Solving Yourself Read online

  Similarly, without the consciousness as a base, nothing is.

  There can be no pain without a consciousness of pain.

  Wu Hsin declares that there is a reality; it cannot be measured by words.

  Wu Hsin's words are the invitation to go beyond words.

  One cannot be aware of this reality if there is fear, which is the byproduct of self-consciousness.

  16

  Attempting to sublimate one's thoughts is akin to burying one's shadow.

  If one is to believe that there is a thinker, one could likewise believe in a digester or a heart beater.

  Until the desire for personal continuity is surrendered, how can Understanding manifest?

  Any mind functioning from the mandate for self-protection must fill itself with imaginations, thereby skewing reality.

  Regardless of how disparate and disorganized a series of appearances may be, that which perceives them is organization itself.

  It is an impartial equilibrium.

  17

  When a man enters a pitch black room and declares "There is nothing here" he speaks incorrectly.

  Was he not there to observe the absence?

  Mind struggles with absence or emptiness.

  It cannot find a box to place it in.

  The brain does not know how to process it.

  This is the conundrum that remains unresolved until it becomes clear that this emptiness is prior to both mind and brain.

  It is the source or fountain from which all things spring.

  18

  As the mind creates bodies in a world while one dreams, it likewise creates other bodies in another world during what is called waking.

  Each lives in and from his own mind.

  Each mind is the container of each world.

  Unable to know another's mind, one is, in truth, unable to know another's world.

  19

  When Wu Hsin awakens in the morning, I-am is already present to welcome and receive him.

  Anything perceived comes and goes, whereas I-am was there before its appearance, during the moments when it presented itself, and after it had left.

  I am this background.

  I-am is the gap before one thought replaces another.

  I-am abides as Knowing, knowing thinking mind, perceiving senses, acting body, happy or sad personality.

  Being this Knowing, it can be neither thinking mind, perceiving senses, acting body, nor happy or sad personality.

  I-am is this impartial observation of the organism in the flow of life.

  20

  All attempts at rejection only provide reality to that which one wants to reject.

  See the false as false; there is no need to reject it.

  How can one reject what isn't?

  For most, the destruction of the false is quite difficult as falsity is being created and renewed all the time.

  Realize that all is in your mind and that you are beyond the mind.

  The disentanglement from self-consciousness, the movement of attention from thought to the spaces between thought, is sufficient.

  21

  Questions attempt to enhance one's intellectual understanding.

  As intellectual understanding is not a pre-condition for clear sight, the pursuit of intellectual understanding is a road with no outlet.

  To be a master of intellectual understanding is to be wearing a paper crown.

  Wu Hsin acknowledges that you have come here seeking the truth.

  Yet, how will the truth seekers recognize the sought?

  22

  When the body dies, "I" is in no way diminished.

  This "I", it is pure existence, eternal, infinite, indefinable, not affected by the succession of Time.

  It is not involved in the extension of Space, beyond form, quantity, quality.

  It is Self only and it is absolute.

  23

  Language translates thoughts from symbols into words. Prior to thought, it has no use.

  The challenge to Wu Hsin is to apply words to where no words apply.

  Consciousness itself is mind, thought, all phenomena, all manifestation, the world.

  What is "me" other than the thought of the composite that the mind has created?

  See that since no thought can do anything, "me" can't do anything.

  Now, be still.

  24

  Who can know That by which everything is known?

  Those who are seeking to know who they are walk a trail with no end.

  One already knows what one is relatively.

  One never can know what one is absolutely, for as such one is no thing to be known.

  There is no division between inner and outer.

  There is only one movement in which the inner and the outer exist as aspects of movement.

  Seeing otherwise is confusion, like seeing ice as something separate from water.

  As absence of light is darkness, absence of confusion is enlightenment.

  25

  Always you think "I exist".

  Every moment your body and mind are changing, but in the middle of all these changes the unchangeable notion "I exist" persists.

  You never think "I do not exist".

  This awareness of "I exist" is the reflection of the authentic-I.

  When you realize, you will understand that there is nothing to give up or to get hold of.

  What exists always exists.

  Only one authentic-I exists.

  26

  What is the world other than one’s consciousness of it?

  Every perception, thought or feeling is known by oneself.

  One is the knower of the world through the sense organs, the sense organs through the mind, and the mind and its activity by Knowing Itself.

  Actions, perceptions, thoughts and feelings all come and go.

  But Knowingness does not stand apart even for a moment.

  Resting as consciousness everything will be happening spontaneously.

  Standing as a body-mind, one will think that you are doing something.

  27

  Silence is a state of aloneness, which is absolute.

  It is a state of surrender to life, the unknown.

  To face the unknown is to be free from all the reactions of the known.

  When your house is burning down, it is not the time for analysis.

  28

  Consciousness turned outward toward phenomena is called mind. Mind is therefore the First Phenomenon.

  The mind is opaque and cannot accurately represent what is true.

  It is made opaque by fear, which arises after the birth of the conceptual dichotomy of self and other. Such a mind is incapable of clarity.

  By what faculty does one experience the mind?

  Consciousness is the First Movement.

  From it, the movement into mind and all other movements ensue.

  The differentiation into same, similar and dissimilar begins.

  29

  The goal of any practice is the end of all practice.

  It is only the recognized that can be transcended.

  This explains why Wu Hsin places so much emphasis on discerning the false.

  In every instant when one stands outside the mind to observe the mind, one is the sought after.

  Clarity occurs in one of two fashions.

  First, if one directly sees what one is, then one knows what one is not.

  The other is to discern what one is not, with the residual being what one is.

