My ‘knowing’ – which I’m so proud of, which I place so much stock in – is nothing more than me. It’s an extension of me, an indefinite (and thoroughly pointless) perpetuation of me. It’s a self-defeating overabundance of me…
My knowing is me because the only way I get to know stuff is by comparing that stuff to ‘the yardstick which is myself’ (or ‘the yardstick which is my mind’). It’s not the world that I’m perceiving, therefore but ‘the world is it appears to be from my taken-for-granted viewpoint’. It’s ‘what I personally make of the world’.
What I ‘know’ is not the world, but my idea of the world, my personal or subjective impression of the world, and my personal or subjective impression of the world has nothing to do with the real thing. My idea of the world has nothing to do with the world but everything to do with me! Anything I construct of conceive in terms of its relation to me is me.
We live in a personalised world – a world that perfectly reflects our own examined biases, a world that always confirms our basic expectations. A world that perfectly reflects our own unexamined biases isn’t a wild – it isn’t anything, it’s a nullity. It’s a narcissistic / solipsistic thought bubble that has no connection with anything real. Consciousness is trapped in this bubble, even though there is no bubble. It’s like light trapped between two mirrors (even though there aren’t really any mirrors there).
Hence the Buddha says, ‘This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, and drop of dew, a flash of lightning.’
The ‘life of separateness’ occurs (or rather seems to occur) as a result of us living in a world that is made up of our own knowing without realising that ‘our own knowing’ is only ‘us’ and nothing else. Because we perceive the Known World to be not our own projection the Self-Concept imagines itself to have a bona fide existence in the real world. To recognize our projections as such dispels this delusion. therefore.
Once we see that the real world has nothing to do with our ‘knowing’, our assumptions and presumptions, then that’s the end of our so-called ‘separate existence’, (or rather, since there never was any separate existence, it’s the end of the illusion that there is, or was, or ever could be such a thing. The loss of separateness is the loss of the mind-created identity, but since there never was any separateness, there was also never any identity to lose!
This doesn’t mean that we won’t cling to the life of separateness for all we’re worth, however! We will cling to the last (and we do cling to the last) and we will necessarily experience an incalculable amount of anguish as we do so, haunted as we are by the fear that we may get pushed to the critical point – the point where we can cling no more. This is the possibility we don’t want to countenance.
This isn’t just ‘a’ fear either but THE fear – the fear that is too great for us to ever face, the fear we are obliged to deny every step of the way, the fear that defines – therefore – every aspect of our day-to-day lives. This is the Great Ineffable Terror that we seek to protect ourselves from via our ‘day-to-day egoic existence’. The fear of losing what we think we have but don’t is our Master; this is the Tyrant we cannot stand up to, and yet at the same time this overwhelming terror of ours has no real basis, since the thing we fear losing so much never existed in the first place…
Image – unsplash.com
