As I work my way through my personal encounter with COVID-19 I find myself with a great deal of time to organize the many thoughts that still come to me during my midnight ramblings.
I offer this synopsis of what I have may have learned over these months of training and practice here at the Night School. I am hoping that those of you who have time to read this will be kind enough to correct anything that seems misguided.
I hope all of you are well.
The world around us has universal form as all things are being constantly revealed by their interactions with other conscious agents. The leaves of a tree are being revealed by interactions with the wind and the sun. From a quantum perspective they take form because they are being measured by those interactions. From one perspective perspective, perhaps the leaf has consciousness. The consciousness of the leaf reveals the heat of the sun; it perceives it as heat and responds to it by turning toward it.
In the waking state these forms are revealed to us as images and we perceive them relative to our conditioning. We give these images specific form and substance though the editing of the autobiographical self. We invest them with an individuality and because of that, the relationship between the autobiographical self and its environment becomes dualistic in nature.
In this way we are creating our reality moment by moment, with the autobiographical self instantly reconstructing what has been revealed into images with characteristics that we give them. Our perceived reality is being constantly edited by this autobiographical self as, in an instant, we compare what has been pristinely revealed to what we have been conditioned to expect. We continually weave that dualistic perception into the tapestry of who we believe ourselves to be.
The primordial self (true self), however, is empty and clear. In the instant of pristine awareness, that primordial consciousness reveals the true nature of those forms around us as luminous images. Each image appears in instant clarity and is then gone forever. Nothing remains static. No image can ever be exactly the same as another and no two people can ever see the same image. This is the inherent non-dual nature of the relationship between the true self and its environment. They are inseparable.
When we can abide in the pure presence of non-dual awareness and pure perception we recognize the illusory nature of the waking state.
In the dream state luminous images arise within the emptiness of the primordial self, and the autobiographical self becomes the dreamed self. The dreamed self confers upon these images substance and form from the vestigial conditioned dualistic traces left from the waking state and the dream becomes an exercise in dualistic perception.
If we have developed sufficient skill in recognizing the illusory nature of our conditioned reality in the waking state, we can inhabit the dream as our true self. From this primordial-self perspective, the dreaming self and the dream images become inseparable. The dream becomes non-dual as we realize the illusory nature of these images. With sufficient skill, that can be developed, the dreaming self can control this lucid dream at many levels.
And this is one of the daytime mantras I have been bathing in of late:
Thread by thread, I unravel the tapestry of my autobiographical self until my true self is revealed.
