Seeing-Knowing

Q: Gilbert, I’m stuck, I don’t know who I am. There’s a lot of stuck energy in my body, I feel sort of depressed, the search, the hope is almost dead, it just goes around in loops and never results in anything. I’ve done so much spiritual work, so much psychological work. I don’t know whether to keep pushing or to just give up. Neither seems to work, to bring me freedom from suffering. I would appreciate any pointing you could offer.

A: Where are you actually seeing all this psychological story FROM?
You must be totally genuine in an investigation of the story and the narrator of the story.
The mind may appear to be too quick but what you are is ‘before’ whatever appears and disappears in the mind.
The mind content constantly changes but what you are does not change. I can assure you that relief is immanent.
Seeing is happening.
There is no entity in the immediacy of seeing or in this naked consciousness.
The believed in entity requires a story or a fixation on an image of self. Without that fixation it all dissolves naturally.  That image was not with you until language started with all its labels.  It is made of ‘word’ and image (imagining).

A little pointing in the right direction will put an end to the psychological suffering. Whatever help you have been getting is fine for what it is…but it is obvious that it has not cut the fixation with ‘me’ away.

You may take some comfort from the fact that no one actually knows ‘who’ they are. They may say they know but it is all words and story. The FACT of your existence or being is the ONLY fact you can be absolutely certain of. This fact is called ‘I am’ and it is harmless on its own. It is what we add to the ‘I am’ that is fictional, erroneous and unreal. The suggested way of investigating, pointed out so often here, may appear to be without compassion and somewhat cold to many. However it is the quickest and most compassionate way to cut through ‘the fiction of me’ and all the unnecessary psychological suffering.

A common story of me is often put in the terms of energy being stuck, personalised as the ‘me’….I am stuck.  Look closer.  Energy cannot actually get stuck. The nature of energy is to move and it never stops moving in expression.  So the story about a lot of energy being stuck in the body is actually a fiction – and that is a painful story, psychologically. It seems like a trap and it is. The ‘me sense’ feels stuck because of the dead reference point ‘me’.  It is the story that is stuck in a repeating and believed in pattern.  Question everything!

What I will term as ‘old mind’ is just repeating patterns of beliefs….beliefs that have NOT been investigated. Some label it as ‘unconscious’ and say ‘I don’t know’.  Investigate and bring it into the conscious.  We must examine the beliefs impartially and SEE that they are all transient appearances. Referring to them constantly is what ‘becomes’ unbearable and gives a sense of being trapped. We want the story to stop but we do not examine the story or the one who appears to be telling the story. Some get into self-harm due to that unbearable reference point (me) and all the stories about ‘me’.

Tremendous relief is available and some radical questions can cut through the old story of me in an instant if you are open to the investigation. Professional helpers like Psychiatry and Psychology are sometimes very intelligent ways of fixing up the image of self. However, an image is an image. And an image will vibrate into a different pattern easily. What you actually are is not in the mind content….you are not an object nor a subject in actuality. You are the living intelligence that expresses ‘as’ the body-mind. Investigate and see for yourself. There is no other way.

Q: Yes I’ve done a lot of different things, had a great deal of experiences of no self etc but it has not cut the fixation with me away as you said. When I look to see where I’m experiencing the story from I can’t find anything, it goes blank. There is a conviction that I am a separate though. I can do practices that get me into a state of oneness and seeing consciousness everything but they feel manipulative and too much effort to maintain.

A: So, drop the effort into the naked seeing.

Q: Just staying with direct experience you mean?

A: You ARE THAT……you can’t get out of it.
The concepts of coming and going appear and disappear. You are present and aware.
Who has to stay with it? You CANNOT get to non duality from duality.
START from the fact of your own being.
Drop the concepts…..and what is left?

Q: Is being not a concept ?
I feel I can witness the being coming and going.

A: No…..the concept ‘being’ appears and disappears.
The true nature of mind is clear and empty.
Who feels being coming and going?

Q: But the sense of it Gilbert, when I go inside I can sense the beingness and there is a sort of knowing that I am before it.

A: Is the knowing a concept?

Q: The emptiness that lets the being come and go

A: Yes what you are is before being and non being……but it is NOT a problem.

Q: Yes

A: The mind is making a problem out of nothing.

Q: This is understood and not a problem.

A: So why suffer over nothing?

Q: Here’s the problem – I think I am a separate person, so I suffer.

A: So investigate that idea and SEE that……
It is a concept. I THINK…….that is the problem.

Q: I can spend a lot of time “resting” in the knowing before being and non being……..but the idea comes back that I am separate and it hurts again…..I can feel the contraction of it.

A: WHO is the ‘I’ that thinks it can rest in knowing?
Knowing is prior to all ideas and concepts.
Go INTO the contradiction totally.
AND……Where are you seeing the contradiction from?

Q: I don’t know where I’m seeing it from

A: Is there an I that is seeing?

Q: No

A:……or is the seeing spontaneously there?

Q: Yes

A: SO…where is the problem?…WHO has a problem?
Find out.
Put an end to the confusion by recognising that you are present before any problem appears.
What you truly are is invisible…….no centre and no boundary.