The King's Question: Meditations on Consciousness and Eternal Transcendence

Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. La Sardo

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in review.

Printed in the United States of America

Published by WingSpan Press, Livermore, CA

www.wingspanpress.com

The WingSpan name, logo and colophon are the

trademarks of WingSpan Publishing.

ISBN 978-1-59594-381-1

First edition 2010

Library of Congress Control Number 2010930372

Dedicated To The Three Magicians-

Space, Time and Causation

KING PRASENAJIT:

All those here who are still in the stream of

transmigration wish to know how to realize that true Mind

and prove that it is beyond birth and death…

THE BUDDHA SAID:

As you now notice your white hair and

wrinkled face, there must be many more wrinkles than when you were

a child. Today when you see The Ganges do you notice that your seeing is

old now while it was young then?

THE KING REPLIED:

It has always been the same, world Honored One.

THE BUDDHA SAID:

Great King, though your face is wrinkled,

the nature of this essence of your seeing is not. Therefore, that which is

wrinkled changes and that which is free from wrinkles is unchanging.

The changing is subject to destruction whereas the unchanging

fundamentally is beyond birth and death; how can it be subject

to your birth and death?

CONTENTS

Prologue

The existential question is the only question. Many attempts have been made throughout history to maneuver the mind out of its dark sleep, but the twisted allegories of desperate men still stand to remind us of our failure. The danger has been and always will be, that the remedies are more dangerous than the original confusion. This is due to the nature of this kind of understanding which is synonymous with freedom.

Rigidity is a form of fear, so its practice in any form guarantees the totalitarian religious approach which include some of the saddest demonstrations of spiritual incarceration that mankind has ever witnessed. It is not my intent to enumerate the current degenerative religious forms. Suffice it to say that compared to what we are capable of, almost all of them stand firmly in the dark ages as anachronistic pillars of desperation.

The following essays are a tribute to those moments where insight overpowered the stubborn urge to conformity and spiritual lethargy and the people that were responsible for those insights.

Introduction

There are many ways that the flaw appears; that irreconcilable flaw that topples over the common sense view of the world revealing what is implied by the idea of God.

This is the turn that these essays take. They do not deal with knowledge or points of view in any conventional sense but with the not too well known core of all the great religions—the Advaita—or non-dual gnosis that is their raison d’etre. It is a process of enquiry and relentless investigation that attends to and finally neutralizes the tacit infrastructure of common sense, the defense of which is vigorously upheld because of its direct connection with social and personal sanity, which as impressive as it sounds, is nothing more than the inertia of previously held ideas and precedents.

Under scrutiny, the flaw is certainly revealed, but the flow of the phenomenal world has its hypnotic effect and must be reckoned with. It must be examined boldly and impartially without regard for the reputation of accepted scientific views whose reign is always short and displacement inevitable given their dvaitic assumptions. Upstream of the conceptual avalanche, the universe does not require an origin but is naturally and inevitably revealed as the appearance of nomenon, what is seen of Mind itself.

The world parades in glory

before ignorance

and disappears before right analysis.

– Tripura Rahasya

Book One

The Primacy

of Consciousness

CLEARING THE GROUND

The following inquiry and investigation is of no practical consequence but the avoidance of this type of investigation literally constructs and maintains all the difference in the world. Instead of finding conceptual worlds based on the model of our delusions, we will attempt to uncover and apprehend the true nature of what is before us. We must begin by not taking for granted without critical examination anything at all, especially that most pivotal and persistent reference known as me, I, etc., so that we may neutralize the profound mysteries and confusion that is the consequence of "mistaken

identity".

This approach to re-integration must necessarily be most relentless and iconoclastic, resulting in the total restructuring of our linguistic idiom allowing easy transit to our understanding. It must trigger an explosive dissolution rather than construct further linguistic and psychic obnubilation.

I. Ubiquity

Seeing, hearing, etc.; the immediately given.

