The World is My Mirror (11 page)

All objects that appear just appear. But they are not objects; it is you seeing yourself. The world of appearances is your reflection‌—‌not that ugly mug in the mirror. Your reflection is not that personal. It might include the image you see brushing its teeth in the morning, but exclusivity to this one will only induce pain, suffering and fear. The world of appearances points to the eternal only, not the impermanent world. How magnificent!

This has always been the case; it just became downgraded to normality. Normality is being born, having parents, getting a job, looking forward to holidays and generally fitting into a system that we have been convinced pre-dates us. Or, indeed, trying consciously to live outside the system, going off the grid, being self-sufficient and having an alternative lifestyle. The astounding recognition that life is amazing and totally mysterious is hardly noticed. The contracted self that lives in a body with a world outside believes only the constant ramblings of the internal objects constructed to alleviate the fear of not knowing and unpredictability. This is why trying to discuss ‘non-duality’ at a dinner party with friends just won’t be heard. You might as well be speaking a foreign language. The other dramas showing on screens one, two and three are providing all the entertainment necessary for your friends and colleagues. Don’t bother with subtitles either, in the form of showing them ancient teachings or introducing ‘self-enquiry’, the silly buggers won’t read them.

The drama constructed from a fear of a dreamt separate world creates constant anxiety for a person. Your eyes are fixed on a future that never arrives. This false sense of ‘me’ will never be happy‌—‌ever. It thinks it knows how to be happy by emulating others who it thinks are doing well and who prosper in the world. The pursuit of physical riches and admiration is like peeking through the cracks of the stage curtains at a cold, black, white and grey audience, not noticing the constant light, colour and warmth shining constantly within you. It seems Wholeness will do absolutely anything to gain what it thinks it has lost. It will travel to holy places and seek out holy people. It will try and control thought and goes out of its way to be compassionate to others.

Wholeness may not be as stupid as you might think. The seeking keeps the drama going all the time that there is a someone looking for a future, and that ‘future’ includes enlightenment. If you were watching a movie and paid your money, you would be rather miffed if it ended after only ten minutes: let’s face it, you have hardly had time to become irritated by the kid behind you kicking your seat, let alone start on the bucket of popcorn.

It appears that some people are mighty fortunate and have what seems to be a half-hour sitcom as their drama; other poor sods have the director’s cut of
War and Peace
. When it’s over for them, they find themselves dead in their seat and get taken straight to the crematorium, cooked in the chair they were watching from.

So, dramas are all unique. Wholeness likes to sit and watch multiple screens, flicking through the channels, laughing at some and crying with others. When it finally switches off the set, silence and stillness provide all the entertainment required. The blockbuster called ‘having a life’ starts to lose its appeal. It is like when you are growing-up,
Tom and Jerry
get replaced by horrors, thrillers or so-called adult entertainment. Mind you, when the false sense of separation gets rumbled
Tom and Jerry
can become an absolute scream. Watch the episode
Jerry and Jumbo
, where a baby elephant falls from the travelling circus train and ends up making friends with Jerry‌—‌hilarious.

Dramas need their sets. They need context for their plots and venues for their actors to exchange dialogue. Old westerns had the shop fronts and saloon bars propped up with timber bracing, and if you have noticed the wobble on wooden frames from slammed doors on low-budget soap operas, you will know what I mean. Clever camera crews and multiple angles show us just enough information to fool us and help us play along with the film makers.

The life drama is no different. Right now I am sitting in my office writing this close to Christmas. There is a parcel downstairs that needs taking to the local post office, a ten minute walk away. This requires imagination on a grand scale because the parcel, the post office and even the downstairs are not present. All that’s happening is that pen is squiggling on paper and thought objects are creating the next scene of parcel posting.

Nothing is actually happening other than thought which is building sets and writing scripts. How absolutely amazing this is. It is so obvious when
personing
collapses and becomes impossible when Wholeness takes a world view.

I wonder sometimes what on earth the readers of this must think, especially those who have picked it up at a jumble sale or found it clearing out a relative’s attic. If I’d have read this when younger it wouldn’t have meant a damn thing. Non-duality seemed to drop in my lap without any warning; perhaps it will do the same for you. If it’s way in the future, dear reader, goodness knows what technology you will have and what tyrants and tossers are around manipulating your thought processes and telling you how to be. All I’ll say is this: timeless being does not change; there is nothing to change.

I have touched on the fear of other people already, but this was so dominant for me that I want to look at it in more detail.

What are other people? What is another person? It seems an easy question on the surface. You could respond by saying other human beings are like myself, who, although similar in basic design, have subtle differences in body shape and intellectual abilities. Some people are older than you; some are younger. Some are richer and some are poorer.

Straightforward? No. So-called ‘other people’ act only as a stimulus to activate templates, mental characters or stereotypes constructed early on in our lives to make sense and protect an unstable feeling of selfhood. You never see a human being as they actually are; you are positioning yourself based on your best interpretation of them. You are attempting to read their mind and second-guess what they are capable of based on experiences from the past. Behind those closed doors of the factory other people are being assembled from parts and pieces of encounters in the past. What you are left with is a chimera constructed in a crude and very ad hoc fashion. You are Victor Frankenstein. Welcome to your monster.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, your creation does you no favours. It will not be restrained, and goes on the rampage. In a sense you are both in bondage‌—‌you and your creation. To create is to destroy. What is destroyed is the uncertainty and mystery of life itself. Notions of creation leave you in bondage and thinking you know what the world is and what is happening. You can’t know. You will never know. It’s not possible. Knowing is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Ignorance is thinking you know; it isn’t the common-sense notion of being stupid.

