I was evaluating these statements a few months ago. All I can say
is I seem to get them in terms of my own experience, but that
does not help anyone else. Basically just meditating for half a
century seems to be the trick.
Also certain specific experiences that have occurred also helped
illuminate them for me. Specifically the transition from waking
to deep anaesthesia to waking, which is about as close to death
one can get as far as shutdown of the brain was one factor for
me. Also the transition from TC to waking although that is more
erratic, and it does not happen any more for me. Another
experience is the realisation that what one thinks is not true
except in a very limited and restricted sense.
In other words, feeling comfortable with these statements as
having an experiential significance can only come within one's
experience, not in the telling of that experience. You cannot
prove a thing.
As also pointed out by others, translation is a factor, but
basically it is the same old thing, whatever you call 'absolute'
and 'relative' specifies a difference in experience and the mind
has to recognise that difference, the relationship of the words
bring to light. It can be as simple as life and death. Awareness
is what you have in death, but the awareness, i.e., being, does
not do anything or is conscious of anything. Consciousness and
awareness is what you have in life. Parsing the difference goes
on in the mind until you no longer really think of them as
essentially different. It is just an exercise in mental clarity
rather than an exercise of truth.
Truth is really local. It is the relationship between a statement
and a situation. "I have a MAD magazine in my right hand" is a
true statement if you have a copy of a MAD magazine in your right
hand. But such a statement really does not say much about the
character of the items mentioned. It is a very coarse
approximation of a unique situation. For example, it did not
contain information about the pigeon crapping on my head while I
was holding the magazine.
Trying to apply a statement to the entire universe as a whole
simply contains no useful content. The most generalised 'true'
statements are probably general relativity and the standard model
of quantum mechanics, and they are not entirely general about all
the universe is, they still have local value. No one has figured
out how to combine them into a more general statement, and we
also do not know if there is some unknown they cannot account for.
When a person says they grasp what Nisargadatta said, what they
are really saying is they are experiencing a certain way, and
that way for them is what they would call 'truth', but it is not
an expressible truth, a provable truth, like holding a magazine
in hand, it just means that whatever is being experienced can be
no other way at that moment, and that the mind is settled in the
knowledge that it cannot be any other way. Every moment is absolute.
Statements like 'awareness is not the same as consciousness' make
the mind work, and it is an exercise in mental flexibility to
find experiences that correspond to these terms, assuming such
experiences are possible. Eventually, like practising a musical
instrument, like fingers, or breath, or embouchure for a
musician, the mind gets a bit more flexible and responsive if you
work it a certain way for a while. Once that work is done, it can
relax because what was previously work now can happen
automatically. Basically it breaks down previous conditioning by
replacing it with another sort of conditioning which is
presumably less restrictive in function.
Jiddu Krishnamurti said it a different way. He said 'My secret is
I do not mind what is happening'. That just means from his
perspective there is experience, and that is all there is,
nothing else is happening. For myself, I find the world of
metaphysics simply vanished as experience clarified. It was a
reality created entirely by the relationship of words to one
another, but there were no magazines to hold, it was imaginary,
that mental world of things supposedly 'beyond'.
Awakening shows the mind there is nothing beyond what one
experiences. The universe becomes immanent and lean and mean,
because a ton of useless mental garbage is taken down. You can
still make up stuff if you want, you just do not have to; it is
no longer necessary to rely on a mental world of concepts to
enjoy life. You do not have to parse experience to enjoy, you
just have it. But you can parse it if you want. And to do stuff
you do have to parse the world conceptually.
I have not had much time lately to post, I have been working on
an electronic form of a publication, which means working with
Extensible Markup Language, and attempting to remember and
relearn stuff I have not done for several years, and it gets
harder every year as the brain ages, so this has turned out to be
an exercise in re-establishing sufficient mentalclarity to get
the project done.
If you want to do something, to have a beer for example, you have
to parse experience into, not necessarily fully blown concepts,
but sufficiently differentiated enough to distinguish a bar, or a
can or a bottle in a refrigerator, and so forth. I think I will
now leave my computer and go make a cup of coffee. There is also
one beer in the fridge, but its cold here now. Now, how should I
do this?...parse, parse, parse.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>,
<no_re...@yahoogroups.com> <mailto:no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
What can I do to test these statements?
Nisargadatta
"The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know
myself as I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my
experience. It is not that I do not remember. In fact there is
nothing to remember. Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self.
There is no such thing. The bundle of memories and hopes, called
the 'I', imagines itself existing everlastingly and creates time
to accommodate its false eternity: To be, I need no past or
future. All experience is born of imagination; I do not imagine,
so no birth or death happens to me. Only those who think
themselves born can think themselves re-born. You are accusing me
of having been born -- I plead not guilty!"
"By its very nature the mind is outward turned; it always tends
to seek for the source of things among the things themselves; to
be told to look for the source within, is, in a way, the
beginning of a new life. Awareness takes the place of
consciousness; in consciousness there is the 'I', who is
conscious while awareness is undivided; awareness is aware of
itself. The 'I am' is a thought, while awareness is not a
thought, there is no 'I am aware' in awareness. Consciousness is
an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being
conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of
consciousness, but awareness is beyond all -- being as well as
not-being."
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>,
<no_re...@yahoogroups.com> <mailto:no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
What can I do to test these statements?
Nisargadatta
"The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know
myself as I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my
experience. It is not that I do not remember. In fact there is
nothing to remember. Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self.
There is no such thing. The bundle of memories and hopes, called
the 'I', imagines itself existing everlastingly and creates time
to accommodate its false eternity: To be, I need no past or
future. All experience is born of imagination; I do not imagine,
so no birth or death happens to me. Only those who think
themselves born can think themselves re-born. You are accusing me
of having been born -- I plead not guilty!"
"By its very nature the mind is outward turned; it always tends
to seek for the source of things among the things themselves; to
be told to look for the source within, is, in a way, the
beginning of a new life. Awareness takes the place of
consciousness; in consciousness there is the 'I', who is
conscious while awareness is undivided; awareness is aware of
itself. The 'I am' is a thought, while awareness is not a
thought, there is no 'I am aware' in awareness. Consciousness is
an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being
conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of
consciousness, but awareness is beyond all -- being as well as
not-being."
