Rather than giving you a structured article like a college paper with outlines, summaries, plots and conclusions, this article is going to take a step outside of structure and logic.
It’s going to be random, so take what you will from it, if you take anything.
Explode Your Brain
In his book Perfect Brilliant Stillness, David Carse has a chapter called “Explode Your Brain.”
He doesn’t, of course, mean this in the literal sense, he means to allow yourself to see beyond what the mind can see.
Explode all the limitations, all the collected information that has gone into your mind and start directly from scratch, from nothing in this moment, essentially as if you were to see from the standpoint of a newborn baby.
Imagine if, in the aftermath, a tremendous event happens inside of you that truly and literally shatters the foundations of what you think existence is.
Your sense of self ends up in this void, where everything you have ever thought, felt, done, imagined, seen, tasted, touched, smelled and heard vanishes into this void as if it never happened.
You no longer have a sense of self, a self-image, a “me.” no reference point and nowhere to go.
The most fundamental rules of everything you have ever learned or absorbed from the world have been shattered, obliterated.
“When you think about the deep sea. We know so little about the oceans because we can’t study the creatures that are down there. The pressure in the deep is what holds these animals together. If we try to bring them up they disintegrate or if we do it too fast they explode. So what about you are defined by the parameters of your life, by the duties you have, by the people around you and when you remove those parameters do you disintegrate? Do you explode?” – Margaret Bennett
What an amazing consideration to ponder over.
However, I feel that this statement is left unfinished, primarily because words are always left unfinished in that nobody can use words to shatter your limitations for you.
Margaret was using the word parameters, but a parameter is a limitation, restriction, because who you think you are is built within the world of form, of object, of thingness, which is limited in, and of itself.
This is not about having an identity crisis, in fact it’s the complete opposite. It’s that creating and forming this sense-identity of oneself IS the limitation, still having an identity in the world of form for the play of our short time, but not believing that the sense-identity is actually
REAL.
What am I supposed to do according to how society views life?
Who am I supposed to be according to how society views life?
How am I supposed to feel according to the collective?
What should I care about according to the collective?
What should I be thinking about?
How should I be acting?
Let’s take a look at one of the primary songs that I listen to during my “Already here, no state to get too” meditation from which Nirvana (ultimate internal freedom) happens.
“Is this real? Or am I dead? Am I here? Or inside my head?” – Ralf Muller
This short quote has a whole lot going on….
#1. Is this real?
We are born into a world to believe that what others say is real like physical objects, what the mind thinks, experiences, feels are ABSOLUTELY real.
The fundamental challenge is a few mechanical problems in the thought process.
Your thinking, beliefs, outlooks, perspectives are in a constant state of change, a flux.
Even if someone’s beliefs are genuinely the same, they are always somewhat changing even in the slightest of ways as time passes.
So then, which sets of thoughts, beliefs about the nature of what you call reality, is real?
Are your thoughts about reality real right now?
Real back then?
Or real at some point in the future?
And if you think they are real right now, then what about the other 7.5 billion other individuals and counting?
There is no clone of the human brain, no clone of the human mind.
A lot of people would seem to believe that you as a separate someone can “have” a different reality than someone else.
If this were the case, where can the mind pinpoint an experience that it is having precisely at what time?
Is your reality right now?
Is it back then?
Is it eventually?
By the time you look to the future, it’s already become back then, not being in existence.
How will you know when reality is here and when it is not if your thoughts about it are always changing?
The mind will say whatever it is thinking right now is reality. But by the time you have a thought, that single thought is already gone.
In order for something to be “real” it has to be timeless. The mind cannot be bias and choose when reality is and when it is not.
It cannot not depend on the individual either; it has to be the same regardless of how your brain works and how your mind functions.
Reality is not a part of time, reality is.
This means that reality is beyond what the mind can think about it. You cannot see reality; you can only see from it, because you ARE real, timelessly real.
The only thing, which isn’t really a thing that is real, is what the mind cannot see.
This! Forever this, thoughtless presence!
The thing that you call life, that you think about, is actually a dream. That is why when people say “bend reality” they mean bend the dream that thought is interpreting.
Reality cannot be bent, because it is forever neutral, beyond what the mind can comprehend.
The reason that your thoughts are creating a dream that you see (call it the physical world, physical universe) is because this dream is in a constant flow of gone forever, and never coming.
By the time the mind thinks, that thought goes away forever, while simultaneously the next thought has yet to come…. forever.
Whatever you ‘have’ done, thought, felt, or imagined being is past tense, is gone, and vanished forever!
Whatever you are going to do, think about, feel or imagine has yet to come in the future sense because it is not yet here…
…until IT IS and then when it is, it is not the future which never comes, it is here and forever here.
#2. Am I dead?
What would happen if you found out you were already dead?
People equate thinking, feeling, acting as a means of being alive.
But are they?
Society also equates life to mean from birth until death.
There is a difference in words between life and being ALIVE, but not a separation in the absolute sense.
Life, which is no different than existence, no different than reality, is known prior to a thought, and to a prior second.
Who you are is not your sense of “me,” of self-image, but of eternal thoughtless is-ness.
When you think, that life is a thought, an experience, of an amount of time, then who you are which [IS], is stuck inside of the mind, of the past/future and of the experience that it is seeming to have in this instant.
