Breaking The Mirror

Explaining How A Mirror Is Like Awareness In Order To Allow Us To See What The Problem Is In Our Common Understanding Of Awareness

In the preceding dialog, “Awareness Is Unlike A Mirror,” I presented a necessary and very apostate correction to an often used allegory — in order to break our minds free from the false understanding that we commonly have — regarding this abstract conception named “awareness.”

I pointed out that the Allegory of the Mirror, so often used in spiritual circles, creates an obstruction for us, both in our understanding, and more importantly, in our speech.

We all know, today, what “going viral” means, and how misinformation spreads like wildfire, while things that take more than a soundbite to transmit to someone else are met with the impatient and distracted inattention of those who are inundated with data from all quarters, and are unable to even attempt to attend to the explanation, let alone allow it to take root in their understanding so that it helps further their progress in comprehending the world and themselves.

Sharing this Allegory of the Mirror, spreads just such a misunderstanding — in today’s world — rather than the insight it was hoped it would, as I explained previously.

The point of this article is twofold: to explain how a mirror is like awareness — the opposite of that Allegory of the Mirror — in order to allow us to see what the problem is in our common understanding of “awareness,” and to help break us out of the common way of talking about “it.”

Part of the often stated reason for this allegory is to reinforce for meditators that their thoughts are not themselves, their feelings of fear, anger, and suffering are not themselves, and, indeed, even their feelings of being in love, being happy, exaltation, and bliss, are not themselves. But this is a basic use of the allegory to present the meaning of the direct meditative insight of the absence of an inherent self-nature in any phenomenon.

Later, in more esoteric “secret” doctrines, the point of this allegory is that awareness “itself,” being the ground of all being, is absolutely pure and unaffected by whatever appears; but again, the viral takeaway of the allegory is that “like a mirror, awareness is unaffected by what it reflects,” and this is a false understanding of our knowing presence that conflicts with the fully lived events that fill our lives.

When we are reflecting upon our consciousness of something, which is already an abstraction from our actual direct experience, because we are thinking about it after the fact, rather than living it in that moment, it appears that there is a subject and an object. This is because we put them there, either through the extruder of our understanding, which forces all of our directly lived imperiences to be structured (extruded) in such a way that they are coherent with our existing understanding, or more subtly, by our habitual perspective upon our direct experience as something that we are having, rather than something we are doing.

It is our understanding which places limitations on our comprehension — our so-called “worldview;” but it is our common reversed perspective upon what is happening that confuses us.

So this configuration of our experience is due to our fundamental misunderstanding of what “awareness” actually is referring to, because ultimately, our understanding is developed from the very beginning using that reversed perspective.

Awareness is a conceptual abstraction — nothing real in itself, because there is no self — there or anywhere else. But, then, what is it an abstraction of and how do we actually abstract it?

Well, we live a life filled with experiences which we are aware of having — that is, we are conscious and experiencing our lives; rather than being unconscious and experiencing nothing even though the world still carries on its activity. This is the difference that we call “being aware,” and from that state of being aware, we abstract, or cut out, the cognitive quality, for that is what it is, and we label it “awareness.”

We can go deeper into this process while in periods of deep meditation during which we can notice that there is a more fundamental level of imperience, which is the deeply felt presence of that which we perceive, think, emote, embody, remember, and intuit, arising as the processual unfolding of the phenomena in our experiences. Note that presence is different than meaning, or character, or even identification. Thus imperience does not contain those; but rather, is simply the felt presence that is the condition for the arising of the cognitive processing that occurs within our brain and nervous system.

These imperiences are then immediately apperceived into our understanding as experiences, i.e. identified content that is absorbed into the body of our understanding. We automatically fit these imperiences into our current understanding in a process that is called apperception.

If we cannot “make sense of them” then experiences are either ignored; beaten into an acceptable “shape” by recasting parts of them, or the whole thing, as something other than we first took them to be; or we label them a disease symptom — visual or auditory hallucinations, for example.

And then, once they have been apperceived, we may, or others may, abstract qualities from those experiences — and our “awareness” of our experiences is the one essential quality of an experience. But you can no more have awareness alone, than you can have a “Cheshire smile” without the cat.

This whole process of abstraction of qualities and positioning them as things-in-themselves is similar to factorization of mathematical terms in order to simplify the solution to a complex math problem. But unlike in mathematics, we don’t tend to “show our work” when we use these abstractions later in our thinking or communication, and these “things” take on a life of their own — at least in our understanding.

This is why “awareness” is such a problem — in particular, when it is presented as the “ground of all being.” As I have argued at length earlier in the Proem of this book, awareness is abstracted from that which — I argue — is more appropriately seen as the Now — the known presencing of all appearances.

But without a duration, “to be aware” is empty of meaning; and without the cognitive felt sense that is encapsulated in the concept of “awareness,” “duration” is meaningless. And this is very similar to the “wave-particle” duality problem found in quantum physics: To call something awareness, implies that it is other than time; to call something time, implies it is other than aware. But that which we are speaking about is neither — and in saying this, excluding the familiar ideas of duration and awareness, the conversation becomes incomprehensible, rather than just difficult.

This whole error arises because it has been created by our reversed, or more properly described, inverted, perspective imposed on our imperiences, so a better approach is to focus on that reversal.

A mirror reverses an image and re-presents it to us; “awareness” reverses the source of imperiences and re-presents them as sourced outside of our “awareness.”

Reflect on this: even the awareness of our self is reversed and re-presented to us as if we are an observer of ourselves — not only creating a subject-object split, but also dividing us into a mind and body.

