Dear M,

Question 1: What Are Thoughts?

How can we embrace our thoughts without fighting or clinging on to them?

Find out what thoughts are. Go step by step:

S1. Thoughts rise and set within you, awareness.

S2. Awareness is the support–that which is continuously present–throughout the thought’s “itinerary.”

S3. Just as water pervades a sponge, so awareness completely pervades, or saturates, each thought.

S4. The substance of each thought is nothing but awareness.

Therefore, there is no-thing (no separate thought) to embrace, and there is no-thing to fight against or to cling onto. When you “see” a thought, you’re “seeing” Yourself.

Question 2: Are There Different Kinds Of Thoughts?

But aren’t some thoughts “coming from” awareness while others are “coming from” ego?

Provisionally speaking, yes. Ultimately speaking, no.

1. Provisionally: one can distinguish between “sacred thoughts” and “profane thoughts.” The former point directly to awareness (e.g., the question: “Who am I?”) while the latter seem to take the I in an “outward-facing” direction. That outward-facing direction is sometimes termed “maya.” 

2. However, ultimately speaking, all thoughts are “equal in the eyes of awareness” since all thoughts are made only of awareness and thus are nothing apart from awareness.

3. Know, therefore, that no thought can ever “take you away from” awareness–that is to say, from Yourself.

Question 3: How Does Awareness Guide My Life?

How is awareness guiding me in the way I live my life? Does it happen through some thoughts or other?

Your question implies that there’s a separate you with an independent life to lead. Yet there is no such you, and there is no such life to lead. 

You are being lived by awareness. You don’t have a calling, a dharma, a gift to share with the world. You are that calling, that dharma, that gift already. 

In fact, awareness is living through and as you. You are, as much as any other appearance, an expression of consciousness. 

Question 4: How To Practice?

How am I to practice so that I don’t forget this understanding during the course of the day?

Take out a measuring stick and see how far away you are from awareness. Can you measure that distance? No! 

Right now, ask yourself, “Am I separate from awareness?” No!

Understand that practice requires a practitioner who’s trying to “go back” to the Source or to “get to” the Source. Stop this! Just let go of these dualistic assumptions!

So long as you try to “remember” awareness, you’ll seem to be “apart from” awareness. As one Zen koan puts it, “If you try to go toward it, you go away from it.” It’s for this reason that Advaita Vedanta says that you–awareness–are not an object. Not being an object, you can neither be forgotten nor gotten.

Ramana Maharshi says that ignorance, itself, is “nonexistent.” There’s the appearance of ignorance but not the reality of it. The only reality is the Self–and that’s you!

In short, jnana yoga is a “practice of non-practice”: it keeps undercutting one’s assumptions until such is no longer necessary. And what remains? Only what’s right here!

Question 5: Being Virtuous

How does the Sage live her life? If one were to know that he were awareness, then he wouldn’t kill, right?

In the beginning, one thinks that a Sage is a person who is realized. As a result, it’s thought that this person must exude virtuous qualities like compassion, love, mercy, and the like. And the hope is that we too, someday, will be and live just like that–or in some other way that will be a beautiful expression of the Truth.

The error should be seen, however. It’s that there’s no such thing as an enlightened being. Nisargadatta: “Liberation is not for the person; liberation is from the person.” And Zen: “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!”

The invitation is to “kill” our concepts–most notably, the I-concept or I-notion. As this “self-emptying” unfolds, fewer and fewer expectations about how “the Sage is” appear. Frankly, one just doesn’t care or–it can be said–is more and more care-free or without a care. One ceases to think of the Sage as some kind of special being and starts to feel that the Sage is dwelling deep with our heart. 

Indeed, the Sage is the Heart, and that Heart is you.

*

You empty the mind cup, says Zhuangzi. 

And a quiet joy dawns.

Warmly,

Andrew