Life is so obvious, that it is too obvious for the mind to see, so the mind bypasses it as if it ever had an existence to begin with.
Exploding your brain means transcending everything your mind thinks about, and experiences, and is so fixated on “what time” it is relative to what I have to do, to see that which does not rely on time, on thought, the timeless formless dimension.
It’s awfully easy to equate “dimension” with an abstract idea or seemingly non-concrete thoughts because of the scientific and analytical mind, but actually the “thoughts about” reality are not concrete at all because they are in a never ending flow of vanishing forever.
And the thoughts that appear next are slightly or majorly different then any thought ever before.
What is concrete, what is forever real…. IS.
Thoughtless. Empty. Silent. Still.
The mind is so wondrous of what happens after death, because it cannot see what life is, to see that life IS
Once you see then you realize what happens “after” does NOT matter.
If you are stuck in thought and in psychological time, then you don’t REALLY know that you are alive.
And to the other seeming separate parts of the whole who are completely identified with mind/thought/experience are terrified of seeing beyond thought and experience because they have built a strong sense of who they think they are out mind/thought/experience.
And really who they are is not afraid of being alive, that’s all you know is alive life.
It is the mind that it is afraid of it losing itself.
“People are actually afraid that they are alive.” – Benjamin Smyth
Because when people find that they are alive, it is never who they think they are (mind) that is alive, but who they actually are. It is life, it is YOU that is alive.
And you know it right now…. thoughtless.
#3. Am I here? Or Inside my head?
There are a few quotes that can determine this, but they can only be felt on the level of Beingness; let all words point you in that direction.
“The only thing that you can be absolutely certain of, is that [I Am.]” – Nisargadatta Maharaj
“I think therefor, I am NOT here.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh, of course, meant that I am not aware that I am here.
Simply because who you are is never not here (not here in the sense of location of the body/mind) but since who I am cannot be located in any specific place within psychological/clock time (and our perception of space) it seems to be separated, which it is not. (Space is)
I was discussing this with a buddy of mine, Michello, and he seems to feel that there is no such thing as thoughtlessness.
And I could certainly understand that, because he’s coming at it from the idea that if we were not thinking how would you know that?
Could the mind just be playing tricks on you, when you think that you are thoughtless?
And I know, absolutely, you can be aware that you are thoughtless.
Who you are in the absolute sense does not think, has never had a thought, does not think right now and will never have a thought, because you are beyond the illusory nature of that which comes and goes.
So rather than trying to stop your thoughts, you are simply seeing through the mirage of your thoughts and that who you are is thoughtlessness itself, right now.
The amazing part about this, is that I do not ask anyone to believe this, any of this for that matter. I do not ask him to change his views or feelings.
Belief is of thought itself
However, what I have come to observe is there must be something beyond thought, to know that the mind is thinking or moving.
Otherwise there would be no way to distinguish that the mind is thinking to begin with.
There is an understanding through the body that knows you are here, through the aliveness of the cells, neurons, sensory perception, without thinking about it.
It’s registered in the nervous system through breath awareness, which is what anchors you in the moment.
It’s a scientific way of describing the unexplainable, but you don’t need science or to understand it when you know it.
How do you know you have a mind or are thinking?
There must be something outside of it to “have” the mind, that is why. The mind doesn’t have a mind. You have the mind, because you are NOT the mind.
Science has also proved that in meditative states, or thoughtless states, that the brain goes into similar vibrations (frequencies) regardless of how your brain functions, and how you think.
The point of this is to show that the natural state of who you are is not for your particular seeming individual mind but the natural state of ALL that is.
Back to the point.
So, the way you know you are here is if you can feel the inner aliveness as a result of the non-movement of mind.
The mind will continue to have periodic movements, of thoughts, it is incapable of having a seeming existence in this dream.
It’s a seeming existence just as when you’re dreaming at night in sleep, there is a seeming reality going on in the dream.
But was it reality?
Or did it just “seem” that way?
Until you awake from that dream to have realized it was never really real to begin it.
So then, I digress; there is no such thing as an alternate reality. Because there is no life opposite, there can be nothing but reality, existence as it is, which simply neutrally is.
The word “is” is to describe that which is here and which is always here.
“Was” and “eventually” are words we use to describe and communicate the mind’s interpretation of this dream.
But in the absolute sense, whatever was doesn’t exist, and whatever will be doesn’t exist.
All there is….is
The reason that you cannot refute being here (not the mind) is when you ask the question,
“How soon is now?”
You would come to the fact that it’s not soon at all because you are already here, regardless of what the time clock says, and the word soon implies something that is coming eventually, future oriented.
So when it comes to the parameters/limitations of life, you still have them, because of rules, laws, and mind structures, but we are no longer so bound by the limits of what the mind can perceive that will keep us from truly being alive in this one singular instant.
It’s kind of like if a Dog had a leash on, stuck inside of a cage but that Dog was Utterly, COMPLETELY satisfied with where it was because the dog knew that it didn’t need to be off the leash and outside of the cage to be completely alive from where it stood…. AS LIFE.
Begin life from here, rather than trying to live, trying to search for life, and let it come from a place of already knowing yourself as life which IS alive And You KNOW IT.
Wowww!!! Matthew, what an article. It brings the chills!! Fully Present, Fully Alive. ALIVE Life IS!!!