Direct Approach - Short Essay

[u/RusyAldo]

The human mind is not infinite. There are things it is not capable of knowing directly—of truly comprehending within the space of awareness, to be experienced directly.

For example, non-duality. Recognising that object and observer are the same—just experiences within awareness, absent an experiencer outside of awareness. No permanent self thinking or looking.

This is something you can come to realise—the rules of the game, so to speak—after observing closely how the game is played. But what you’re comprehending is the nature of awareness itself, which is the base substrate of the simulation. What all objects, all that can be experienced, is constructed within.

The space where all that can be experienced is—and must be.

But these rules of the game cannot be constructed into an object within awareness. There can just be abstractions, ideas, thoughts that try to explain it—try to explain some of the connections made—but these too are just more thought, more objects within attention, and can’t truly describe it in its entirety.

That is why the language of Eastern traditions is so vague—you can’t directly describe it. This is why there are so many contradictions, paradoxes, and varying levels of understanding around awakening. Anyone can recognise they are playing a game. But how well can you understand the rules of that game—what it’s made of—when you can only see what exists within the game itself?

This is why there are different degrees of knowing—why it’s a stream, not a point in time. You can travel it quickly, or get stuck. You can turn fully towards it, or glance at it from an angle, bit by bit. Awakening is different for everyone. And it’s more about thinking less, and avoiding the many traps, than thinking harder trying to grasp it.

This is recognising the internal simulation our minds are running—what we experience and know as reality.

Experience and internal reality is an emergent property. And emergence is something the mind has trouble comprehending. Something it has trouble identifying with.

We are stuck on our current plane of emergent phenomena. We emerge from a large number of cells, but we do not identify as the cells. We form part of society, but we do not identify with society. We could be individual parts of a larger system, outside of what can be known or experienced within awareness—and not know it. But we identify with this self, this person beneath, living this life—from the outside, or maybe stuck inside, or just separate from life itself. But that too is just an object within awareness.

We are just the result of a long chain of things changing—emergences from the start of time itself, the Big Bang.

We identify as a permanent self, at this plane of emergent phenomena, where present-day brains are capable of comprehending.

But we are just the current collection of atoms at this time and place. And this is all there is—this moment. Everything else is change. Nothing is permanent.

Impermanence is recognising that within awareness, what can be experienced cannot be permanent. All things change, from moment to moment. Stop clinging to keeping parts of your life exactly as they are—and your ability to keep it stable won’t change at all, the trajectory won’t change, things won’t fall apart—but your suffering will drop dramatically. Because you won’t be living in the future quite so much.

Oneness—Connectedness—is recognising that we are all part of a whole, at some level. That even if we are not materially connected in the way we usually understand it, at some level we are just parts of a greater emergence. Parts, in this time and space, of a larger whole.

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[u/Diced-sufferable]

Ack…that was short?