There are no beliefs here

I’ve heard that in the sage, everything happens spontaneously.

Yes. And do you want to know what else? In everyone, everything happens spontaneously. In you, everything happens spontaneously.

I don’t experience it like that.

Exactly. That’s the difference.

Do you believe that the Understanding can happen to anyone?

I don’t believe anything.

What?

There are no beliefs here.

That’s an extraordinary statement.

Not at all. It’s really quite simple. You either know something or you don’t. If you know something, you don’t have to believe it’s true or have faith that it’s true; you know it beyond doubt, it simply is, and there’s no belief involved. On the other hand if you don’t know something, the honest thing is to simply say you don’t know. But of course there are many psychological and political and social reason why people can’t admit, even to themselves, that they don’t know something, so they create a belief; which is essentially saying that you don’t really know something is true, but you’re going to pretend you do. It’s all activity in the dream. There’s really only one thing which is not of the dream, only one thing that can be known, and that is the basic consciousness, “I Am.” Everything else is just a concept, a construct of mind in the dream, something “I don’t know.” Everything.

Okay, but can this Understanding happen to anyone, any body/mind?

Of course.

Could it happen to me?

No, of course not. That’s the difference. But it could happen in the case of the body/mind organism which at the moment you think is you, and then there would be the understanding that there never was a ‘you,’ a ‘me’ for anything to happen to, and that who You are is the Consciousness in which all this appears to happen. The Understanding and the belief in a ‘me’ are mutually exclusive: if one is there the other will not be.

From ‘Perfect Brilliant Stillness’, David Carse, Non-Duality Press, ISBN: 954779282.
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13 thoughts on “There are no beliefs here

  1. This statement: “There’s really only one thing which is not of the dream, only one thing that can be known, and that is the basic consciousness, “I Am.” Everything else is just a concept, a construct of mind in the dream, something “I don’t know.” Everything.”

    For me, this is a statement by someone who has had a deep insight, but still speaks from the point of view of someone who is having an experience, and not one who has gone beyond self. Clearly, Nisargadatta has shown that this sense of ‘I Am’ is not one’s true nature. That this was just an expedient way of approaching the whole subject of Who Am I?, and not the end result. There are many individuals running around speaking and writing books and articles as authorities on this. The Zen tradition calls these kinds of statements, ‘partial realization’. Vasishta called them ‘half-baked’.

  2. Non-dual Consciousness cannot make any statement – how and to whom would it do so?

    All statements made by those proclaiming themselves (or being proclaimed) as j~nAnI-s are by ‘persons’ at the level of the world. And this is not absolute reality.

    It is not possible to ‘go beyond the self’, whatever you mean by that. There is ONLY the Self at the pAramArthika level, and at the vyAvahArika level we can only talk about seeming reflected Consciousnesses. Some of these seeming reflections are j~nAnI-s who try to explain this to us.

    Some make a better job of this than others…

  3. I asked UG once about non-dual consciousness. He replied ‘there is no such thing as the non-dual state’. I’ll leave it at that.

    • As to ‘there is no such thing as the non-dual state’ – of course there is not.
      Non-duality is not a state. A state has a beginning and an end. Non-duality has no beginning, no end. It is reality as such, otherwise called Brahman.
      The recognition in the individual mind of non-duality being the only reality does have a beginning, yes.

      But it does not have an end because the very moment the recognition happens, the mind, having understood itself to be identical with non-duality, “dissolves” into it. What remains is non-duality that, as long as the body lives, goes on manifesting itself as body-mind and therefore, luckily, can take on the impossible task of pointing those who are still taking themselves for body-minds beyond that wrong notion to their actual non-dual nature.

      Sorry for the complicated wording – due to English being a foreign language for me and due to the above mentioned impossibility of the task.

      • Sitara, the problem with language is not that you don’t write or understand English well. You do. The problem is talking about what is difficult to talk about. No model is so precise that there is no possibility of incorrect interpretation.

        UG would address the conceptual mind and the questions that arose out of it. But his answers had no ‘hidden’ meaning. His was a complete ‘wash & dry’ of all ‘knowing’. The sense I got from his answer was this wasn’t something to measure anything by. The Buddha also talked about ‘reality’ being neither dual nor non-dual. I don’t think there is any analysis that is going to settle this. lol.

        Are you saying that you have had this recognition and that any form of struggle in your ‘apparent’ body/mind has ended?

  4. Nothing that one could ever say about the nature of reality would be true ultimately. (Hence the myth about teaching ‘through silence’.)

    But of course there is no such thing as a non-dual ‘state’. For there to be one state, there would have to be another; and then it would not be non-dual. Non-dual Consciousness is simply a name we use for the reality, like Brahman, turIya, Absolute etc. Many names, one reality (which is not a state).

    • Some people would argue that consciousness ends with death. That the particles that make up the body change into something else and go on and on.

      How do you know what you are calling Brahman or anything else absolute? Is it a belief that this exists? If it is something that you have experienced, then it would not be absolute as I have understood what you and others are saying, because there is no permanency to it. If there were a real ‘awakening’ to this, would it not be the end of ‘you’? It would seem to me that only one who has lost themself, could make any comment about this. So I wonder, what is it we are all talking about?

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