialectic reasoning to the level of perfect ratiocination. Willful attentive skill develops exacting ratiocination. Willful attentive skill is the capacity to be developed for the elimination of ignorance and nescience from the non-lucid mind. When trying to understand what mind and consciousness really are, an individual starts looking inward at his own subtle internal functions; he finds that his fundamental perceptual awareness is virtually always in motion, involved in acts of momentary attention and concept-making. This is called mind. When these instants of attention are mechanical and automated to the level of reactivity, they are not a willful placement of attention, but the reactive activities of ingrained, mechanistic automatism. This is lax, passive attention to any object or event; it is habitual distraction and semi-conscious reactiveness. On the other hand, active attention is willful attentiveness toward a specifically selected object, event, or topic, a purposefully placed, deliberate focusing of attention. Active attention is the determined directing of concentration, whereas passive attention is the semi-conscious reactive mode of awareness, perceptivity gone astray and lost in the automated distractions of daydreaming and semi-sleep. Both of these aspects of attention, passive and active modes, are necessarily confined to some object, but only active attention is the mode of awareness defined by deliberate placement. In the developmental stages of the evolving individual, the only real volition, or willful choice, is the choosing of a suitable idea or object for inspection and perhaps for analysis; doing so, it is suspected, may somehow benefit the contemplator by producing knowledge. The most important benefit, however, will be the development of an exacting ratiocinative ability. Until this point of recognition in the personal evolution of the individual there has previously been no significant willful placement of attention regarding the operations and functions of the perceptual and thinking processes. The motivation to develop the ability for willful attentive skill, or mindful reflection and contemplation is the initial essential factor required for the higher development of exacting ratiocination. Ratiocination is the highest level of scrutiny in rational conceptualization and the only possibility for superseding the limitations of nescience and errant suppositions. Only the exacting ratiocinative mind can be used to understand the mechanics of disharmony and the mechanics of harmony. Therefore, the development of the exacting ratiocinative capacity of the mind is crucial, for without this development there can never be any certainty of understanding or recognition of truth. Only recognition can disrupt absorption in delusive compulsion. Whether or not the individual understands and recognizes the truth does not change reality; whether or not the individual understands and recognizes the truth does not stop the mechanism of the causal nexus. But understanding and recognition can disrupt absorption in delusive compulsion which is a component of the dysfunctional psychological apparatus. The continuity of presumptuous thought based on falsehood or conjecture must be broken. A gap or break in the continuity of the incessant perpetuity of delusion and distraction has to be intentionally created. This gap is then slowly nurtured and matured until it is no longer a short gap in the long uninterrupted flow of distraction and semi-consciousness; with practice this can become a total absence of distraction. The absence of nescience, along with the absence of distraction in semi-conscious passive attention is the vital prerequisite for achieving unbound free consciousness in lucidity. When there remain moments of nescient thought construction and traces of semi-conscious distractedness then there is yet a lack of perfect attentive skill. With the maturation of willful attentive skill comes the disruption of absorption. Long-repeated disruption eventuates in attentive stabilization. Disruption of the absorption in nescient thought processes is critical and is begun by creating gaps in inattentiveness. Inattentiveness is disrupted by fostering short moments of attentiveness. The basis of nescient dualistic concept-making and distracted inattentiveness is the base propensity, the ego-notion. The objectifying of one's subjectivity is the dichotomy of errant perception to be transcended, and one who has stabilized his attention perfectly does not fluctuate back into conceptual aberration. This means one must learn to detect and recognize the very beginnings of distraction and gain a decisive understanding of its mechanics. When automated, reactive concept-making, the usual daydreaming, is stopped by attentiveness to present mental situations themselves, always based on the ego-notion, then the ego-notion will simultaneously subside and automated thought activity will stop. This is the nondual, nondichotomous realization of one's true identity as pure consciousness but possible only in the total absence of the counterfeit identity, the base propensity, ego. As long as one continues to suppose he is an ego and others are egos – considered as separate body-mind entities, then everything else in the objective realms will be automatically presumed to exist as separate, isolated entities also. The only way to promote the absence of repetitive fluctuation between lucidity and semi-conscious daydream activity is to attentively continue to create gaps in the continuity of distraction. With practice these gaps can be expanded so that eventually they last longer than the continuity of distraction. Lucidity becomes the continuity when the influences of nescience and semi-conscious daydream activity have been eradicated and when the five aspects of consciousness activity are no longer in differentiation. To achieve stabilization in lucidity it is necessary to understand the different aspects of consciousness activity. These five are:LucidityWaking thoughtWaking dreamDream sleepDeep sleep The life of the individual is focused in one or the