Awakening is the recognition of transcendent Value that easily surpasses anything the world has to offer. This would seem attractive to people who long for Satisfaction more than anything else. The problem is that the supreme Value of awakening is arrived at through a process of negation.
From a talk given by James in 2006
Q: What does it mean to see the body as a form of dependent arising?
James: It means to see the body consciously. It means to see the body as dependent on consciousness for its existence as opposed to an independently existing entity, a thing in itself.
To see this, you have to get really deep and really quiet. You witness the sensation in your body. What is the body but a field of sensation, in a way? Consider thought, feeling, and sensation. Have you ever had a tight place in your body and breathed into it and the tight place became fluid?
Is the world practical? Well, in itself, it’s just a meaningless birth-death machine, a cosmic meat grinder — or at least an extremely peculiar form of abstract art that we don’t know what to do with, like a bizarre Rube Goldberg device that endlessly cycles back on itself. But seen as a way to wake up, it is practical. It is the means to wake up. We must use it to get to the other side, as it were, then it makes sense — and only then.
No thought matches Reality.
If you attach to a thought, it hurts, because you are leaving Reality in that moment.
It hurts to leave Reality, like leaving home.
In this case, however, it is your true Home of homes you are leaving.
You will never figure out
what awakening is.
No one ever does.
It’s impossible.
You cannot capture it.
You can only dismantle your attachments,
then Truth sees Itself everywhere.
But not until you let go
of your ideas.
From a talk given by James in 2008
I want to talk about sanity. Somehow I feel more sane when I don’t talk about it. The silence feels really good.
I was editing some talks from the summer and I remember that someone brought up something about doing this work and having a sense of fear of letting go of the known, a sense of falling or letting go that feels like a loss, like you’re losing your mind.
It can feel that way. What really happens is you don’t lose your mind. Awakening is losing the mind’s ability to control you.
There’s not much you can do about politicians,
corporations, media figures
lying.
The only place where you can stop all the lying
is within yourself.
If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re
lying.
Truth is like a well in the desert. Most people ignore it completely, even though they are thirsty. Some people curse what they see as an eyesore above the ground. Some resent having to go around it. Some notice it and think it’s nice: this stone wall built in a circle. Some sketch it in a pad and walk away. A few come closer and see the opening, sensing water in its depths. Some find the water, drink — and are satisfied.
True Freedom does not mean license to do what you want. It means allowing Truth to run your life. Allowing the unknowability of Truth in your life is Wisdom. It allows you to put down the baggage of obsessive planning and just be.
You can’t know what’s next, so try to embrace this not-knowing instead of fighting it. Then you can be more in the Now.
In the introduction to my book, The Path of Awakening, I write the following:
Most people think that a spiritual teacher is a person outside you. This is not necessarily the case. The ultimate Teacher is Truth, or who you are in your essence, so you already have a Teacher inside you. Everyone does. You are your own Teacher.
I speak and write a lot about the importance of the Teacher. This can easily be misunderstood to mean that the Teacher is an external authority, which is not true.
No matter what we want things to be, they are what they are.
In my experience, if we try to gloss over, ignore, or repress our awareness of Reality — things as they are — we cannot help but be confused. It’s like looking at the world through lenses that distort what we see into what we think we want to see, when what we really want to see is things as they are.
From a talk given by James in 2008
If our true nature is formless and what has us captured is form, then the relationship between the two is what I call the Awakener. That’s where Emptiness comes into play. Emptiness means that forms neither exist nor not exist. They have a certain kind of existence. When forms are viewed consciously, they have no ultimate or intrinsic value. Of themselves, they are nothing—and in that sense, they are empty. But they have a conventional kind of existence.
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