  30

  Wu Hsin knows what you are while you believe what you aren't.

  Wu Hsin has examined that which you have yet to examine.

  Understand that understanding is possible only when there is observation without any center as observer.

  The consciousness that one is has no outside.

  All phenomena are appearances in it.

  This includes the psychosomatic form that carries one's name.

  31

 
; Most spiritual pursuits fail to draw the distinction between the search for freedom for the ego and the search for freedom from the ego.

  As such, most fall into the former.

  One must be willing to forgo the security of the habitual; most are not.

  Wu Hsin advises that one must narrow the attention.

  The body is an inert egg, infused with the Conscious Life Energy.

  That which cared for its every need while enwombed, continues to do so today.

  What causes one to believe that the caring ceased with the exit from the womb?

  August (Liù Yuè)

  1

  The world is not external.

  Because you identify yourself with the body you see the world outside.

  The inauthentic-I arises in the waking state. It is a product of the state in the same way that any I that arises while dreaming is a product of that state only.

  That which rises and falls is the inauthentic-I. That which has neither origin nor end is the authentic-I. All things that arise and set do so within this authentic-I.

  This inauthentic-I or signatory self, wants to affix its name on everything.

  Its logic is that the more I do, the more I am; the more that is mine, the more I am.

  2

  Cast your gaze into the skies, to the heavens. It is endless.

  The objects that appear do so within the endlessness.

  Or close your eyes and gaze inward. No objects appear here.

  Does this have an end or is this inner landscape also endless?

  Imagine the vastness of this endlessness in that it can contain your world and billions of others' worlds.

  Will you now identify as a small object in the endlessness or you can be what you are, this vast endlessness itself?

  3

  When individual consciousness rises from sleep, one know oneself via "I-am-this-body".

  But in sleep there is knowledge of neither the body nor the world.

  The pure consciousness or authentic-I alone exists in sleep.

  In the waking state, the first thought "I am" appears. Only to this first thought do additional thoughts of other, of second and third persons, rise.

  The more one attends to second and third persons, the more the thoughts will increase.

  As such, the attention must return to the first-person and away from "other".

  4

  What one is is Consciousness. Everything else is what one has.

  In this Totality, there has been a fragmentation.

  The condition of fragmentation makes seeing things clearly impossible. A fraction cannot perceive the totality.

  The restoration to the condition prior to the fragmentation is another way one could make reference to enlightenment or realization.

  5

  Peace is not far away.

  It is concealed by one's entanglement with what one believes ought to be.

  In that sense, thought is not the problem.

  Believing the thought is the problem.

  6

  This That is inscrutable. The mind and speech are baffled by it.

  What you are is independent of everything.

  However, unless you drop everything and remain unsupported, this cannot be discerned.

  Until you have met yourself, you don't know anything.

  After meeting yourself, what you need to know you come to know.

  7

  All that one can do is to be available.

  When the Emperor sends his carriage for you, if you are not available, the Emperor cannot be faulted for your failure to reach the palace.

  Disregard intellect and cultivate silence so that you can hear the whisper of Intelligence. This Intelligence is native, not something that is developed or acquired.

  Although unknown to you, you are saturated with It.

  Look closely and see the ease with which distraction dissipates the attentive energy.

  In that instant that you realize that you are not present, you are present.

  8

  The mind that creates its own bondage invents its own freedom.

  Both are imaginary.

  A mind seeking "how to" is already ensnared in searching.

  Understand that one has no connection with this mind-flow; one is apart from it.

  All one can do is observe oneself.

  Once the nature of the organism is fully seen, That which enervates it is understood.

  This is sufficient.

  9

  Reality is one indivisible whole.

  To sever oneself from it and imagine being a separate entity is the confusion of the mind.

  You are. You acknowledge this knowing through the declaration "I-am".

  This I-am is the bridge between the pure-I and I-am-this, the particular.

  The back and forth traversing of the bridge continues until one is stabilized in the pure-I.

  Then, the bridge collapses and there is no going back.

  10

  This day, Wu Hsin shall reveal the four pre-conditions for Understanding. They are:

  (a) acknowledgement of the theoretical possibility of Understanding,

  (b) the intense desire to obtain it,

  (c) exposure to a true teaching, and

  (d) the direct apperception of the subject.

  The last of these results from one's disinterest in the discontinuous.

  It is one's turning away from what appears in awareness and toward awareness itself.

  Stated another way, it is not attending to what-is-other, not attending to you, he, she, we, they, them, those or it.

  11

  Collect as many of Wu Hsin's words as you like.

  Your collection will not provide you with what you seek.

  If Realization was assured to anyone who moved ten thousand stones one by one over a great distance, many people would do this work agreeably.

  But when Wu Hsin asks each to consider for themselves, this is too great a task.

  12

  It is the self-consciousness itself which makes efforts to get rid of itself, so how can it die?

  If self-consciousness is to go, then something else must slay it.

  The potentiality for self-consciousness is the I-am thought.

  In its subtle form, it remains a thought whereas in its gross aspect it embraces mind, senses and body.

  One must come to understand who is that "I" contained in each "my".

  Before one conceptualizes anything, one is.

  13

  Wu Hsin declares that there is nothing higher to attain to.

  One is already the highest, but one tells oneself otherwise.

  One can only know oneself by being oneself without any attempt at self-definition and self-description.

  Nothing happens to you; you are the center of observation of all that happens.

  Turn away from intellectualism and toward pure experience.

  Be still, cease being anything in particular, and see whether or not the words of Wu Hsin ring true.

  14

  There is an obvious, intimate link between identity and memory.