other of these aspects throughout every day and night. With the achievement of the continuity of lucidity the first four differentiated aspects of consciousness activity are integrated into holistic lucidity. Holistic lucidity is the very ground of being and existence, timeless and spaceless, beyond all causality. With lucidity one experiences the silent depth of presence. In waking thought consciousness one is usually focused on coarse external phenomena with willfully directed thought. In waking dream one is focused in the mechanical mental mechanism of daydream activity with the senses semi-functional. In both the waking thought aspect and the waking dream aspect of consciousness activity there is only a semblance of actively directed attention. In dream sleep one is focused in the mental mechanism of dream while the body is immobile and the senses nearly non-functional. In both the waking dream and dream sleep aspects the focus is in the subtle internal realm of mental imagery. In deep sleep there is the silence of dreamlessness with no imagery and no thoughts; here the mind is without particular focus and no linear thought functioning. These four aspects of consciousness activity are differentiations from the fundamental primal lucidity. Lucidity itself actually is not an aspect of anything other than itself, nor does it emanate from any previous cause or condition. To see it as a fifth aspect of consciousness activity is not correct although it can so be conventionally described. Lucidity, or pure consciousness, is self-existent and eternal, the hidden intrinsic knowing essence of all and everything and everyone. Lucid pure consciousness is the truth of all existence; it is the only one subjective permanence. The other four aspects of it are its differentiations and permutations, but all essentially concomitant with one another. Waking thought consciousness is the field of experience and creativity in the coarse phenomenal matrix, but with the common individual the waking state is not very wakeful at all; it is obfuscated and obstructed by the accumulations of impressions made by previous faulty perspectives and errant discriminations. These turn into tendencies and predispositions which are at the root of continuing nescience. People are almost constantly in a mixed state of awareness while awake, between dream sleep and waking thought; this is waking dream. Waking dream is the pervading daydream, a condition of sleep mixed in with the aspect of waking thought. Most persons are habitually absorbed in daydream throughout the majority of each day, so the waking thought aspect is actually ruled and obscured by an affliction of the mind, having become habitually mechanical, automated and warped by discriminative dysfunction. The afflicted individual does not recognize this as being his nearly continual condition of consciousness activity. Although most persons are convinced they are awake and aware, they do not recognize their superficial and mechanical condition of automatism. Theirs is a condition of confined consciousness, a mode of mental activity in which perceptive boundaries and the limitations of nescience become obstructions. In both daydream and dream sleep the mechanical tendency of the mind is to complete whatever has been left unconsummated and unfulfilled in the desire-nature of the individual. Ego-based desire is at the root of frustration and frustration is a basis of stress and tension, so the mechanisms of the mind automatically formulate imaginative scenarios in dream sleep and in waking dream, creating a fantasy of imaginative fulfillment in order to lessen tension and relieve the effects of frustration so the nervous system of the physical organism can have a period of rest and temporary recuperation during and after each day of waking experience. In the waking state tension can be somewhat overridden or ignored, or perhaps temporarily suppressed when a person gets entangled in distraction or entertainment or in an obscuring daydream. Desires that have ego as their base engender these feelings of incompletion and unfulfilment, but upon the entering into dream sleep these tensions cannot be willfully suppressed and a dream display will unfurl itself in order to imaginatively complete the unfulfilled desire. Dream fantasies are unintentional, automatic, and mechanical, and they occur without willful act of attention; the dream sleep state is completely automated. Daydreaming and other distracted modes of attention are transcended when lucidity is present because lucidity is without ego; ego and dream are complimentary. Dreaming is ego-based but lucidity demands egolessness. In the state of lucid presence all dreaming must stop because the base for dreaming is absent. When the fantasies of dream are known to be what they really are, there is a possibility for dreaming to be suspended and eventually terminated. Dreaming individuals live in lower desires, fears, anxieties, and delusion. When dreaming is regularly noticed in the waking aspect of consciousness activity it is the beginning of the path leading to dream purgation and the overcoming of delusion, but without awareness of these facts nothing can be done. With the development of attentive skill it will be noticed that nearly the whole day of so-called "waking" is spent absorbed in the flow of intermittent mechanistic automatism, the activity of propensities and tendencies that always are erupting in daydream displays. Becoming more and more continuously aware in a vigilant presence negates all dreaming and allows all the layers of subconscious patterns to dissipate through the portal of lucid waking presence. Becoming aware of daydream projections is the prerequisite to becoming aware also of dream sleep projective displays. This procedural sequence, developed only in the mature contemplative, is necessary in order to interject willful intent into the processes of waking dream, then into the dream sleep state. With practice and the development of contemplative skill, willful intent can become useful in the dream sleep aspect as a tool to eradicate unwanted