The Self Is Not A State

The smokeless blue flame of anger flashes up and vanishes. The grief cloud bursts in ten thousand droplets of the sun. Bitter turns sweet, sweet turns sour, but Beauty is the flavor of impermanence.

No need to make a cult of ecstasy and delight. No need to make a cult of grief and anger. These are feeling states, not signs of more authentic spirituality.

Feeling states pass through awareness like clouds through the empty sky. But awareness is not a state. It is the Self, eternal, unborn, boundless and clear.

The Way is not to cultivate feeling states, or personify them as gods and goddesses, but to transcend them, resting as self-luminous pure awareness. This is meditation. This is ananda.

Yet feeling states continue to arise, dissolve, arise, dissolve, in that field of bliss, and we have no cause to grasp or reject them. Is this freedom so esoteric, so difficult? In truth, is easier to rest as the Self, eternal and boundless, than to be joyful or sad...

The Self is not an emotional flat-line disdaining the color and fragrance of feeling states. Four Immeasurables reveal the mystery of a Buddha's heart. In vast dispassion (Upeksha), boundless love, joy, and sorrow arise (Metta, Mudita, Karuna).

Our own awareness is a rich abysmal intimacy that contains all feeling states, all gods and goddesses, without conflict or resistance - just as the still desert air contains the dance of a mirage.



Photo: sunset over my town