Huang Po makes an unusually categorical statement according to the Wan Ling Record. He says textually: 'A perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; and by this understanding will you awake to the truth of Zen.'
Evidently in our consciousness, dualistically divided, we know ourselves as subject and object, as positive and negative, as yang and yin (as the Chinese put it), and since we are unable to be conscious of more than one thought at a time we have to recognise these dual aspects of ourselves consecutively, and can never recognise them together, which indeed is the mechanism of duality. Yet Huang Po tells us, I think we may say reminds us, that they are not divided in reality, that they are one, and that to realise that unity in an intuition - since we are unable to realise it as a concept - is to realise our reality.
How simple it appears!
Perhaps it is? What, in fact, is hindering us from experiencing this essential intuition? Surely just the concept whereby we think of our objective aspect as subject? That is an erroneous identification, for subject and object are one but object is not subject when experienced dualistically, and that error is responsible for the notion of an 'ego' which all the Masters told us does not exist.
Suppose we reverse the identification and think of our subjective aspect as object? We just cannot! For an eye cannot see itself, nor can an 'I': subject cannot see itself as object - for ultimately subject is pure consciousness, absolute and unique. Reversing an erroneous identification could only replace one error by another. That is why all that is required is the abolition of the identification.
In order to abolish an identification it should suffice to realise that it is erroneous. If we see and know that the object cannot ever at any moment be its subject in duality, we can no longer admit that it is so, or that such a thing as an 'ego' can exist.
The misplaced identification abolished, who are we?
Who can we be but the ultimate subject, non-dual consciousness in which the duality of subject and objects becomes manifest dualistically?
Do not let us be hypnotised by the word 'subject', etymologically absurd, to which an arbitrary and contradictory meaning is attributed in metaphysics. That which it seeks to describe is in fact sub-jected to no one and to no thing: on the contrary, it is the origin of every one and of every thing.
We have been attributing positivity to the negative aspect of duality! How ridiculous we are! Clearly to attribute negativity to its own positive aspect would be equally absurd. Perhaps if we were to bring the two poles together we would short-circuit ourselves? Would that be Satori? Or would it be what we think of as death?
Let the life-current flow from one pole to the other, freely, or rather recognise that such is what takes place in duality - is not that living in accordance with nature, as Lao Tze wished us to do? Is not that living in the present, which we do not? Is not that spontaneity?
If we do that - may not the way lie open for the intuition that in a further dimension the two poles are one, so-called subject and its objects being two aspects of one whole, and that we ourselves are just - reality?
Notes:
A. Subject and object, positive and negative, can have no independent existence; when one appears both are present: therefore they are one whole thing in reality. Are we the obverse or reverse of a coin, the effigy of the sovereign or the symbols of sovereignty, 'heads' or 'tails', 'subject' or 'objects'? We are the coin itself - nothing else in the reality of this image; in its dual aspect we appear as both sovereign and symbols, but our reality is just gold.
B. As subject I speak, look, listen, as subject I am action - but that which seems to do it is object.
