Illusion to Reality

My friend recently commented that she is loving her new found life where she is freed from her past habits of calculative spending, freakish control over events, and manipulative scheming to be safe. She is becoming more conscious of her mind, more ready to surrender and more able to trust deeply. She also notice there is a deeper integrity to respond to situations instead of the habitual defensive reaction that she used to do in the past.

It is very difficult to understand or even perceive how could it be possible to surrender entirely and trust all will be taken off.  Many of us comes from learned perception of the need to strive, to control and to get what we want, and to go against that principle is unimaginable and incomprehensible. Yet if one were to realize all those principles were mere learned perceptions rather than ultimate reality, one could not help but to find ways to slowly break that notion and find new ways of living.

Consider that all our thoughts, speech or actions are motivated from perceptions of deep seated ideas unknown to us. And when we are not aware that they are merely ideas reinforced over years of beliefs, we will never question its validity and open up to a potential way of living life differently. One may dispute that the reality is such that everyone is doing the same hence it is an empirical truth and also that when one goes against that norm, repercussion is inevitable as always. That is exactly what ignorance does to perception – reinforcing what it experience from the past without further exploration why it cannot be otherwise.

One of the main reason to this is that we are never thought to address the cause but instead to change the effect. We try to change life by changing what we are doing, yet if our mindset is not change, what we do differently will not have a different effect in our lives. We have not been told and given the right information that the life we lived now has much to do with our mind, our consciousness, our perception. We have not been shown and hence not realized that we are constantly motivated by what is within our mind. Many a times our mind is motivated by fear instead of love. Whether it is fear or love, both are merely ideas deriving from perceptions. It is not that, one is better than the other. What we do not realize is that each has implication of varied experience of opposing degrees. Fear attracts lack and love attracts abundance. One is about depreciation, the other is about appreciation.When we come from the perspective of fear, probably unknown to us, we have no choice but to experience lack. Lack or fear are merely results of ideas we have never questioned in the first place. When we don’t notice this reality and vehemently tries to change what is outside through frustration or stress, we are merely going against our ideas instead of transcending them. Whenever we go against the mind, we are reinforcing what is within as nothing within the mind can be pushed away except to be noticed and realized. Only through realization can we see the folly of our beliefs and hence open up to change. Change of perception leads to change of action; it doesn’t work on reverse order. We can’t change the effect except from realizing the cause. Without the cause(s), effects cannot take place.

Imagine what can happen when your inner cause is love, motivated by wisdom. A world of difference awaits you as you are merely experiencing what is within the mind.

When it comes to money matter, the importance one gives to it is not the form it takes, nor is it the denomination. Not even, strangely, the value attached to each note or coin, but rather the value one gives to it. I may not entirely represent everyone’s perception over this subject, but one thing I can be sure of is that, the consciousness, a universal nature of its own, can be seen, explored and understood from an angle where everyone may be familiar with, albeit unknown to his or her own experience at that moment, until awakened to it.

As we explore and understand deeply our relationships with any objects of the world, be it a relationship with another fellow human, or a relationship with our career, money, health or materials like house, car, phone etc, we are looking at a common ground how our own consciousness is dealing with it. Our attention of most time is towards the object of consciousness rather than the consciousness itself. “Consciousness” in this context is the mind itself, the knowing mechanism whose function is to keep contacting with objects, having objects as its own knowing, thus creating what it knows of a reality out of it. In other words, mind and the object which it latches onto, becomes an inner impression of perception we are all living with, albeit our entire lives.

One can say object of the mind is what that is known by the mind. Thus, to each specific moment of experience, it will be true to say the only experience there is, is the knowing mind, or consciousness, and the object or known by the mind.

experience = mind in contact with object = knowing and what is known

The word “object” denotes the inability to know itself except known by the mind. When our consciousness comes into contact with any object, without exception, which includes another mind, that object which our mind picks up does not has the capacity of knowing itself. Strange as it may sound, the object that the mind latches on, is, but an impression, of its own perception. Knowing mind and perception comes together in unison, with feeling as its effect, thus making what comes into contact merely an object of impression and relatively, an experience.

In other words, the mind cannot fully or truly know what is outside, except its own meaning given to it. Thus, I cannot really know you except my mind’s meaning of you. The meaning my mind gives to you is all that is, within my sphere of experience, sad to say, of each moment. I only experience what my mind is doing, not you, not anyone for that matter, for the mind that I have is merely a projection tool, like the metaphor of a spectacle where the image of clearness or blurriness stands at its mercy.

What my mind has when I see you, is what I am experiencing about you – I don’t experience you all the time except my mind experience. If my mind has a peculiar programming of beliefs, I will see you in the eyes of that belief. I cannot see you other than that without my mind coming into picture as seeing will not have taken place at all – for “seeing” is the mind itself! Bizarre isn’t it? In brief, I am already-always witnessing the mind ALL the time, without my knowledge. Because the mind is a power tool of projection, hence I thought what I see is outside me – it is a big time conspiracy! It is the same for all the senses that I am experiencing.

So I am subjected to the mind’s game all the time. Hence, if you are one of those hungering for money which the mind is making you to experience, you would have missed the point of what it is at that moment. You think it is money that you want. And you think it is the value of money that is what attracts you. And so you keep chasing after it, scheming, planning, conspiring how to get closer to more money – all these are done real time of the mind, from the mind, by the mind and not to mention, in the mind, too. All these motivations depends on what programming your mind has. The value of the mind, is the value you see on money, not the value of money itself. Even that is what the mind gives! Hence it is a game of self-cherishing, self-fulfilling, self-perpetrator, in a loop upon loops, strangling its own agenda. Apply these to the way you relate to your relationship. Big time!

Thus my journey, or your journey, is only one – to be awakened to the subjugation of the incessant play of the mind game. Not that the world is to be avoided, for that is impossible, as the world is the mind itself. Neither is it to stop doing anything but to just be a bare witness to the mind – to be awake to each relationship between the mind and any object apparently outside of itself; be it money, career, or anyone for that matter. When you are awake to the mind, witnessing the mind, within each now, the past or future is totally irrelevant, even unreal to you. That witness, that wakefulness is your closeness to what many have awakened to. You may call it God, Love, Enlightenment, whatever. Let not those concepts blind you but lead you to a direction you can finally arrive at on and of your own.

The worth you give to this is worth many more times than the worth you give to money or relationship, for when you resolve the unresolved, you resolve everything that is in your life.