Richard: Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention –
exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination … and fascination
leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur.
Apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to
being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive … one is never alive at any other time than now.
And, wherever you are, one is always here … even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are
always here … and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is
always here … and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is
already here, and it is always now … then one has arrived before one starts. The potent combination of attention, fascination,
reflection and contemplation produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself.
Apperception is an awareness of consciousness.
It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception – a way of
seeing that is arrived at by reflective and fascinating contemplative thought – is when ‘I’ cease thinking and thinking
takes place of its own accord … and ‘me’ disappears along with all the feelings. Such a mind, being free of the thinker and
the feeler – ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul – is capable of immense clarity and purity ... as a sensate body only, one is
automatically benevolent and benign.
It is really important to understand about the soul
... getting into feelings like this – ‘perfect’ feelings – leaves one in imminent danger of the seductive snare of Love
and Beauty, and, conveniently ignoring their opposites, becoming enlightened, or at least illuminated. ‘Me’ – that sense of
‘being’ that I call the soul – sugar coats itself with Love and Compassion and Beauty and Truth and swans along in a state
of Blissful Euphoria. Thus one then goes off into some mystical State of Being in some metaphysical world and misses out on the
clean and clear perfection of this actual world.
It is very, very difficult to get out of the enlightened state and go
‘beyond it’ into this actual world of the senses. I found out for myself how difficult it was ... I lived enlightenment for
eleven years … the same as the ‘Tried and True’ teachings that all the Saints and the Sages, the Messiahs and the Masters,
the Avatars and the Saviours and the Gurus and the God-men have been touting as being the cure-all for the ill of humankind for
millennia. I found these solutions to be the ‘Tried and Failed’. I found that, in an altered state of consciousness such as
spiritual enlightenment which results when the ego dissolves, the sense of identity does a quantum leap from the head to the
heart.
One realizes oneself as being ‘Me’ at the core of ‘my’ being
... one becomes ‘pure being’. The resultant oceanic state of unitary perception – called by some choiceless awareness –
creates the delusion that the illusion of self is ended. There is an on-going experience of oneness and wholeness which expresses
itself as: ‘I am everything and everything is Me’. Those who go all the way into this delusion realise that ‘I am The Self’
or ‘I am The Buddha’ or ‘I am God’.
It is possible to extinguish this identity – this ‘Me’ which is
the second ‘I’ of Mr. Ramana Maharshi fame – and go beyond enlightenment into an actual freedom.
One then lives in this actual world of sensual delight that under-pins
both the illusory grim and glum ‘everyday reality’ experienced by 5.8 billion people and the delusory loving and compassionate
‘Greater Reality’ experienced by 0.000001 of the population. Then one is both happy and harmless automatically. With
apperception operating more or less continuously, ‘I’ find it harder and harder to maintain credibility. ‘I’ am
increasingly seen as the usurper, an alien entity inhabiting this body and taking on an identity of its own. Mercilessly exposed
in the bright light of awareness – apperception casts no shadows – ‘I’ can no longer find ‘my’ position tenable. ‘I’
can only live in obscuration, where ‘I’ lurk about, creating all sorts of mischief. ‘My’ time is speedily coming to an
end, ‘I’ can barely maintain ‘myself’ any longer.
The day finally dawns where the definitive moment of being here, right
now, conclusively arrives; something irrevocable takes place and every thing and every body and every event is different, somehow,
although the same physically; something immutable occurs and every thing and every body and every event is all-of-a-sudden
undeniably actual, in and of itself, as a fact; something irreversible happens and an immaculate perfection and a pristine purity
permeates every thing and every body and every event; something has changed forever, although it is as if nothing has happened,
except that the entire world is a magical fairytale-like playground full of incredible gladness and a delight which is
never-ending. ‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realise, ‘I’ only
imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination.
