Solving Yourself
Page 10
The great teachings never come from men although this is how it seems.
The great teachings come through the mouths of men from an unseen source.
All experience requires memory.
The articulation of any experience comes after the experience and must therefore be accessed from memory.
Memory is merely a momentary refuge.
To remember that which is ever-present and very close to you every moment, this Conscious Life Energy, is the right use of memory.
19
Not even Wu Hsin can point out a raven on the tree branch to a blind man.
Identification is a form of attachment.
The purpose of all attachment is to make real the unreal by adding substance to it.
The ones without attachments are the free ones.
They can touch whatever they like, but they never land.
20
There neither dying nor being born.
From a singular flash of thought, a world with occupants springs to mind.
Everything that is resolves into two thoughts.
"Me" is the I-thought made material into a body. World is the other-than-I thought made material.
When there is Knowing of where thoughts arise, then you have arrived at the truth and there's nothing to be sought.
21
The realized man knows what others merely believe.
Give up all preconceived notions, and thoughts, borrowed from the words of others.
See for yourself; understand for yourself. Assert and manifest your own divinity.
With ceaseless remembrance of what one is in reality, one cannot fail.
Do what you are told diligently and all obstacles will dissolve.
22
Consciousness is the center of perceiving wherein the perceiver and the perceived are resolved.
In humans, it is from where mind arises.
As your nails grow outward from your fingers, all phenomena move outward from consciousness.
Consciousness' instrument for comprehension is attention.
When the attention is scattered, it is like reading what is written on the scroll while not seeing the scroll.
When the attention looks directly at itself, then this very attention awakens you, because in attention everything is revealed.
23
The senses function in order to provide data regarding the body in the world.
As such, living as sensate creatures, the perspective is outward.
Those interested in other dimensions of knowing turn inward.
What is found there is the ineffable, a state before words.
It is the end of the confusion between that which merely plays the music and the one who wrote it.
The character in the book stops masquerading as the author.
24
Some travel long distances every day to listen to Wu Hsin. This trekking continues for weeks and weeks.
How much sea water must you drink to experience the taste of salt?
Wu Hsin only talks about the manifest and its father, the unmanifest.
The words may be different but that which they point to is unchanging.
25
For emperors and beggars, the peace of the deep sleep state is the same.
Wu Hsin does not teach how to make the mind still.
He teaches how to discover the inherent stillness therein.
However, it is your discovery to make.
Will your hunger be satisfied by watching Wu Hsin eat?
26
A mind cluttered with concepts, a mind with ten thousand thoughts in queue, will find little utility in Wu Hsin's words.
Understand that this body, this form, is like a fruit rind.
The sweetness, the beingness, is inside.
Understand that the phenomenal world is like mercury.
It may scatter into millions of parts. Yet, in time, it re-forms into a singular whole.
27
Effort and ego form a singular unit.
Ego means to be something.
To be something in particular requires effort.
Being is effortless.
28
Ching Ping sent twenty years shoveling a single mound of manure.
For many, his efforts are nothing compared to what is required to empty their minds of ideas.
When one is mesmerized by a ripple in the lake, one loses the vastness of the lake.
What is required is a new perception; as sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one.
29
Going outward precedes returning.
To go far, one begins near.
What is nearest than your own sense of yourself?
Those who sit with Wu Hsin are returning from the world.
They renounce the error of conceptual thought-processes so that their nature will exhibit its pristine purity.
This alone is the way to clarity.
30
This Conscious Life Energy is not a mere conceptual construct.
This Conscious Life Energy is palpable.
It is the feeling of your very aliveness.
It is the knowing of your very being.
It is the experience of experiencing.
Let the two words "I am" serve as the constant reminder of It.
October (Bā Yuè)
1
When there is a center, there must be borders.
Where there are borders, there must be limits.
When one is clear, life goes on but without the 'me' as the center.
This is unlimited life.
It is the final transcendence of the selfing process
2
Belief can never know reality.
Belief is the result of conditioning or the result of seeking comfort from an outer or inner authority.
Many come here seeking Wu Hsin’s authority. Can't you see that freedom is freedom from authority?
Wu Hsin is no one’s authority; don't make him into one.
Don't accept anything as the truth, his words included, until you can affix your personal stamp to it.
Your confusion can only end when you are the sole authority.
3
The ashes of a dead fire provide neither heat nor light.
So it is with viewpoints of those who represent themselves as knowledgeable.
Whereas philosophers and scholars can talk captivatingly, they are lacking in the direct experience that provides the ring of authority.
One cannot serve as a guide to a place to which one has never been.
4
Embodied consciousness depends on the condition of the brain and the senses. The mind is a force operating on the brain.
The thoughts of the world are in the brain within the body.
When a man dreams, he creates himself and the world he occupies. It is only a mental projection.
This waking state is another.
In this sense, nothing can trouble you except for your own imagination.
No matter what the condition of the moment or the condition of the world, you are.
Without you, nothing is.
5
The world cannot be experienced from outside of the world.
As such, an instrument for experiencing, inside the world, is required. This instrument is the brain in a body.
We imagine that experiences are something we have rather than something that we are.