impressions and patterns in the subconscious. One can, upon waking from a dream display in dream sleep, remembering it clearly, fall quickly back asleep with the intention to continue the scenario of the dream or "replay" it once again, making alterations and adjustments within it. In this way, parts of a dream which reveal unwanted, unsatisfactory, or unwholesome attitudes and tendencies can be replaced with action sequences based on virtuous intent. This is a powerfully effective contemplative device for progressively purifying the subconscious of obstructive impressions. With skillfulness and stability in lucid presence all unintentional automated dreaming will eventually altogether cease. In the waking thought and waking dream aspects the ego-notion is dominant. In the dream sleep aspect the ego-notion is somewhat weaker; in deep dreamless sleep it is absent. Deep dreamless sleep is nearly total unawareness and unconscious dormancy in the non-contemplative common person. In waking thought, waking dream, and dream sleep, awareness always has an object of focus, but during deep sleep there is no object of focus, naught objective to be conscious of. Deep sleep is an absence of mental function because all thought and image projection are then suspended. If one can become truly aware in waking aspect with vigilant presence, then in the dream states this presence becomes dominant and the mechanistic dream activities cease; then the deep sleep aspect can also be consciously experienced with presence. Thus, the differentiated aspects of consciousness activity can be integrated into holistic, lucid pure presence where there are no longer any differentiations or dichotomies whatsoever. Centered in this lucidity one has returned to his deepest primordial nature. Deeply within the truth of all being and existence, everything then becomes obvious in a holographic, totalistic perspective. This lucid pure consciousness is that from which all began, from which all is phenomenally manifest and apparently differentiated, in which all is contained, and to which all must obviously belong and be identical with. Lucid pure consciousness is the precursor of all apparent differentiation, coarse or subtle but is itself beyond all spatiotemporality, as well as being identical with it. It is the only constant reality. It is the only thing that does not change in its essence, yet it is the essence also of all flux and change in the totality of the existential matrix. It is absolute simplicity and at the same time absolute complexity, homogeneity as well as heterogeneity. To enter into the totalistic presence of the eternal and infinite, the evolving individual must learn to integrate lucidity with the other aspects of consciousness activity. The absence of nescience-based fluctuations within the differentiated aspects of consciousness activity is attentive stabilization. Stabilization disengages the continuity of dichotomous perceptions. The individual who has become skillful in clear attentiveness and firm in purpose is no longer distracted and subservient to the conditions of nescience. The whole flow of dichotomous perception is disengaged from when an individual stabilizes attention and is not distracted or in the throes of daydream. In the absence of distraction the mind is not aberrated or susceptible to distortion, but can operate in present wakefulness. When disturbing afflictive attitudes are not present, then stabilized lucidity can be present. Attentive stabilization means not being engrossed in fixations of attention, but being constant and stable in non-fixated free attention. This stabilization thoroughly dismantles all structured impressions of delusion and the individual can then perfectly abandon attachment to habitual mechanical tendencies. In such clear perceptive attitude there is no preference or prejudice, no accepting or rejecting of external or internal events. When dualistic biases are absent all phenomena are recognized truly as interrelated components of the flux of the co-emergent matrix of objectivity. Stabilization in astute wakefulness is unconcocted, unconditional, totally open and receptive, and free of mechanical automatism. When automated mechanisms of mentality fade, consciousness is freed. Continuous fixated activity belongs to those who are as yet unawakened and entangled in the incessant repetitive rounds of automatism. When consciousness in its differentiated aspects is associated with constrictive afflictions such as the ego-notion, delusion, and pseudo-volition it is bound up with obstructive limitations. This is the unevolved state of nescience. Since the pseudo-volitional stance of the unevolving individual mind is a semi-conscious state resulting from the lack of capacity for correct discernment, there must be a total submission, relinquishment, and abandonment of the inattentiveness which allows the structure-building of automatism. Then consciousness can be freed from all binding influences. Consciousness is already the principle of all recognition and understanding, and inherent within consciousness is the potential to know that all objective conditions, subtle or gross, are modifications in fluxation. There is no single part or aspect of the flux which can be isolated as self-existent. All is a grand modification, an enormous infinite conglomeration of motion that appears to have some implication or purposeful final goal, indicated by the conventional "clash of the opposites" such as good and evil, happiness and sadness, war and peace. But there is no real dualism of opposition between the aspects of objective phenomenal fluxing in things or in beings. Nescient cogitation may mistakenly structure presumptions about absolute subjectivity, but as these presumptions are based in dichotomous perception they cannot reach to the understanding of Gnosis. Perceiving according to the occlusions of the senses and of the body-mind, or the errant conceptions of conditional factors of experience, one cannot recognize or realize clearly, or function in Gnosis. Instead of realization there is only imagination without certainty. This