Imperience is the precognition of our naturing — our foreknowledge of it. This precognition is not knowing that something is going to happen at a future point in time; but is rather only a primordial stacking of “knowing” before “perception,” “knowing” before “thinking,” and “knowing” before “feeling” (noticing) the presence of the imperience. Note here the structure of a knowing subject and a phenomenal object.

Thus imperience is “pre-” only in the sense of a perspective that is itself the stacking.

This perspective is our habitual way of “looking at things” and ordering them in our understanding. In deep meditative absorption, this perspective can be reversed — in the sense of undoing it — in a preternatural unstacking of the two events, which are now “seen” as one and the same event. This should be called “Breaking The Mirror”

Accomplishing this is sometimes called “transverberation,” or “religious ecstasy.” But it is not accomplished by “merging with the divine,” nor by seeking out blissful feelings. We are already (the) divine, and bliss is but a fleeting phenomena.

This state is only attained by breaking the mirroring effect of awareness, turning around our perspective, unstacking the knowing and the known subtle perspective in imperience, and simply abiding like space. You may only accomplish the state of transverberation once in your life — I have done so four times in my life — but once accomplished, “you” are changed forever. Holding that state is the supreme accomplishment — complete enlightenment. I have seen enough to know this.

It is our needing to understand what happened, when this state is achieved, that leads to the development of religious doctrines. And a religious doctrine is a very fragile flower, made more brittle when dogmatized. The Allegory of the Mirror is just such a brittle flower.

Thinking that “awareness” is something pure and unaffected by what appears “in” it, we reify a plethora of natures: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of awareness, the nature of appearances, and therefore, the natures of being, of having intrinsic natures, of not having inherent natures, and difference. The necessarily simple whole of reality suddenly bursts into an infinite plenum of things!

Given that the nature of awareness, as normally construed, requires an object, when the object is no longer there, awareness must also end. This leads to two important considerations:

No practice is entirely continuous, So even mindfulness perforce arises and must halt. An intermittent practice’s results are intermittent. How could awareness guide all beings to enlightenment⁠?¹

and:

Return just one of the perceiving faculties Back to its source, and all six faculties will then be free. For what we hear is mere illusion, like the objects of our vision — Like what is seen by one whose eyes are covered by a film. The Threefold Realm is like those flowers in an empty sky, But turn the hearing inward, and the faculties are cured. Their objects vanish, and awareness is completely pure.⁠²

Note how the first quote points to the discontinuance of awareness in the intermittent absence of its object — in the case of a dualistic understanding — or the discontinuance of mindfulness in the case of a nondualistic understanding.

The second, as I will now point out, conflates awareness and the Now.

“Turning the hearing inward,” means turning our attention inwards towards the immanent presence that we all are.

It means reversing the perspective that places us as witness to that which is outside of us.

It means using these inner spontaneous sounds as guide posts to our actual naturing, of which these sounds are the telltale clues.

It means stopping the mind’s apperception — of identifying and recognizing, and fitting the pieces into our worldview storyline.

It means unstacking the subtle dualistic precognitive “knowing before” the imperiences, that underlie and condition all higher level apperception.

It means resting space-like (thus dwelling as the Now), realizing that anything happening is our own activity — our not being still — our attention not being quiescent. Just this.

And it means noticing, in the space-like stillness, what arises. And then realizing that any stirring is the spontaneous naturing that we call “mind,” which is not a thing, but activity.

What is apperceived is outside of all that, but all of it presences, and is natured Now. When imperiences are cleared of the stacking, the perspective is reversed (undone) and then condenses into the truth — that the venue is the surface of the phase space of possible coherent forms of time, like unique wavepatterns on an ocean, each with a sæculum that sets a bound on the “what it was to be” of each path through that ocean, which is the Whole — the innate wisdom of the Real.

“Presence” is immanent feeling (not “emotion;” but the “what it feels like to be” angry, happy, human, flower, dog, positron, water — any form at all).

“Naturing” is the enduring of felt presencing. But there is only naturing; not some “thing” natured, nor a Nature naturing — there can be no distinction made between maker and made at this level.

“Nature” when used as a noun should just be shorthand for pointing to the infinitive of the verb. “Natured” therefore is a misleading concept with no referent in actual truth, but only a fleeting glimpse upon, and of, the stage. The “natured” are the illusion, and the illusion is only possible if known, because presencing must be felt or it is nothing at all.

Reality can be described as a metaphorical “phase space” containing all the possible configurations of all the infinite forms — in the Ancient Greek sense of “womb,” the place of origin where everything is created and resides in potential. But nothing is created in Reality. There is no change. No difference. No self. And no ‘in’. What resides is Pure Presence, which has no self, nor greater Self, which has never been stained with ephemeral existence, which is the venue for all that appears and which alone is.

There is no where and no when, no sequence of clock ticks. What is, is a vignette — not a moment of time — chosen from infinite combinations of possibility, each a perspective upon the whole, the whole constrained to be coherent in every case, each with the “what is,” “why is,” and “what might be” (i.e., the “present” context) of a single coherent resonating “verse,” all present as, and only Now, which alone is the presencing of the whole, all at once, and total — not gradual, nor progressive, nor even regressive.

And every path becomes the same: a unique verse that is and never was not, branching out into an infinity of possibility, and each branch, becomes the same, a unique verse that is and never was not — and always Now.

“Becoming” is the liminal swap of one verse to another along the lines of coherent possibility and nothing more. Right now, this vignette of the Now is all that has ever been.

Footnotes:

¹ “The Śūraṅgama Sūtra,” Buddhist Text Translation Society, 2009, page 253

² Ibid. page 255