February 8, 2007 at 18:35:56

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The Zoom of Abandon

By W. Christopher Epler (about the author)     Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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Occupied-withness is what it is independently of thought. It's the territorying of the territory. Pre-living and separateness are constructions of delusion. Desiring the better isn't coming from a "desirer". Immediacy is unself-controllable. The intuition that spontaneous immediacying (the zoom of abandon) is the already ongoingness of occupied-withness, is the self-awareness of life itself! This is intelligence freeing itself from time.

However, the tar baby of the world is a masterpiece of fail safes. Identities of separateness are always seeking solutions and answers. That's because where there's no seeking, there's no seeker. We seek IN ORDER to be seekers. There's nothing to seek and there isn't any seeker. Dreamers don't wake up from dreams. Dreamers are awakened from by that which is more real than dreamers! Spiritual goals are delusional fail-safes.

It boggles us to think that Salvation and self-improvement are equally meaningless. Achieving and receiving are strategies, merely, to perpetuate "achievers" and "receivers". The challenge and alchemy is elsewhere. The challenge is where it's always been. The challenge is NOW. The challenge is radical truthfulness. The challenge is to choose truth over safety, intelligence over desire, and time plays no role in this whatsoever. We don't need to "read a few more books", take a trip to Tibet, or find a validating guru. And we certainly don't need acronym advice faucets (PhD's, MD's, etc.), nor to find some meditation technique that "really works". We don't need two or three more retreats and we don't need to "stop and think". Dear God, the human condition is already virtually NOTHING BUT stopping to think!

What we need is to make eye contact with life -- which is certainly never ceasing to make eye contact with us! We need, simply, to meet the gaze of realness. Language, of course, greatly complicates the saying of this, reinforcing, as it does, the (delusional) "we's" who need to do this or that. So we have various options here. One is succumbing to the language/thought version of life by equating the "thinking about" with the "thought about" (the maya option of choice for our species). Another is mute resignation. Still another is to allow intelligence to liberate itself from the straight jacket of language by "making the best of a bad situation", i.e., to communicate with, and IN SPITE OF, the arbitrary structures of language. Language can be a useful and creative tool, but it doesn't have to be our God. The point isn't to eat the envelopes, but to open them.

So all this "we" talk is the hubris of language. It's not a validation of separateness. The challenge is real, but it's not a challenge to identities of separateness. And notice how difficult it is to deal with these matters without slipping into "What should I do?", or "How do I do it?" questions. But no advice is being given here, no formulas, and no technology. Pursuing such questions is recycling craziness.

We must stay fast on our feet with this though, because the "moral" isn't that we SHOULDN'T ask "What should I do?", or "How do I do it?" questions. That's because there ISN'T any moral and we aren't talking about shoulds or advice. Plus, this isn't a conversation between self-image identities. Something is going on here which has one foot in the world and the other foot radically elsewhere. Three-dimensionality is communicating with n-dimensionality. This writing isn't coming from a "personality", but neither must it be seen as coming from a "meta-personality" that's "channeling" its communications to us. The sun of truth shines with its own light. It doesn't need to be peopled with glorified or Greek God-like projections of personal pronouns.

Personality is now being used in the etymological sense of "the mask we talk through". It's an artifact of time and conditioning and a cartoon only of the mystery of humanness. To identify with personality is to betray the vulnerability of our hearts. Vulnerability is all of a piece with the zoom of abandon. To be vulnerable is to be real. To lack vulnerability is to lack existence. Self-image identities are creatures of memory -- "smiles" (or frowns), at best, of Cheshire Cats of beingness. The spontaneous ongoingness of already occupied-witness, is NECESSARILY the ongoingness of vulnerability, because vulnerability is "unself-controllability" and the (no alternative) ongoingness of being myself living is the This is It reality/universe.

The This s It reality/universe is where we ALREADY ARE and being myself living is what we're ALREADY DOING. We don't have any "unplaced trump cards" of potentiality or separateness. We're reality beings living reality lives in a reality universe (the soul intuition of liberation). And clearly this is equally true for all life forms, from zebras to eagles to extraterrestrials. However, the life form aspect of this can also be misleading, since vulnerability and spontaneity sound depths of voidness beyond the relative morphologies of our species. One wonders if "whales" self-classify themselves -- or classify (self-classified) Homo-sapiens.

To be alive is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to be alive. Vulnerability is hard-wired into beingness. Self-control and separate selfness are merely strategies to avoid vulnerability. Of course, they don't really avoid anything, any more than death denial ever tricks death. The pseudo avoidance of vulnerability is the pseudo avoidance of the zoom of abandon. Living is unconditional committed ness. The mutterings of thought notwithstanding, self-image identity is neither a duality away from totality nor true selfness.

To think of vulnerability as a "limitation" is like thinking nature is limited because it can't be other than what it is. The naturing of nature IS nature. Should we then see nature as limited because it can't abstract itself away from itself so as to control, observe, or escape from itself? These conundrums of thought aren't solved with effort, but "dissolved" with realiazation.

The actualizing context of durational immediacy (it's not a "point"), is the home of true selfness. It's where we all "live and move and have our being". Huang-po, a 7th Century "Zen Master", called it "Absolute Thisness". Now that's a real conversation stopper, similar to Jesus', "Before Abraham was, I am." Or to play with a phrase from the 19th century, we're all in mid existential leap. There are no thought-created hand holds on the mountain of life -- and death is as real as birth.

Clearly implicit in any desire to transcend vulnerability is the judgment that vulnerability is what's rotten in the Denmark of the human condition. But, isn't this just more bad advice from thought which never tires of cooking up alternative realities to reality? Thought's version of vulnerability is that we're vulnerable to the precise degree that we can't be other than what we are. Thus, the ISness of selfness, for thought, is anathema, because the ESSENCE of thought is to "think about". Indeed, the "thinking about point of view" (the perspective of separateness), IS self-image identity and self-image identity is what presumes to puts reality into perspective.

Accordingly, it horrifies thought to think that true selfness is one with itself and therefore unthink-aboutable. But the actualizing context of immediacy is the origin of thought and never it's "object". Nowing is the self-activity of that which is already the case and the unclassifiability of this realness may be a limitation for thought, but not for the realness. This realness transcends classifiability and it's intelligence-accessible precisely BECAUSE of that. What's invisible to thought isn't invisible to itself.

The pet in our house isn't the concept in our mind. And neither are we or our families or neighbors. And neither is ANY (classified) "life-form". These nets of memory may be pragmatic and useful, but they catch only theoretical fish. "Reality fish", however, swim only in oceans of thought/form transcending realness -- in which they're neither fish nor "they's". When all boundaries become insides of outsides and outsides of insides, then all "relata" disappear into relationship. The "world of form" (which is always species specific), is absolutely without independent realness. Figures are figures only IN RELATION TO grounds, and visa versa. Interdependence and polarity is all.

And in this ocean of transcendence, self-nature self-natures with abandon. But why should this trouble us? Religion, science, metaphysics, etc., are at best, closed systems of speculation. However, all this can be LEFT by opening to the ISness of transcendence! But can this truly be "done", and what is the "way" or the "path"? It can be done because there isn't any "doer" to do it, and there isn't any path to where we already are. Nowing isn't on the way to the desired. Nowing is the heartbeat of God.

W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

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