A perceived successful and confident other person can activate the loser in you. Thought can establish scenario after scenario of what ‘their kind’ are like. You imagine the expensive restaurants they patronise, their political ideology and even the acrobatic sexual activities in which they most probably engage. Your thought factory turns out people faster than a milk bottle being filled in a dairy. Not only that, the current person under construction is recycled for another day where bits and pieces of the current character are used for someone else we meet, perhaps years later.

How grotesque.

The mind of a separate person is often suspicious of others and on guard. To be a person is to be vulnerable and frightened. Behaviour around others is often to protect and pre-empt a strike at the fragile structure we call ‘me’. To relax and just
be
is like having a defence budget of about £1.50. That’s not enough to protect you from attack. You might as well wave a white hanky even before you shake hands for the first time.

It does not have to be this way. You are not seeing anything as it actually is. You are living in fantasy. To think you know what anything is, and that includes other people, is at best inaccurate and worse‌—‌totally wrong. The whole notion of there being other people is a by-product of the internal structure established to defend and make sense of a world that comes with contraction and sense-making.

Let’s face it, if you are a shy and fearful person and are with a crowd of strangers you will automatically feel self-conscious. Imagine you are in a pub or a bar you haven’t been to before. It might be filled with lots of laughter and lots of people who know each other very well. You might witness the bar staff exchanging words with the punters on a very informal basis and feel rather uncomfortable because you are clearly a strange face to others. It’s like catching a glimpse of a movie half-way through and not knowing the characters or the plot.

When self-consciousness ceases, there are only flashes of light and sound and lots and lots of storytelling. The mind constructs scenes complete with people and places to make sense of the infinite. Boundlessness and lack of definition scare the life out of an engineered self.

I can assure you that liberation does not stop thought, though. Thought is seen as this incredible phenomenon that arises out of nothing and falls back into nothing. Like a lucid dream, it is taken to be entertainment‌—‌no different from reading a novel or going to the cinema. It has no power to do anything. It is always playing catch-up, interpreting from old knowledge and ignoring the present appearance of everything in and as this timeless realm.

If you see what I am trying to convey, you will never be bored again. The mystery of what is will be a constant travelling companion for you. So, sitting in traffic with others becoming frustrated at the one metre per minute progress will be a source of pleasure while you are looking at the surroundings and hearing the tutting and cussing of your fellow passengers.

In liberation, the very thing seeming to be a constant cause of anxiety can morph into utter fascination and interest. Listening‌—‌real listening‌—‌where you seek clarification from another to really grasp their thoughts shows the utmost respect for someone. Rather than stored knowledge becoming activated or crass stock phrases being used, you give another the space to express themselves. You can still misunderstand someone, however, but you seem to have the confidence to admit it, and you are intrigued and interested all the same. There is no inner structure to sway about and become unstable after an attempt to criticise you and your lack of knowledge. There is no separate person in residence to receive and interpret this. What you are becomes unbounded and free and unaffected by the neurotic needs of others.

Fear can come in all guises and so my fears are not your fears. But I think fear of other people is ubiquitous and the source of a lot of depression, anxiety and cruel vindictive behaviour designed to belittle and control others. Fear of others is not just the withdrawing from social situations so as not to be exposed as an unworthy human candidate; it can appear as always wanting to be the best around others and the withholding of praise and love if someone achieves more than you. The self which emerges from early unsatisfactory encounters with parents and teachers strives for perfection. If this perfection is clearly out of reach, the fear of being found out and having your Achilles heel on show will activate aggression as well as self-pity. It is much easier to inflict harm on others if we feel ourselves threatened and in danger.

Judging others and creating a personality for them has very little to do with who or what they are. In a way we are always writing two scripts‌—‌ours and theirs. This is inevitable and comes with the package labelled:
I am a separate person
. Not only do we imprison ourselves, we create an accomplice and share a bunk bed with him or her in jail.

Interactions are influenced by the internal drama. This is the dynamism that drives so much misery and unsatisfactory behaviour. It is as if you are a talent scout searching for someone to play a role in your production. If someone leaves you to star in, or play a supporting part in, another drama, then there is a role that needs filling. You cannot put on the performance without a cast; who would come to see that? A drama with no actors is a non-entity. It makes me wonder if it’s why some people find themselves in more than one abusive relationship. They don’t know it, but they are probably looking for someone to play the role of tyrant and torturer. Gaps feel uncomfortable and confusing. No identity is tantamount to death for the person. So, any identity, even that of a slave to a cruel and abusive partner, can seem better than having nothing to cling on to at all.

Shyness and anxiety do not exist independently‌—‌just like everything else. Anxiety requires created events. We can stimulate the anxious person by giving him or her a script that will suit the artistic prowess of the actor within. No actor likes being out of work and twiddling their thumbs. Anything is better than nothing and so you will make it your own and impress the director no matter what. Even if the role is exhausting and scary it shows you are still a ‘someone’ rather than a ‘no one’. Misery doesn’t necessarily cause a person to seek help, though, to find out what the problem is. There is an energy in misery and depression that can become addictive. It becomes addictive because it is predictable. If you have ever experienced depression you will know how a flat-line internal state is maintained no matter what anyone says or does. In the prison of depression, every day is much the same as the one before it. There is a pseudo sense of control over your life. The curtains are closed‌—‌private viewing only.