Dismantling the Fantasy by Darryl Bailey

Author:Darryl Bailey [Bailey, Darryl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Advaita, nonduality
Publisher: Non-Duality Press
Published: 2012-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

dialogue three

Q: Good morning.

DB: Good morning.

Q: Shall we continue?

DB: Yes.

Q: As I said yesterday, I want to get into this matter of enlightened beings.

DB: In my sense of things, there are no enlightened beings. Once thought realizes its limitations, it doesn’t attempt to describe an existence of any kind. It’s just this –

[D gestures to everything around and to his own body.]

There’s no interest in defining it.

In my experience, people are always looking for something extraordinary in their spiritual quest: intense concentration, psychic flashes, visions of inner or outer light, energy releases, deep relaxation, special insights, wisdom, compassion, enlightenment, and so on. They believe there’s some great freedom to be attained in chasing these things.

For me, these things may be pleasant or interesting if they arise, but they have nothing to do with freedom. Anyone pursuing them is always left yearning for the next special experience, because these things are short-lived.

Special experiences, rushes of energy, visions, insights, and so on, are merely false appearances of form. There’s nothing stable in them. There is only an altering that has no particular shape, and we can’t possibly grasp it, mentally or physically.

Once it’s realized that thoughts can’t describe a reality, they are important only as a tool for functioning. Like a hammer. We can use a hammer in many ways, but we wouldn’t ask it to describe something called reality, because it can’t do that. We can use thought in many ways, but I wouldn’t ask it to describe something called reality, because it also can’t do that.

Thought still happens, but there’s no obsession with its fantasies. There is no desperate urge to explain a reality. There’s no impression of knowing anything.

Whether we attempt to describe life or not makes no difference to its movement. It simply moves. We could stand by a river all day long and never attempt to describe it, but the river will flow anyway. The same is true of life, and that flow includes the automatic movement of thought.

Q: So much for enlightened beings.

DB: Sorry.

Q: No, no, it’s fine. I’m getting used to this.

DB: One of the difficulties in relating to this is the desire to reach some goal. Most people think they need to reach some understanding, or get some particular thing, in order to feel complete.

It’s my experience that a sense of wholeness is not about gaining anything, or coming to any understanding. When you watch a cloud, you don’t need to make that cloud happen. You don’t need it to be something in particular. You don’t need to understand it as a world of things. It’s simply a beautiful and wondrous expression, sometimes dark and stormy, most times big and bouncy. It’s the same with all of life.

Everything that has ever occurred has been an indefinable, wondrous expression. It’s not, and never was, a bunch of people doing things.

What’s fascinating is motion itself. All apparent physical and mental forms simply happen. The process never stops rearranging itself.

Look at the birds and the flowers. Do

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