I was with some children last night. I have no children myself, so it was rather intriguing watching what interests them. One was about one year old, and the other about three. The one year old seemed totally fascinated with an empty aseptic package (Rice milk or something like that). Its whole world was wrapped up in this empty package. It made me wonder how its mind was beginning to fashion the world it experiences. The other child was much more interactive with me because she could speak, but I could rarely understand what she was talking about. The ego was forming in this one, but mostly she was interacting with me with a beach ball and some other small spherical toys. I have vague memories of my childhood playing and making up stuff, trying to figure out how things works. Somewhere along the line all this make believe solidifies into something more sinister - what I think is real. The pretend becomes fossilised.
The spiritual path reverses this fossilisation, but only at the end, almost as a corollary. When one realises that the world of the senses is all there is, what is happening now, this has a huge fallout in regard to what one thought was real. The 'transcendent' that far away, mystical idea about where things come from turns out to be just the entire expanse of what one has always experienced from day one. But this means, in terms of the mind, that all those ideas about reality were a dream, they were just an attempt by the mind to make sense of experience correlated with what others informed me about experience. Most of the the thoughts I have about things largely result from input from outside, from other humans. Most of the words and concepts I use do not come from me, they are reprocessed input from others, refashioned by the peculiar twists of my nervous system. Those words and concepts are then projected onto sensory experience as an attempt to explain it all. But those words are just symbolic tokens. Now there is an experience, based on what some have reported, that I could call God, but I choose not to do so because that experience would hardly resemble what I perceive others have as their take on that word, because it is not intelligent in the way most seem to me to understand what intelligence is. The experience is really a mental ghost, the remains of a long search for what the mind imagined was real but was not. Transcendence is a token, a label for an experience that for part of the journey seemed to exist but does not now. It is very difficult to explain this in any way that would not create a picture in the mind that is patently false. All ideas about this are false. The whole apparatus of spiritual development is really a mechanism for manipulating the mind's ability to phantasise and dream, and to manipulate it into a corner where it ceases to be the dominant quality of living. Because one still has thoughts, can think about things etc., the potential to dream nonsense onto one's experience of life is still there, so there is always the chance the mind will trap experience again, but at some point it seems less and less likely this will happen. This is what freedom is like, the mind's idea of reality does not dominate experience. The corollary is the mind thinks thoughts that are always in some way false, but unlike the mind of a child where an empty box becomes the whole world, spiritual awaking shows one that in some way, all of one's ideas are in reality an individual mind's opinion, not a fact, not true. There are practical applications of thought. Science takes great pains to try to align thought with perception, to make the concepts and ideas that come from the mind correlate with the world of observation, and it is quite clear that this is not a perfect process, it is always an approximation. A scientist is always on the edge of a precipice where his or her ideas will be show up as being wrong. Thoughts approximate reality by proxy, they are an imperfect stand-in for the other aspects of human experience. I think this is the basic mistake on a spiritual path, that one has found the truth in the descriptive words of spirituality. Scientists seem actually much better at formulating thoughts one might call 'true' in some way. Religions are terrible at this because the thoughts, the concepts get fossilised. Science provides a chisel to crack the rock away, but it cannot free the mind from the identification with thought. Scientists argue just as much as spiritual people, but they have a method for settling differences. Because spiritual experience is private and seemingly numinous at times there is no public forum for communication and correlation of thoughts, no way to investigate. When a child makes a whole world out of an empty box, the mind is creating a metaphysical dream. When grown-ups do this I would call it theology or politics. I have a certain fondness for the sage Nisargadatta. A very uncharismatic looking man. He ate meat, he smoked, and owned stores that sold tobacco. He was married, and his wife and daughter did not seem to be interested in attending his sessions. He sang bajans with a horrible voice and burned incense in a small confined space in a polluted city, kind of an antithesis of what a 'holy' man is thought to be like. Even so, with these characteristics he seems to have aced out just about everyone in the time required to become a realised human being, just three years. He would say things like this: 'Where is the dwelling place of truth where you could go in search of it? And how will you know that you have found it? What touchstone do you bring with you to test it? You are back at your initial question: What is the proof of truth? There must be something wrong with the question itself, for you tend to repeat it again and again. Why do you ask what are the proofs of truth? Is it not because you do not know truth first hand and you are afraid that you may be deceived? You imagine that truth is a thing which carries the name 'truth' and that it is advantageous to have it, provided it is genuine. Hence your fear of being cheated. You are shopping for truth, but you do not trust the merchants. You are afraid of forgeries and imitations.' 'But you are cheating yourself in your ignorance of your true motives. You are asking for truth, but in fact you merely seek comfort, which you want to last for ever. Now, nothing, no state of mind, can last for ever. In time and space there is always a limit, because time and space themselves are limited. And in the timeless the words "for ever" have no meaning. The same with the "proof of truth". In the realm of non-duality everything is complete, its own proof, meaning and purpose. Where all is one, no supports are needed. You imagine that permanence is the proof of truth, that what lasts longer is somehow more true. Time becomes the measure of truth. And since time is in the mind, the mind becomes the arbiter and searches within itself for the proof of truth -- a task altogether impossible and hopeless!' 'You are holding on to the need for a proof, a testimony, an authority. You still imagine that truth needs pointing at and telling you: "Look, here is truth". It is not so. Truth is not the result of an effort, the end of a road. It is here and now, in the very longing and the search for it. It is nearer than the mind and the body, nearer than the sense "I am". You do not see it because you look too far away from yourself, outside your innermost being. You have objectified truth and insist on your standard proofs and tests, which apply only to things and thoughts.' 'The outer self and the inner both are imagined. The obsession of being an "I" needs another obsession with a "super-I" to get cured, as one needs another thorn to remove a thorn, or another poison to neutralise a poison. All assertion calls for a denial, but this is the first step only. The next is to go beyond both.' How about that? All this from a tobacco vendor!
