The Center has no Location

[deci belle]

In a prior thread, I used the ancient phrase "it has no location" in reference to the Center, which is the impersonal unity of the immaterial body of awareness. Another related alchemic phrase is to "float around in the center of the compass."

That it has no location is not to mean that it is somewhere else. It is a teaching device to prevent misguided materialistic people from attempting to pander to the development and/or pursuit of derivative psychological spinoffs characteristic of habituation to pimping aesthetic naming and their values, indulging in self-reifying visualization practices, addiction to formal quietism or psychosomatic techniques (energetics) that only confuse the order of authentic practice by the mishandling of the terminology of alchemy only to fool themselves and others unfortunate enough to be misled by such calculated activity.

The reason that [having] no location is emphasized, is because even though the effect of the Center is by virtue of having a physical body, and it is not beyond the body of the being that is going to die, there is nothing relative to personal aesthetic, mental or physical manipulation, deprivation or effort relative to the body, in private or in public situations, or is there any part of the body, physical, plasmic or subtle, that constitutes this Center of the immaterial Body of Awareness.

Therefore consciousness itself cannot be construed to have any such personal attributes constituting it. Consciousness cannot have an appreciative or antagonistic perspective relative to itself or any thing. Consciousness has no point of reference such as sentient beings do. Why? Consciousness is simply the quality and capacity of one's selfless awake nature. It has no point of view. Consciousness doesn't see. It is seeing itself and is therefore selfless, uncreated; no different than true reality, nonoriginated. This is the inconceivable nature of ignoramuses and buddhas alike. Even in ordinary situations, they are hardly discernible to the awakened, but for tell-tale signs of karmic momentum, which cannot be stopped.

In other words, this Center, being the body of immaterial awareness, is not relative to the physical body nor is it accessible in terms of any of the so-called "apertures" in the body used by the lowest of the low who employ perverted practices to "nurture essence", or else obscured by the attempts by some to posit identity values with respect to what it is. When people see this for themselves, they are liberated from the tyranny of psychological qualifications pertaining to self and other, including personalistic value judgements relative to self-reified projections identifying "creativity", "beauty", good and bad, right and wrong, and before and after. Liberation is liberation from having a self to posit as "self." This is realizing the nature of "awake" as itself, stripped bare, utterly naked with nothing to hide, nothing to show, and most importantly, nothing to know. To float around "in the center of the compass" is to be just this quality of awake in the very midst of delusional, situational, karmic existence.

Applying the selfless intent of open sincerity liberated from habit energies relative to egoism hiding behind personal views and projections, and without dwelling on anything or clinging to anything is the highest practice of self-refining enlightening activity, in which vulnerability to what is, is the basis of carrying out subtle spiritual adaption in the midst of everyday ordinary affairs, neither courting perfection nor avoiding potential impurities in terms of peoples' habit-energy, or blind malpractice (agreeable or otherwise) constituting situationally karmic momentum.

[kbone]

@deci belle

Great stuff. Non-locality is a key insight. Yes, touching mind brings in the bifurcation for perception, distinguishing, labeling, memory, etc.

Seeing through the constructs of self, all thoughts, beliefs, and other self-referential definitions that have formed the bars to ones psychological prison simply can fall away.

 

[SoonHei]

"Center everywhere, circumference nowhere"

[Claymoree]

simply centre is not located in tis reality. 

[deci belle]

Thank you so much— and I appreciate the contribution, kbone!

kbone wrote:

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"…self-referential definitions that have formed the bars to ones psychological prison simply can fall away."

This.

I would add that my "borrowed" phrasing from the taoist alchemic lexicon is a device in itself, a tool, for those working with sustaining processes of self-refinement contributing to dissolving "the self-referential definitions that have formed the bars to ones psychological prison", that kbone laid bare, exposing the marrow of refining practice. Bravo!

 

 

ed note: remove penultimate paragraph

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by deci belle

[kbone]

@deci belle

Thank YOU.

I've always appreciated the Taoists. I once even lived in Taiwan, partially in an attempt to be nearer that cultural influence after having been exposed to them in my search. Seemed like the thing to do at the time, hehe.

The passage you quoted is in a style of communicating on these concepts that a gentleman used to share with me. I always appreciated the directness. We can never learn "about" What Is, but, if sincere, honest and willing, something might be read that can arrest one's usual way of thinking "about" it. In that seemingly eternal moment, it's as if light in caste unto a shadow, and the weight of what was seemingly ignored drops.

In essence, true learning may not be about "gaining" knowledge or perfect practice, but about Realizing "absence" and the Peace that is eternally available to anyone.

