Adyashanti wrote an essay on asking when one will wake up, and why it can't happen sooner, and why we keep trying to find the other thing, not the thing we already have.

Sort of relevant to many of the current discussion threads, so thought I'd post it: www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=writings_inner&writingid=21

Adya has such an effortless way of just saying it how it is. Thanks for posting.

The man's a genius.

Beautiful!

I needed that. Listening to his talk earlier today about the resurrection got me all juiced up to finish this thing ASAP. That, of course, is just plain silly. I even developed a nice little story about "my" enlightenment. I knew it was silly at the time, at least.

Be...here...now, Laurel.
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.
.
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Still want to be somewhere else?

That is a great little essay!

Yes, unfortunately. Or I want to be something else: awake.

The problem with being extremely smart: you can make an iron-clad case, fully documented (with footnotes! and multi-page bibliography!) for "who," "what," and "where" you are. The best fiction your one and only precious life can buy.

I think that's why so many of the old-time masters appeared as rude, crazy, uncouth, idiot shouters-- smart people require shock therapy.

All that wonderful "information" in the maps can be fashioned into the most high-tech harness to keep the carrot of what you want to attain -- in sight and just out of reach. In perpetuity.

I think it's time to give up. You can't do it.
Ready to admit it?

I think the term I used was "a collective Royal Pain in the Ass."

I get the impression that you think boning up on Daniel's detailed map analysis is not the best use of my only precious life. So how do I give up?

It's not like I haven't done it before. I gave up on my first marriage, and I remember the very moment I did it. One minute we were arguing and I was trying to get my point across, and the next minute I realized it was over. There was an endgame, of course, where I still went through the motions. But it was essentially over.

I also gave up trying to make my present husband happy. For years and years I thought it was up to me to solve his problems, help him navigate life, find resources for him. Then one day I knew it was over. I remember with the same eerie clarity as with the first time when that happened. And there was an endgame there too. Now, miraculously enough, we are still married, with good boundaries.

So I know that "click" when everything lines up. In both those cases there was a sense of helplessness and relief. It was no longer up to me. It never had been. I had been playing a role all that time, with the outcome an inevitability.

So now I have to give up on myself. Unfortunately, I sense that I still have a couple of tricks up my sleeve, things I could try. Don't ask me what those are. Maybe note the sensations of the witness as sensations and then watch them pass away. I haven't really done that yet. Or maybe I have to burn through other old patterns that I've been carrying around, although I'm not sure what those are. Or sit and wait for that "click" when it all lines up. In the meantime do what, practice? Do my work? Let it go?

I can't solve my own problems any more than I can solve someone else's, that much is clear. I'm not sure any of them are problems, to be honest. So what if I can't drive on the freeway? Maybe I can, maybe I can't. So what if I'm not so good at managing my time? Maybe I'll improve, or maybe I'll go on as I have been. In the scheme of things, it's not really the end of the world.

Maybe I'm already awake and don't realize it. Maybe there will be a big wow at a particular time and I'll know it. Forty years ago there was a hugely big wow, and that in all likelihood is plenty for one lifetime. Maybe this is it, all I'll ever have, all I'll ever be.

There's the stumbling block, right there: I want something more. I am holding out for Something Else. I even think I know what it is. Hm.

In the immortal words of the Through the Looking-Glass Sutra:

"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Two pence a week, and jam every other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire ME – and I don't care for jam."
"It's very good jam," said the Queen.
"Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you DID want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day."
"It MUST come sometimes to 'jam to-day'," Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know."

WHAT "else" you're holding out for is irrelevant, immaterial, and leading to the witness, Your Honor. So is getting it, or not.

Laurel I empathise - I was also wondering whether I should do a 'deconstructing the sensations of the witness' practice - I started doing this a little toward the end of the last time my practice collapsed, and I know some people have found it really helpful (Nick Halay for example). But then for me at the moment though it feels in an intuitive way like this would be an attempted manipulation/vipassanisation and that an Advaitic 'be the witness' (and the possibility that that will eventually collapse into pure consciousness without needing deconstruction) seemed less like trying to manipulate my experience to try to match something that I thought 'should' be happening?

Oh and the end of that Alice quote which Kate somehow neglected to include

'"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"'

'"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"'

Well spotted, sir! Since we all ARE Alice; and the less we are able to simply say, "Hell, I just don't get it!" the more confused we are.

What gets in the way of actual understanding is the firm belief that understanding would be grander than understanding that we are confused. That understanding would look or feel very different from giving up and admitting that WE DO NOT KNOW-- right now, as we are.

We are very much in the position of someone who's misplaced something crucial-- keys, wallet, passport-- and can't find it because we keep looking in the "right" two or three places: where we always put it; where we have a memory of having put it (last night or last week?-- not sure), where a friend suggests we might have put it. We humans seem to be capable of being surprised-- more than once-- not to find the object in these places.

Like discovering your lost glasses are on top of your head? I always forget to look there.

It's weird how not knowing (and admitting you just don't know) is liberating. It's like it takes all the pressure off. You don't have to keep sustaining the lie, performing the role, holding the world up.

This is a diversion-- maybe-- but Lewis Carroll did more to display the beauty of circular logic than anyone else I can think of. If I knew more about mathematics, I would love to explore whether and how that impinges on stuff like chaos theory.

"How?"

You could say, "I. CAN'T. GET. ANYWHERE. (full stop)" or "I don't know."
-- and see how it feels. To not talk yourself out of it, make a drama of it, or strategize problem solving of it. Just the facts, ma'am: I feel... who what where how.

That's square one. There are no others.

Okay, I'll admit it: I really don't know a damn thing. I think my years as a seeker have been devoted to finding the truth. As an academic, I have a fear of being found wrong. I'm trained to support my positions with evidence. I teach my students to do this as well. But really, all we're doing is playing an elaborate game that has certain rules developed and recognized by the profession. It gives us pleasure to find an angle on something and research and write about it over a lifetime to develop a body of work. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the habits that one develops doing history are the opposite of what is needed here.

I don't know a damn thing, and no one else does either, about who or what I am, what the universe is, how everything got here, and what it all means.

I'm going to sit and do Shinzen's "do nothing" practice, aka "just sitting."

How funny--our posts crossed. Great minds think alike? Or not . . .

Laurel Carrington wrote:
Same... even if I am a postmodernist and therefore don't believe in the tyranny of reason

(actually some of the pomo/deconstructionist people, and those who influenced them, I see a lot of dharma in what they write or theorise - Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, etc - but then I'm always like, that's all very well but where's your praxis? )

Ona Kiser wrote:
There's a famous Advaita story, you've probably heard before, used to explain how it can be that we are already what we think we're not and are looking for:

After leaving a party, a woman realises she's lost her necklace. She rushes around everywhere looking for it, but can't find it anywhere. Finally, it occurs to her that she may have left it at the party, and goes back to her friend's house - where her friend immediately points out that it's been around her neck the whole time.

The most powerful inquiry I've done in the last several years, is to honestly wonder if I'm completely wrong. And "who cares what I think?" THERE'S a question with no ready answer!

'course I have the advantage of being nobody in particular...

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

- Emily Dickinson