errant imagination produces the pseudo-reality that is thought to be actual and authentic. Therefore, those who remain without developed ratiocinative certainty become occluded with a false understanding of the apparently external world and an aberrated image of their own situation. This happens mechanically because of lack of reason and lack of proper analytical contemplation, so the understanding of reality as immanence and transcendence coalesced is impossible. It remains impossible to understand because it is approached in the same manner as the rest of experience is conceptualized – through the base-propensity of the ego-notion, according to desire and frustration, hope and fear, preference and prejudice, and all the other conceptual dualities of the body-mind. The body-mind cannot enclose understanding of the totality of the flux of the matrix, since it is an aspect of the flux itself, and is itself enclosed. It has been said that "the limited cannot understand the unlimited". But we say, "the limited is potentially unlimited". There may be many different ways to "achieve" what is called enlightenment, hence so many different approaches or "paths". But near the end of the so-called "path" one inevitably comes to the realization that all "paths" are simply aspects of the one real great path. As there are many differentiated elements of the "path" so then there have evolved many coinciding formulas for reaching the understanding which is needed to proceed to the next "stage" along the "path". Primarily, in the upper extremities of the approaches to the "goal" one discovers there are basically two ways to find the "end" of the "path". The first way is to introspect deeply into the functions and content of the mind. Finding there the many dysfunctions and obstructions to clear thinking and clear recognition one decides to develop ratiocinative abilities in order to determine the correct next "stage" of the "path". This probably also includes the replacement of unskillful mental qualities with skillful qualities, which takes much introspective effort. The second way involves a format of analytical thought and meditation whereby one eventually realizes a more obvious "way" or "path", which is to learn how to detach from the error of motivation for transformation of the sentient vehicles, including senses, body and mind, through "paths" or practices, and instead, at a higher level, re-seat oneself in the original primal Gnosis itself, transcending all motivation to seek by means of a "path" that supposedly goes from dualistic "here" to "there", and just relying upon the understanding and realizing of one's essential Gnosis, beyond all pseudo-identity which generates such motivations, and just remaining in the spontaneous apperceptive "seeing" of all there is as-it-really-is. Free consciousness is individuated holistic intelligence with lucidity. Consciousness in the individual is just ordinary wakeful awareness in differentiated aspects. In its unrestricted, unconfined, and non-constricted state it is natural lucidity. This lucidity is the original, primordial, conditionless condition of free and pure consciousness. The individual, once having recognized his natural holistic presence, is then concerned with integrated wholes, or the total unfragmented system of objectifications within the manifesting matrix, rather than with deluded absorption in and attachment with the supposedly separate parts of it. All phenomena are then recognized just as-they-really-are, as interrelated components of the unified field of fluxing conditions in cause-and-effect sequentiality. This recognition is the precursor to undifferentiated nondual holistic lucidity in which all the implications of the afflictions of conceptual dualism have ceased to be, and the phenomenal matrix is clearly observed, cognized, and perfectly understood. This primordial awareness is the unchanging principle of all changes; it can know all and it can know itself. This unconditional awareness is not just a blank mirror able to reflect images, but is the source of all knowledge, will, and action. It is sovereign unto itself and the supreme spiritual power, all-inclusive, both immanent and transcendent simultaneously. Everything starts as a potency within this source; all beings have this source as their own essential nature. This is the one essence from which all phenomena are derived and with which all phenomena are secretly identified. Since all phenomena whatsoever have this same essential nature then all phenomena are nondual, meaning that absolute diversity is only an illusory appearance; in whichever way something may seem to appear, its real essential nature cannot differ from this one universal source, and this quality of sameness is the fact of nonduality. All phenomena are beyond categorization by conceptual elaboration because the limited human mind cannot conceive all the infinite causal and relative correlations and all the endless details and possibilities inherent in the totality of conditional relations. The source is beyond conceptual elaboration since it is both immanent in and transcendent beyond each particular objective phenomenon or the totality of phenomenal existents. Elaboration and categorization by means of concepts and ideas cannot truthfully or completely represent the infinitude of conditional relativity, let alone the primordial source essence, the principle, which has no definable boundaries or limits of itself. A contemplative practitioner does not have to create or change anything; he just recognizes his own consciousness in its unaltered true state. Alterations and corrections are functions of the dichotomizing mind absorbed in the delusions of dualisms. When examining the true primal state of consciousness holistic unity is recognized; everything has the same source, permeating all places without boundaries. This essence always retains its own self-nature without change, yet always adapts and establishes beings; it is omnipresent, eternally pure, and pervades all times, but cannot be explained with words. It is not something that can be cultivated.