Is there a bridge to objects called seeing’? A very critical question. If there is, then it must exist other than as a linguistic convention. In other words, its existence implies its detection or cognition. But, upon investigation, this is most assuredly not the case. The fact is that if seeing were veritable, I would see your seeing and you would see" mine. You would also see my not seeing, etc. It requires persistent and unbiased investigation from different angles to see this concept as a mere conceptual ruse necessarily conjectured to further justify and elaborate upon an already existing distortion; The Primary Duality.

II. I – See – The Lamp

In this little sentence is the revelation of the inherent mysticism of common grammatical structure involving cognition in the accusative case. What operation is being performed on the lamp? What is the implication and how does it differ from an example of the accusative case where cognition is not involved?

Unquestionably, the lamp appears, but the bridge, seeing, does not; which immediately renders I redundant, leaving us with just the lamp. Not only does seeing not appear, but the primary distortion I also fails to make a showing. To prove I, to show its existence, to make any sense whatsoever about its use or presence, we must produce or verify it; but the catch 22 is that to experience, verify, know what I am, requires that I be other than what I am. This is true, if the sense of what it means to experience is retained and it demonstrates that what I am can never be an object of experience.

If this makes us feel desperate, it is completely futile to attempt to pass the body off as the cognizer of the lamp since the body is a much an object of cognition as the lamp.

Grammatically, at this point, we are not involved with a sentence but with a mystical revelation.

I – See – The Lamp.

1. Without the separation implied by objects seeing objects, the lamp alone loses its objective status.

2. The lamp is the seeing of the lamp because seeing is not an object.

3. Non-object does not face object – this unbalance is forever impossible. If seeing is not an object, a non-object can never see an object.

4. An object can never see an object, but when a non-object sees a non-object, it is see(ing)!¹

With the revelation of the lamp in its ultimate existential sense, source and appearance are co-incident, which is the destruction indirectly of space and time, or to put it another way, no one sees the lamp, there is no real distance to the lamp and the idea of an object is a distortion. What is Being/Functioning is instantaneous, outside of the sense of time and is not inside or outside of any-thing.

It must be mentioned, with due respect to the spiritual process which proceeds from the side of understanding, that the attempt or motion toward apprehending our very nature is the dividing factor modeled on the very process of appearance. Our Being is eternally assured as-it-is, even if it does appear to pull away from itself by freezing a dynamic process which automatically produces the idea of subject and object. This is the process of reading Reality through its functioning rather than its functioning through Reality; a process which is inverted and creates the inexorable mystery that knowledge is never up to.

There is a timeless, spaceless, nameless Being functioning. The misunderstanding of one of its functions, perhaps the very nature of one of its functions (conceptuality), produces the dream of separation and isolation as its own fabric, the reintegration of which is the disappearance of all interdependent counterparts as an approach to Reality. Conceptuality by its very nature is a conjurer. I reifies, or times and places. So the transcendence of conceptuality is the understanding of its function, true understanding, not the creation of an entity that tries to refrain from conceptualizing. •

HO-TSE’S JEWEL

A single word is sufficient to reveal the truth.

The jewel reflects all colors. When black is seen, it is not really black which is seen after all, it is the transparent luminosity of the jewel, each color is the brilliant, pure and full luminosity. Everything is void; only the mind is immutable. Even when the mind is deluded, it is still aware, for awareness is inherently undeluded. Even when thoughts arise, it is still aware, for awareness is inherently free of thoughts. Whether the mind is sad or happy, joyful or angry, loving or hateful, in each of these cases, it is always aware.

– Ho-Tse

FULL CIRCLE For Ho-Tse

In this one word ‘Awareness’ is the key to all mysteries.

The One Mind

The Kingdom of Heaven

IF it is possible to be aware of everything – i.e., all objective objects, all subjective objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions) and this must be so, for whatever exists or does not exist is so ascertained through awareness – what am I?

I am this awareness, and since it is what I am, awareness cannot be an object.

IF this awareness is not an object, it cannot be separate from anything since only objects can be separate from each other (or separation could not be conceived).

IF awareness cannot