HERE.                                 Right NOW.                                 TRUTH.

 

[deci belle]

Yes, one's thorough return to this centerless center by virtue of spontaneously opening into refreshing innately familiar perpetual absence… wonderful insight into the whole elemental aspect you included, kbone❤︎!!

Somebody wrote: 

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I find it curious how terms and phrases may become obvious once one has experienced what they describe. If one seeks, one travels away, but if one surrenders seeking, one no longer prevents return. I suppose this is why many texts were intended as tools for the already enlightened, and the teachings intended as experiential transmission.

Once I had an experience of this principle. Where I previously would distinguish different locations in my body, and feel energy travelling between them, suddenly anywhere I focused was the same. It was all one - there were no body parts, everything was unified, and every location was the center, but a center that defied location.

 

So true. The words left behind by prior illuminates are indeed talismans for those who themselves step over the whole eternity of created fascinations without diminishing the wondrous gleaming of phenomenal nature, thereby to enter the path that follows the same dusty footsteps of the ancients, along an endless gradual incline. Their experience awaits us as our own and beyond.

Evidences of efficacy leading up to and including the sudden are all such as they are, as simply as they are— and they should all be seen through, no different than anything else, and passed through as they are. What is most direct and imperative is to apply the experiential resonance of the body of wordless unified awareness in terms of adapting fearlessly to everyday ordinary situations.

Though it is completely natural to meet situations spontaneously, if one cannot act on the knowledge, it is as if one had none.

 

 

ed note: change "sudden" to "spontaneously" in 1st line

Edited December 10, 2020 by deci belle

[ajai]

The Book Of Balance and Harmony

Chapter--6

The Opening of the Mysterious Pass

"The Body is like a puppet; the strings of the puppet are like the mysterious pass. The person controlling the puppet is like the inner-most self."

 

The Opening of the mysterious pass is the most abstruse and most essential mechanism. It is not, as various practitioners of yoga say, in the forehead, or the navel, or the bladder, or the genitals, or between the kidneys and the navel, or between the kidneys and genitals. From the head to heels, any spot of the body you may focus on is not it. Yet it is not to be sought externally, apart from the body.

 

Therefore sages just used the word "center" ,

to point out the opening of the mysterious pass. This "center" is it. Let me give you a convenient simile. When a puppet moves its hands and feet and gesticulates in a hundred ways, it is not that the puppet can move— it is moved by pulling strings. And though it is a string device, it is the person controlling the puppet who pulls the strings.

 

Do you know this person who controls the puppet? The puppet is like the body, the strings are like the mysterious pass; the person controlling the puppet is like the innermost self. The movements of the body are not done by the body; it is the mysterious pass that makes it move. But though it is the action of the mysterious pass, still it is the innermost self that activates the mysterious pass. If you can recognize this activating mechanism, without a doubt you can become a wizard.

 

 

[deci belle]

Yay!! Oh, I hope people will see your post, Ajai~ and begin to realize the profound origins of this word, Center.

I don't know if I will ever become a wizard, but maybe~ someday… heehee!!

 

 

ed note: add 2nd line

Edited December 10, 2020 by deci belle

[deci belle]

Arriving at this center is a culmination of sorts~ but not at all a kind of "aha" moment. Don Juan Matus, Carlos Castañedas teacher of occult Nahual shamanism, typified such achievement as a gradual dawning after long and hard-won effort until one's capacity as such simply becomes one. It is not at all some kind of endurance race, a course of study, or even coming to understand anything. There is nothing to understand. The reality of such capacity is just seen as it is, and one is able to avail oneself of its properties, or not, at will.

The Center's point of illumination by virtue of its incipient upwelling is open awareness not yet fallen into the Creative (the aspect of conditioned cogent momentum in terms of beginningless human psychological consensus). Dissolve that, and there it is: open, clear, untrammeled, sensitive and effective. It has never moved, and as such, since it is your own mind right now, neither have you. What is this if not purity and innocence before the first thought, before the first thought fallen into karmic momentum of time immemorial and beyond? Since existence is incremental, potential's basis is a patternlessness alternating as such a priori, yet it has never moved. It is Creation that manifests by virtue of unified formless potential. Spiritual adepts arrive at the basis of reality by clearing away all influence of habit awareness (typifying the vestiges of selfless intent being the signature of the absolute nature of reality latent in habit energy). As I have said many times before, delusion and reality are the same.