Yet, even that is inaccurate.
We are not the experiences; we are the experiencing.
6
Whereas the biological imperative is to survive, the psychological imperative is to become.
Be clear about how you are driven by this psychological imperative.
You spend your entire life chasing security and permanency. In point of fact there is no security or permanency.
As such, you become a conspirator against reality by forsaking it for the illusory.
Begin by pleading guilty
to this charge
7
You can't see what is looking.
You can only be what is looking.
Stop holding on to conceptual thinking as a style of understanding.
It is what holds back Understanding.
8
The noise of the self-consciousness prevents its own destruction.
Noise can never produce silence.
Noise perpetuates further noise, which in turn, insulates the self-consciousness from dissolution.
As the lake is not calm until the winds cease, the mind has no peace until the movement of self-centric thought ends.
9
What is natural lacks intention in the same way as the rainfall does not intend to irrigate the rice field.
One must reject the allure of progressive becoming.
The conscious thought "I must get it" can be as much of an impediment as any other which appears in the mind.
In the absence of becoming, Being shines.
10
How did this body become you?
When it was an unfertilized, inert ovum, it wasn't you. When it was fertilized and began to develop it wasn't you.
It only became you when you were told it was you. It is merely a developed seed and you are the observing of the seed.
You are as you have always been.
It is only with the arrival of self-consciousness that you and other than you have come to be your belief.
11
You are already the highest.
What else can say "I am"?
What else can think "I am? Without you, nothing can be.
Can this shirt be in the absence of thread?
12
Wu Hsin always talks about the same thing: the world as macrocosm, the body/mind as microcosm and the source of both.
We observe that the temporal bows to the eternal, and the relative whispers to the Absolute and that Mind both creates and perceives matter.
As Mind it creates and as mind it perceives and parses.
Although the authentic-I consciousness comprises everything, neither beginning nor ending with the body, it always remains unassociated with anything.
13
The world is a framework of concepts based on names and forms.
Name is represented by language, whereby we label our perceptions as objects.
In this manner, one creates differentiations, including the duality of ‘I’ and ‘not-I’.
Form represents our sensory perceptions.
The world appears in waking and dream along with the mind and disappears in deep sleep when the mind goes into abeyance.
Thus, the world is a projection of the mind.
14
These words offer a singular example, not of a thought-process, but of a lived experience.
Listen to these talks, not so much with the idea of learning, but allowing what is being transmitted to take root.
If it is true it will take root unconsciously and if it is not true it will rot and die.
The message is not difficult to comprehend.
One is not creating jade. The jade is already there in the mud.
One understands that it was the looking outward that was the missing it.
15
To register the discontinuous, something prior must be continuous.
To register absence, something prior must be present.
This "something" has many names, yet cannot be proven.
It is its own proof.
16
Listen to Wu Hsin as one would listen to music. No interpretation, no projection. No thought.
Simply silent welcoming.
In so doing, it will be new, even if it has been heard before.
Only when the structure is torn down can the underlying foundation be exposed. In your case, this structure is the self-consciousness.
The paradox, however, is that there is nothing you can do to take the structure down because any effort the "you" makes only serves to reinforce the idea of a "you".
17
You continue to believe that Wu Hsin has something which you do not have.
You are mistaken.
What Wu Hsin has, you have in equal measure.
Why, then, do you continue to be like the duck that envies the crane's legs?
18
Wu Hsin has no monopoly on what is true.
Although there may be many paths, the summit is singular.
That point at which you know you are is the doorway between the relative and the Absolute.
On the one side is duality and on the other is eternity.
19
All manifestation or actualization is an energetic movement in the stillness of Potentiality.
Once one accepts that all is consciousness, one sees that "Me" is the I-thought made material into a body and the world is the other-than-I thought made material.
In this manner, duality is reduced to I-am and this-is.
20
Wu Hsin has no rules.
There is no law, only primordial awareness.
No vows are required other than the intention to live in the state of natural consciousness.
This naturalness, if left in its pure state, without seeking to modify it in any way, will manifest.
21
Mind is like space, intrinsically empty.
As there are objects appearing in space, there are thoughts appearing in mind.
The objective world is in the subjective.
The Self is therefore the only Reality which permeates and envelops the world.
22
Understanding means discovering one's own true condition stripped of all the self-deceptions and falsifications which the mind creates.
Wu Hsin speaks of one's true nature.
But what is one's true nature?
One's true nature is one's true potential, the potential to see beyond one's potential to the Potentiality itself.
23
Wu Hsin has provided you with the address of the door.
The door has kept you out for so long. The same door lets you in.
Simply go there and wait.
From that point, It can only come to you, you cannot go to It.
24
Continuance is one.
In deep sleep and in death, what continues is the same.
I am present always when the body, senses and other objects appear as well as when they disappear.
When true clarity arrives, one will not need Wu Hsin's stamp of authenticity.
25
When one becomes a seeker, one becomes limited by the seeking.
This is not the path to the Unlimited.
Wu Hsin's words must become a living knowledge in all one's daily activities.
This is the essence of what one may call practice, and besides that there is nothing in particular to be done.