ONE: Hello! How are you?
TWO: In the dumps.
ONE: Re-identified?
TWO: I often forget my reality.
ONE: There is an Italian proverb which can be helpful to the absent-minded. It says, 'If someone tells you that your nose is gone, put up your hand to see.' Try it.
TWO: It is there.
ONE: Where else could it be?
TWO: Discouraging, all the same.
ONE: Not at all. Knowing is just getting a grip on something, not final installation therein. We must be penetrated by understanding right down to the rock-bottom of ourselves, for knowing drives the false identification before it until finally it drives it out. It is like the fox and its fleas.
TWO: How so?
ONE: The fox is said to back slowly upstream into a river while his fleas crowd forward trying to keep dry. When they are all collected on his nose, he dips it - and they all float off down to the sea!
TWO: Yet I have understood, for when I hear or read of somebody thinking as from an object I immediately perceive his error.
ONE: Each such perception is a nail in the coffin of your own habit of identification.
TWO: When the habit is overcome, is abandoned, I shall remain in the bliss of my first realisation of the real nature of the so-called 'ego', that it is only the absurd attribution of subjectivity to one object?
ONE: No, that was excitement, not bliss!
TWO: Then what...?
ONE: You have only half understood. Ceasing to mistake an object for subject, no longer attributing subjectivity to an object, does not take you out of dualism.
TWO: But in so doing I know myself as subject and all objects.
ONE: Quite so: that is the dualistic aspect of reality, that which we really are in the relative reality of daily life. That too must be transcended if we would know our real nature which you describe, decently enough, as bliss.
TWO: In order to transcend dualism we must transcend the dualistic aspect of reality?
ONE: Evidently. It is as subject-creating objects, that is, creating the apparent universe, that we exist dualistically or relatively.
TWO: So that getting rid of the false I-concept is just clearing the path?
ONE: That constitutes an insuperable barrier while it subsists. Do not minimise the importance of its dissolution.
TWO: And how does one set about the final transcendence?
ONE: I can only give you my own suppositions, the advice of a fellow pilgrim. I think the Masters both knew and told us. Have a look and see what they said.
TWO: The Buddha, Huang Po, Hui Neng, the Upanishads, the Gita, Shankara, Padma Sambhava, Maharshi?
ONE: Any one should suffice, but different forms of words and metaphors stimulate the buddhi in different people according to their background and wealth of ignorance. Sometimes even a feebly pointing finger may happen to indicate the moon.
TWO: In your view what did they suggest?
ONE: They all suggested the abandonment of intellection or mentation - thinking, image-making, conceptualism.
TWO: How can we in daily life?
ONE: In the external aspect of daily life perhaps we cannot - altogether. Perhaps even the Maharshi couldn't. But in our inner life - why not?
TWO: What takes the place of that?
ONE: Could it be spontaneity?
TWO: Is that not just constant recollection of our reality?
ONE: Your intuition sounds to me like genuine buddhi. Shall we try it?
TWO: And that is the last lap?
ONE: There are no laps. There are just paths to the precipice. Then comes the jump.
