Reality is like a magician

always changing

"Reality is like a magician that can do anything, including being nothing at all. It can do seemingly contradictory things simultaneously." — Angelo Dilullo, Awake: It's Your Turn

Liberation is about clear seeing. When seeing is clear, reality is seen as very, very fluid, changing constantly, perhaps with the karmic wind and weather, for what appears to be no reason at all.

The ego-mind tends to fixate—that is what it does. It's probably an evolutionary function of wanting to protect. And yet to a hammer everything looks like a nail. There is no need to fixate like that; there is nothing to figure out, the vast majority of the time.

There is just this, and there is the ego's tendency to want to make something of this. Proliferation. One definition of nibbana is no-proliferation.

In sleep, the ego layer of reality is much weaker. There is far less inclination to want to make something of this, to fixate. It's very fruitful to pay attention to the hypnagogia that arises before falling asleep. In that hypnagogic state, phenomena arise: an image here, a snippet there. Sometimes these images feel very close, like a ripple in them immediately causes a ripple in the body-mind. Sometimes the images feel more remote, like they are over there, with some sort of energetic seal between self and object.

When consciousness is lost into a non-lucid dream, it feels like there is total and complete immersion in a certain time and place—that this makes perfect sense, that there is no inclination to doubt that this is how it is and always was. In retrospect upon waking, all of it is seen as purely a construction of the mind.

In ego-diminished states like sleep or near-sleep, it is easier to see arising. Everything in experience arises and passes away. When there is little hindrance, when the ego is not very active, it is seen that what arises replaces what had just arisen and passed away—cleanly and without remainder.

Phenomena arise and pass away. Suffering is greatly reduced or eliminated in direct proportion to how little grasping there is to that phenomena. The "seer" gets caught up. When seeing is completely clear, the seer is dropped; there is only the seen. As with the Bahiya Sutta: "When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized... this, just this, is the end of suffering."

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