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#2322 -
Exclusive to the Highlights today, are
excerpts from David Carse's Perfect Brilliant Stillness:
Beyond the Individual Self. http://nonduality.com/perfect_brilliant_stillness.htm
I've been meaning to write a full review of
this book and what's making me put it off is that this seems to
be a turning point book, or a landmark book, or the taken fork in
the road. I can't put my finger on it. Part of this book's
attraction and power is the element of the personal that David
incorporates.
A review if this book is going to
require a good look at other books in the genre and a comparison
and an analysis of why David's book is a landmark book, as it
seems to be. Depending in part on how it is
marketing, Perfect Brilliant Stillness could take its
place as a well-known, outstanding statement of truth,
reality, understanding.
-Jerry
Selections from Perfect Brilliant
Stillness: Beyond the Individual Self, by David Carse
(typed, not scanned or pasted)
~ ~ ~
Ultimately, there is truly nothing to say.
The dream continues; and there is re-entering the dream (not by
choice but because that, apparently, is what is to occur to this
dream character) with the full knowledge that it is a dream... .
But you just can't expect I-I to take any of it seriously.
And that hermit's cave still looks awfully
good. Nothing is needed. It is so completely not important that
anything happen, that anything come of this. No need, no
requirement, no mandate, no role. Simple. Utterly
simple.
~ ~ ~
There are those who spend their lives thus,
at the feet of such a teacher, but that's not what occurred in
this case. Nevertheless, the pages that follow are an account of
what happens when 'What is,' that which cannot be taught, which
is beyond the consensus reality of things, ideas, thoughts,
experiences, and sense perceptions, is suddenly and spontaneously
seen or apperceived; and when all of this so-called reality is
seen and clearly understood to be illusion, of the nature of a
dream.
~ ~ ~
Behind the New Age pleasantries, this
messianic idea of being the annointed one, saving the world, is
insidious. Stop. The Teaching is universal, and there are many
teachers, and they are always ready where they need to be. In the
Understanding it is known that the world doesn't need any special
message from any special teacher. That's all being taken care of.
The dream in Consciounsess is unfolding perfectly, and
personality cults around popular and well-funded spiritual
teachers are part of that unfolding; but not in the way they, or
their devotees, might think.
~ ~ ~
Humans seem possessed of the idea that there
is something we can do to get what we want, and we have been
convinced that there is something we have to do, or that we
should be doing.
Listen. There is nothing you need to do.
Nothing you need to make better or improve. Nothing to purify or
sanctify or consecrate. Nothing to accomplish, nothing to prove.
Nothing to construct. Nothing to deconstruct. Nothing to work at
or to learn, nothing and no one to teach. Not even anything to
understand or to 'get.' Nothing to balance or adjust or heal.
Nothing to become.
Of course if it is in the dream of All That
Is for a mind/body object to appear to 'do' any of these things,
then that will happen: something for the dream characters to do
while the dream lasts.
~ ~ ~
At the morning talks [with Ramesh
Balsekar] recently there has been a musician who plays
traditional Indian flute for the group after the talks. The flute
does not know music: it does not know 'G' from 'B flat;' it does
not know tempo or emphasis, and cannot make music come out of
itself; it's just a hollow bamboo stick with holes in it! It is
the musician who has the knowledge and the skill and the
intention and the dexterity, and whose breath blows through the
instrument and whose fingers manipulate the openings so that
beautiful music flows out. When the music is ended no one
congratulates the wooden stick on the music it made; it is the
musician who is applauded and thanked for this beautiful gift of
music.
It is precisely so with what we think of as
our 'selves.' We are instruments, hollow sticks, through which
the Breath, the Spirit, the Energy which is Presence, All That
Is, Consciousness, flows. Just as it is not the flute making the
note, but the Musician making the note through the instrument, so
it is the breath which is Presence which animates this mind and
body and comes out through this mouth to make it seem that this
mouth is speaking words.
The basic misunderstanding, the basic
ignorance, is this unwitting usurpation of the role of Musician
by the instrument. This inversion of the truth is spontaneously
realized when the Understanding occurs.
~ ~ ~
Thinking that you are an awakened one, or
that it is possible that you might become an awakened one, or
that your teacher is an awakened one, or that there is at least
one awakened one in a cave in the Himalaya somewhere, is called
being asleep. Awakening means popping out of the context in which
awakening makes any sense.
~ ~ ~
Eventually U.G.
Krishnamurti's apparently monstrous nihilism is the only
thing that survives: there is nothing here for you. I have
nothing for you. You have no true self, and the false self you
think you are is of no significance. Go away. Sleep your happy
dream life. Why would you want this anyway? Self-annihilation is
never chosen. The only ones who come to this are dragged kicking
and screaming. Or are tricked, lured into the jungle and then
ripped open, hollowed out, gutted. Or accosted at a bus stop;
blasted, moorings cut, left to drift. If you are going to be so
dragged, so tricked, fine. Has nothing to do with me or with you.
~ ~ ~
Once when I was in
A particular specialty of the house was the
carved wooden screens that are used as room dividers. Composed of
several panels, each about a foot and a half wide by six feet
high, four or five of these panels hinged together. One after
another, these carved teakwood screens were unfolded in front of
me, and they were dazzling. Every inch of every panel was
intricately carved; and it was pierced carving, cutting right
through the inch-thick wood so that the air could pass through
the panels, which of course is why they are called 'screens.'
As I examined the carving on one screen, I
found that the closer I looked the more I saw. It was amazing.
There were elephant caravans, the palace of the Raj, tigers in
the jungle, the great River Ganga, sadhus, temples, naked women,
processions, the whole life of the Buddha, the myth of Lord
Ganesha, Prince Arjuna in battle, more naked women, Shiva dancing
the world into existence, and on and on, the whole history of
India, of the world, of the universe. The carving was marvelous:
the fringe on the carpets on the elephants' backs was detailed.
The naked women were... detailed. No individual image on the
screen was more than a couple inches high, and this went on for
several square feet.
The carved screen had my complete and
undivided attention for some time. Eventually, around the edges
of that concentration, I started to become aware of something
else. Something going on, that I had on some level been aware of
but had not been paying attention to. The shop owner and his
helpers were still at work, running around, hauling otu stuff:
"And also we have..." "For you, special
price..." "Please sir, if you would look at
this..." I was sitting on the chair, still holding half a
cup of sweet tea, leaning forward toward the screen standing a
couple of feet in front of me, scanning the marvelous carved
landscape, when...
Pop. My focus is changed, and I was suddenly
looking through the screen. In fact, the screen and its
carved universe which had occupied all my attention was suddenly
vague and fuzzy, semi-transparent: I was seeing through it, past
it, to...
...well, here the analogy breaks down,
because what I was seeing though to was the rest of the shop,
with its enthusiastic staff piling up rosewood elephants and
brass engravings.
But nevertheless. Pop. A very simple thing,
a very ordinary thing. The suddenness of seeing through the veil.
To the background, the substrate. To what is always there, and
ultimately 'real' and true, but not perceived because our focus
has been on the propped-up artificial screen, on "the
world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the
truth... A prison for your mind."
What is always there, What is. Who you truly
Are, is precisely the background, the milieu, in which the phony
hologram, the matrix, the maya, exists.
~ ~ ~
Perfect Brilliant Stillness: Beyond
the Individual Self, by David Carse
http://nonduality.com/perfect_brilliant_stillness.htm