questions

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What is Real? 

We could define ‘real’ as something which never changes. In order to change, a thing has to cease to be what it is and become something else; i.e. it would have to become what it is not.

Therefore, anything that changes cannot be real, since the act of changing involves non-existence

What is Unreal? 

Unreal is the appearance of something in the place/location of its non-existence. Example the snake appears where it does not exist, ie the rope. The snake appears in the location of its own absence. This is the very definition of falsity or unreality. 

Where something is not, there it appears. 
Then it is false. 

Blue color appears in the sky where it does not exist. The blue color appears where there is no blue color. The sky is not blue. 

Similarly, the entire universe of experience (waking world, dream world, deep sleep blankness) continuously appears and disappears in the sky of Awareness. 

Awareness is the locus or location of the absence of the mind. Awareness is where the mind appears, plays it games and dissapears. Hence, the mind is unreal. 

The locus in which something appears and disappears, then in that locus, that thing is an appearance and unreal. The locus only is real.

You are that locus - Awareness.


—Swami Sarvapriyananda
Lectures on Mandukya Karika

 

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Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. 

If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. 


—Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)

 

 

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Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words. 

Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances.


—Charles Baudelaire 

(1821 - 1867)

 

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infinit(esimal

   

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(The student) ought to succeed in noting that 

nothing of all that is from him, is him.

He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

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This "multitude of others" includes the material – the ground, one might say – which he owes to his heredity, to his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

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No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. 

When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought.


—Giacomo Leopardi 
(1798 - 1837)

 

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Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone 

—we find it with another.


—Thomas Merton

 

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revelation

 

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Hidden in the heart of every creature
Exists the One Self, subtler than the subtlest,
Greater than the greatest. They go beyond
All sorrow who extinguish their self-will
And behold the glory of the Self
Through the grace of the One Heart.

Though one sits in meditation in a 
Particular place, the Self within
Can exercise its influence far away.
Though still, it moves everything everywhere.

When the wise realize the Self,
Formless in the midst of forms, changeless
In the midst of change, omnipresent
And supreme, they go beyond sorrow.

The Self cannot be known through study
Of the scriptures, nor through the intellect,
Nor through hearing discourses about it.
The Self can be attained only by those
Whom the Self chooses. Verily unto them
Does the Self reveal itself.


—The Katha Upanishad
from the Eknath Easwaran version

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No striving, no grasping at this or that, no entertaining any self-involved stories whatsoever. 

Instead, attention pivots toward a light in the heart in which the ‘field of boundless emptiness’ is revealed. All questions and doubts are put to rest.  


—Hongzhi

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