EXPAND ENLIGHTENMENT, AND the mind is always calm; go along with things, and consciousness runs at a gallop. I only wish to be rich in enlightenment though personally poor, generous with virtue though emotionally aloof.
Foyan distinguishes between the effect on the Mind of attention to the non-duality and the world of phenomena. He points to his preference for the former state and to his desire to be generative without emotional attachment.
Here, I am thus every day, thus all the time. But tell me, what is thus? Try to express it outside of discriminatory consciousness, intellectual assessments, and verbal formulations.
Foyan is always realizing non-dual experience and points to how hard it is to express.
This reality is not susceptible to your intellectual understanding. Now those who think, attend, and reflect all have some intellectual understanding, but then when they turn back to examine their own eyes and think of the mind that thinks, at this point why do people unknowingly say, "It has never been blue, yellow, red, or white; it has no appearance, no form"? I tell you, this is what I call talk; it is not your original mind.
The reality 'not susceptible to your intellectual understanding' is the reality of him being 'thus every day'. Foyan goes on to point to how intellectual understandings fall short of the actual experience of your original mind.
How can you think of your original mind? How can you see your own eye? When you are looking inward, furthermore, there is no seeing subject. Some people swallow this in one gulp, so their eye of insight opens wide and they immediately arrive at their homeland.
If you drop subjective conceptualizations (no seeing subject) you will see directly.
How can people nowadays reach the point where there is no seeing and no hearing? Everything is always there; you see people, houses, and all sorts of forms, like boiling water bubbling.
The common state is with your attention going out into subjective phenomenal experience.
When you were infants, you also heard sounds and saw forms, but you didn't know how to discriminate. Once you care to the age of reason, then you listened to discriminatory thinking, and from that time on have suffered a split between the primal and the temporal.
A patterns of subjective judgements layered on through experience form a barrier to realization in the form of discriminatory thinking.
At this point, it is inevitably hard for people to restore natural order even if they want to. Those who attain enlightenment do not see walking when they walk, and do not see sitting when they sit. That is why the Buddha said, "The eyes seeing forms is equivalent to blindness; the ears hearing sounds is equivalent to deafness."
Foyan is contrasting the situation most people find themselves in with the experience of the enlightened.
Those who've seen the nature of mind no longer see phenomena as real in themselves.
So in this sense, when the eyes see forms they're not seeing what is there when the ears hear sounds they're not hearing what is there.
How can we say we are as if blind and deaf? When we hear sound, there is no sound to be heard; when we see form, there is no form to be seen. What we see and hear is all equivalent to an echo. It is like seeing all sorts of things in a dream-is there all that when you wake up?
Foyan reiterates the point Buddha makes in the quote above, comparing phenomena to a dream.
If you say yes, yet there's only the blanket and pillow on the bed; if you say no, yet all those things are clearly registered in your mind, and you can tell what they were. The same is true of what you see and hear now in broad daylight.
Foyan draws a direct correlation between things seen in a dream and those seen when you're awake.
So it is said, what can be seen by the eye or heard by the ear can be studied in the scriptures and treatises; but what about the basis of awareness itself-how do you study that?
That last bit is the whole point. What about the basis of awareness itself-how do you study that?
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Submitted July 08, 2020 at 08:18AM by NothingIsForgotten https://ift.tt/2VSzRXG
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