All we can know about Reality is that it must be eternal, informal and non-dual. Since our intellectual apparatus is subject to the concepts of time, space and duality it is thereby incapable of knowing that to which those concepts are inapplicable. Therefore it is only by by-passing the intellectual apparatus that we can have any cognisance of Reality, and such cognisance cannot be expressed in language, because that is a purely intellectual medium.
For instance we can know that we are Reality; in a sense we cannot not know it; but it is not demonstrable.
We can understand that everything must be real, but that, at the same time, nothing we can perceive sensorially can possibly be an accurate representation of what it is in reality, for everything we can perceive is in a time, space and dualistic context, that is to say: it is subject to duration, has form in space, and is one part of a dualistic concept - itself and not-itself - whereas its reality, the thing-in-itself , its suchness, must be eternal (without time), formless (without space) and unitary (without duality), and as such we are unable to know it. Moreover we are only able to perceive it at all by clothing it in qualities - such as size, weight, colour, shape, each of which is a function of its own opposite, and an arbitrary point on a scale limited by the restricted range of our senses, and which therefore has no intrinsic reality but is merely a sensorial estimation.
Thus everything we perceive is only an interpretation in a dualistic, temporal and formal framework, of a suchness, a reality which we are unable to know. Were we able to know the reality of anything at all, we may surmise that it could only appear to us as something such as a mathematical or algebraical symbol.
Many of us realise this well enough, but fewer have understood that what we regard as ourselves are also objects that we perceive, subject to the same conditions of perception as everything else. If we strip ourselves, our friends and our dogs, of the names, functions and qualities we clothe them with, nothing remains but our suchness - which cannot be represented otherwise than, just possibly, by a mathematical symbol. Let us not forget that the image which 'strikes' a retina only produces chemical changes therein, and that these changes, transmitted by nerve-impulses, only effect corresponding chemical changes in cerebral matter, the resulting image being merely an interpretation in consciousness of chemical changes in that cerebral matter. To suppose that anything really is (is in timeless, formless Reality) that which it appears (as an interpretation, in a space-time context, of chemical changes in matter) - is surely the limit of absurdity! At the same time the image that 'strikes' a retina is itself the projection of that image in consciousness, as is any such image when we dream it, and is not anything external - for nothing can be external to consciousness.
So much for what we aren't! But what are we? Strange as it may seem to us - who have been thinking that we are what we think we see in a looking-glass - we are reality. Just that, and nothing else whatever. If we could get that into our heads our troubles surely would be over.
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Is it not enough? It is. It should be. But we may like to try to understand how it comes about and how it works.
Everything sensorially perceived, by our senses or by mechanical extensions thereof, the entire perceptible universe, including what we are used to regarding as ourselves, is an interpretation of reality in consciousness. Psychologically the perceptible universe may be regarded as a projection, apparently exterior to consciousness, of images from within consciousness, but we know that there can be nothing exterior to consciousness, so that the formula of psychology may be regarded as technical jargon based on the misunderstanding that we are separate from the universe we appear to perceive. This is, of course, the basic illusion, which bars the way to enlightenment.
Is that still not enough? It is. It should be. Why does it not seem to be enough? Something is missing? What can it be? Ourselves? Why, of course. But we don't exist as separate entities. The Buddha told us so dozens of times, the T'ang Masters told us so, the Upanishads told us so, down to and including our contemporary, who lived in the awakened state for fifty years, Ramana Maharshi. We weren't able to believe them. Or perhaps we thought we believed them, but secretly did not, because we were not able to see how it could be so, how we could not be what it seemed to us so obvious that we were. And, indeed, to believe is not enough. We must know it to be so. And then all that remains is to experience that it is so.
But now we have seen, and how simply, that it not only can be so, but must be so, and in fact is so!
We have realised that we are reality, and nothing else whatever, and that all that we perceive, including that which we imagined was ourselves, are just objects in consciousness, interpretations of reality in a dualistic medium, all of them ultimately ourselves of course, a waking dream in no essential dissimilar from the dreams of our sleep.
What a relief it is to know that there is no 'I' but I! Is it not the greatest discovery possible to man? Is any comparable thrill imaginable? To believe it is a little; to know it is much; but until it is experienced the illusion holds full sway. Then even gravity is no more!
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Is somebody still asking who it is who is looking at his reflection in the looking-glass, who is talking, who is listening? As the Maharshi might have said - how many 'who's have you? It is you of course, or me, and there is only one of us, and that is a real one. We are all in it, all nature and everything that is. That is the overwhelming, ubiquitous reality that we are. It is we who are looking and talking and listening, but what we see and hear are objects in consciousness - in looking-glasses also - just dream-figments, what we now see as electronic force-fields in flux imagined as individuals and serving as media for the dualistic objectivisation of reality as consciousness and the objects thereof.
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