What is the selfless intent of the absolute nature of nonoriginated awareness? It isn't a thing, such as god. God, the creator of eternity, doesn't have a job by virtue of nonorigination, in terms of any kind of speculative functionality by one's realization of what there isn't. Why? Awareness is not created. It is YOUR nature. IT's YOU. It is the quality of miraculously aware pure living uncreated potential. Beyond this it is impossible to perceive in terms of even nonpsychological awareness, which is itself already beyond the conceptual confines of pattern-based habit-consciousness of the personality. It is called selfless not because it is nice, or good, or "compassionate", in the Greco-Roman "western" sense, but simply because there is no self. There is no self. Awareness is itself no-self. Logically, one may suppose that there being no self, there is no being. It's logical, after all. This is true. Right now, just this absolute nature is the definition of here without the possibility of there. Therefore, we say that the void has no such void, that true reality is the absence of …absence. This is true absence. The absence of "no-self" has never been otherwise in terms of nonorigination.

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God, the creator of eternity, doesn't have a job by virtue of nonorigination, in terms of any kind of speculative functionality by realization of what there isn't. Just this is the meaning behind the term "absence."  The intent of what there isn't just is. Just this is it. This is MInd. Awake.

At this point of illumination before the first thought, one can sense, in spite of the scene before one, there is no thing. The impulse of life and its machinations compelling one to act, as if the puppet's action governed by one's innermost self has no instigator, is itself one's innermost self, now resting in the highest good, before the first thought.

The most critical aspect of arriving at such open accord in reality, is not in "protecting one's tiny bit of enlightenment", but in just seeing what is without having to account for the person at every turn. Just this much is adapting to conditions in accord with true reality. Why? Because no-self IS true reality. Enlightening activity is in not acting in terms of the personality's habitual psychological projections. Just seeing what is, in terms of one's personal absence of personal selfhood, isn't something anyone needs to know. No one knows. Your personal selfhood has never existed, so its absence isn't a loss. Yet its functionality is optional in all respects. The "puppet" isn't what's acting. Action itself is "acting", since non-action is a matter of adapting selflessly.

"Gesticulating in a hundred different ways, it is not that the puppet can move": the center is the basis of enlightening activity, yet enlightening activity does not depend on moving, and it doesn't depend on not-moving either. The point of the above passage quoted by Ajai, from Chapter 6 in The Book of Balance and Harmony, is not that the innermost self is good or bad or right or wrong, or enlightened or deluded— the point is that the innermost self controlling the puppet is where it's at. That point of "control" is the point of illuminated incipient aware energy potential. Seeing this point is "controlling" energy. This is the Center; the opening of mysterious pass.

When one acts in accord with the time, in terms of the potential inherent in the situation itself, spiritual adaption is just by the power of potential. By not relying on one's own power, Power itself is immanent. Even so, "action" is almost universally a matter of seeing.

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"…open accord in reality, is not in "protecting one's tiny bit of enlightenment", but in just seeing what is without having to account for the person at every turn. Just this much is adapting to conditions in accord with true reality. Enlightening activity is in not acting in terms of the personality's habitual psychological projections. Just seeing what is, in terms of one's personal absence of personal selfhood, isn't something anyone needs to know. No one knows."

No one knowing, in terms of seeing potential, is "floating around in the center of the compass." Who knew?

 

 

ed note: remove comma after "one's innermost self" in 5th paragraph; add 7th pargraph

Edited December 12, 2020 by deci belle

[ajai]

Thank-you so much for explaining the quoted section of the book in such a nice way.

[Forestluv]

On 12/10/2020 at 11:19 AM, deci belle said:

The words left behind by prior illuminates are indeed talismans for those who themselves step over the whole eternity of created fascinations without diminishing the wondrous gleaming of phenomenal nature, thereby to enter the path that follows the same dusty footsteps of the ancients, along an endless gradual incline. Their experience awaits us as our own and beyond.

‘You’ have a great poetic style of expressing profundity. 

[deci belle]

Well, to tell the truth, the simile of the puppet has long been a problem for me, Ajai, until realizing the simile's point is that the innermost self "controlling" the puppet is a matter of what it is: potential in accord with reality—  or else delusion, which is, namely, the point of illumination being the opening of the mysterious pass. The passage's point is not really emphasizing the manipulation of the puppet's action, per se. The point of "controlling" is emphasizing the illuminated incipient aware energy potential (up for grabs, as it were). Just seeing this point is "controlling" energy. That subsequent manipulative operation can follow, or not, is not the imperative aspect of concern in this passage. Now it makes more sense to me, because the emphasis of discussing the locus of import is in its transformative aspect where nonoriginated and creative dichotomize. This is the Center; the opening of mysterious pass.

In coming to terms with the simile, I had long assumed its import as descriptive of the manipulative aspect. Now I have concluded that in describing its potential, "control" is not in manipulation of the puppet, but that the "mechanism" is itself the point of illumination.

