Mikey - I am so often 'not here' . Thank goodness Anna has such wonderful insights.
But my attention was caught by "Hi Tony,
I read a book by Douglas Harding a while back, on having no head, a zen look at the spiritual journey,
In it he talked about an "area called the barrier"
I have been so busy writing a summary of things learnt in 60 years of looking. A quote from what I wrote about this 'barrier'.
"There are many modern and ancient ways to arrive at a better life. I will give some details of them.
Many of the ways describe a process of personal growth that is possible for many today. Just as humans started their journey as an animal with no speech and no rational mind and moved on into what we know today as self-awareness; so we are ready to take another step in our evolution. This is sometimes seen as a release from suffering and is a growth in awareness as ahead of self-consciousness as self-consciousness is of primal animal consciousness.
To properly connect and realise what is being communicated it is necessary to be able to put one’s rational mind aside and able to enter a different level of ourselves. I call it The Keyboard Condition -
https://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/the-keyboard-condition/ R. D. Laing, the psychiatrist, in describing the search for one’s fundamental self said, ‘The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.’
One of the sites listed has a heading, ‘What you are looking for is what is looking.’
This change is not a state of mind you can create or develop. It is something beyond any change, outside of anything you can develop. After all, development suggests change.
The frustrating thing about finding this is that the harder one tries to grasp it, the further away from it one gets. The more effort one makes in trying to achieve it, the less one finds of it.
It is the ever present, self existent core of yourself that remains when all else drops away. So the question should not be can I develop the state of mind that is sometimes called enlightenment, but how can I realise this fundamental state?
A classic statement is, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." It can be seen as a warning, but it is given depth through the words of T. S Elliot:
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Some years ago, I tried to do as Eliot suggested; for weeks I gave up doing my daily yoga postures, the hours of meditation and sat without any expectations so I waited for the unknown. I felt that it was like waiting for a stranger to come and touch me on the shoulder as I stood outside the cinema at the top of Tottenham Court Road in London, then I would know them.
I waited like that for many weeks and then one night I had got out of bed to visit the toilet and was just getting back into bed when I heard a loud bodiless voice saying, “You asked how God touches the human soul, now watch closely.” I had never before had such an experience and so I felt something important had occurred. I did not have to wait long because I was not touched – I was shaken!!!"
To cut to the chase you can never know what you do no know - for in searching for yourself you are entering the unknown so you need to be able to put all your thinking and searching to sleep and watch without any preconceptions. Not easy but it can be done.
Tony