[deci belle]

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"…step over the whole eternity of created fascinations without diminishing the wondrous gleaming of phenomenal nature…"

is another way of saying that, for those who see reality, delusion and enlightenment are the same dancing in samadhi.

In terms of the universal symbols employing the spinning wheel, svastika and savastika in both Sanskrit and north American Native wisdom traditions, as well as the taoist Tai Chi, and the Chan/Zen circle— all are figurative depictions of real vision into the nature of transcendent reality, hovering auspiciously in stillness wherein the elemental polar organization subsumes as an undifferentiated unity in perpetuity.

How does one begin to approach reality in actuality? One must  get rid of self-reifying tendencies and take up the Great Vehicle, the Supreme Vehicle. Though it is a very high order of buddhist practice, the Supreme Vehicle isn't buddhist, by any means. And where does it lead? It leads to the road's end. And there, you leave it, before stepping over eternity.

I must add, though, that my descriptive tendencies aren't so much skill in prose-writing, but in deliberately choosing the words to describe exactly what I actually see. In this respect, I am only striving to be as accurate as possible. That my descriptions tend to align with those of similar or otherwise familiar writings of prior illuminates (as well as those on this forum who may intuitively recognize such descriptions as immediately resonant with their own wordless knowledge), simply proves their universality of expression by virtue of the real.

To be specific, eternity (delusion) is an abyss roughly 4" (100mm) wide. It is as if a manageable bit of runoff from the heights containing endless space and numberless spinning galaxies that glint in a most erotically compelling fashion is below one, at ground level. The small shallow gutter at road's end containing the profound fathomless blackness of deep cosmic space flows naturally along from the highest mountain glacial regions as meltwater, just a bit of it, as much as it is, coursing matter-of-factly along into the lower regions, for as long as it goes. It's just that much. Spiritual adepts just step across the source of endless fascinations and alight the dusty path gradually rising ever consistently into the heights, the source of this abyssal trickle. Above, prior illuminates are seen on the same path observing, looking back, looking back over the long incline they themselves traverse without hurrying or lagging. Seeing one in brocade, with a hat in the ancient taoist fashion, they are themselves signposts along the way. Why is it so? It is because gradual practice and the sudden being a singularity, seamlessly leading to and beyond the aftermath of realization of nonorigination is itself further entry into inconceivability. Beyond which no one can know.

It's not that there is a separate path beyond the barrier of eternity. As I said, it's only 4" across. If you can avoid getting lost in it, moment by moment, and moment by moment step over the bit of delusion before you, wherever you may be, the path of all prior illuminates opens up of itself in accord with enlightenment being void of deluded fascinations. It's the difference between the false and the real. It looks the same as always, only it's the path of all prior illuminates. It is erroneous to believe that the realm of enlightenment is other than delusional existence. In terms of time, it is always presently immediate. As such, just now is the freshest and most ancient characteristic of reality by all accounts.  Such is the Supreme Vehicle of Buddhas and Tathagatas that it is void of all pattern. There is no relative configuration by virtue of nominal convention to cling to. It's just that the singularity of enlightening being is your own mind, same as before, yet void of fascinations relative to the person, the knower, the thinker, and the liver of life. The Buddha said so and so did the Sixth and last Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, Hui-neng, who was an illiterate woodcutter living in China during the T'ang Dynasty (619-906).

The Great Vehicle, the end of the road, the abyss and the path itself is a simile, just as the entire oceanic horizon beyond one's capacity in "floating around in the center of the compass" is a 360˚vista beyond which is inconceivability itself. There is always that which is beyond— beyond even the Tao itself. No one will ever know the extent of its mysteries. If you have the audacity for the will to enlightenment, just take the forward step and accept your inherent enlightening function with hands open, sharing yourself freely according to conditions. Stepping beyond the compulsions of personal fascinations doesn't lessen the extent and power of the mystery surrounding you in the least. Don't be afraid of missing out on delusional karmic existence. All that is needed is for you to give up believing that the false identity of the person and its fascinations are real. None of it is real. Not a single shred of it is real.

 

ed note: add last six paragraphs; swap out 5th paragraph; add "just" in 7th paragraph

Edited December 14, 2020 by deci belle

[Red-White-Light]

@deci belle Nice post.

[deci belle]

Merciiiiiii, Red-White-Light❤︎!!

Writing about such matters is a most curious affair. Alchemy is just fusing the two things into one and then watching it poof just like it always wasn't, over and over and over again.

 

 

ed note: just thinking how clever it might seem, I added the last line

Edited December 14, 2020 by deci belle