Light Through Trees

Stumps, Colors, Textures

Interview with Jan K

Here is a short and cogent extract from an interview with Jan Kersschot:

Jan Kersschot: Life is a good movie: you don’t realise you’re in a movie because everyday life looks so real. That’s why I call it a daydream. But when you have a good look at what this person really is, you may discover that it is a concept. I think it is one of the greatest discoveries you can make in life, really seeing that the ego is an idea that appears in the mind. What you think you are is built up by hearsay and memory.

Interviewer: It’s a label.

Jan Kersschot: Yes, it is just an image appearing on the screen. It is not “you” watching the movie, the movie is being watched by the Light and your ego or personality is just one of the thousand images that appear on the screen every minute. While you read these words, you are convinced that there is a person – you – who is reading them. There is indeed a sense of “you” around. We believe it’s something solid but in fact it’s an image that pops up. Not always, but let’s say regularly. There is also a sense of letters forming words – and these sentences having a meaning. So you believe you are reading these words right now. This means that both the text as well as the sense of “you” are being witnessed. What is the witness of both your “me” and the words? Who or rather what is the final witness? It is the Light that makes your movie shine.

Interviewer: That is my higher self then.

Jan Kersschot: No, not all. Don’t try to claim it for yourself. Please be accurate here. The idea of a higher self or soul is again an idea in the mind, it is just another image appearing in the daydream. There in only one Light. And that is not “your light” or “my light.” You as a person appear in It as an image, that’s all. What you really are is that Light, not the individual. There is only one of it: it is timeless and borderless.

Tree, Alone

Sunset Splash

Suffering

Suffering is self-centered thinking. It is thoughts about "I", what "I" should do, what "I" should be, about "my" life, and so on. If there is no belief or interest in them, they just sail through. They have no real bearing on you or your identity because you are not a thought. And most importantly, you are not the person that the thoughts are ostensibly about. If we find ourselves struggling with thoughts, there is some residual identification with the person concept. Who, what and where is this person at the center of thoughts? This is the root concept that keeps the conceptual cycle in motion. The core belief is the assumed presence of the person, the "I" at the center of the self-centered concepts. So, rather than deal with the thoughts on a piece-meal basis, go for the root. Investigate the person. Where is it? Can you find it? Does it exist? If you cannot find the person, then there is no one to whom the self-centered concepts apply. Without the belief in that reference point, the whole network of suffering thoughts is deactivated. They do not belong to anyone. The self concept is the cause, and the self-centered thoughts are the effects. . . John Wheeler

Cloud over Sun and Water

Advice from John Wheeler

My advice is to drop the paradigm of "awakening", "enlightenment", and "liberation". That is a worn out model that is primarily useful for those who want to accumulate followers and promise them things they do not need. It may be good for business (it generates repeat customers!), but for knowing yourself, it is entirely misleading. Your real being is ever-present and fully established. If you get interested in concepts, you follow them. In doing so, you may overlook the constant freedom that has never gone anywhere. Your true nature is not something you achieve, get or attain, either now or in the future. There is no need for awakening, enlightenment or liberation. Why? Because your true self is already present, and the separate self who would want to awaken does not exist. You are freedom itself. Everything else is a false concept arising in the ever-present awareness you never left. You are nothing but non-conceptual presence-awareness itself. So why continue to talk in terms of a separate self that has no existence or about attainments that are entirely unnecessary? - John Wheeler

Lakeside Trees

John Wheeler

In the end, you see that your being is not a matter of work or effort. You are what you are. Your ever-present self is not the result of a process. Work and striving are in time, but what you are is already here. So it is hard to see how relying on time or effort could help you arrive at what is timeless and naturally present. This is about something so simple that we constantly overlook it due to assuming it is complicated. That is why many a seeker gave a good laugh when the basic point struck home. If you have been striving and struggling with this, it might be time to ponder on who is doing all that work! Certainly not your real nature. Then who — and why? That is why the question "Who am I?" is so potent. It immediately exposes the root of the issue, which is the nebulous sense of self at the core of our seeking and suffering. A little bit of looking and the bottom falls out straight away. - John Wheeler

Incomparable Light

Effortlessness

Effortlessness is not something that can be attained by effort.
No-mind is not a state that can be achieved by the mind.
Peace cannot be achieved by striving. - David Carse

Lakeside Twilight

Sunset and Rock Pools

Seeking unravelled

But then, in a moment of grace, something else revealed itself. It was suddenly seen that the entire experience of seeking was being sustained by one simple belief, one idea that was holding the whole thing together: “This should not be here. Seeking should not be happening.” That was it, one little thought…

And in the instant that was seen, the whole thing fell apart. Seeking unraveled itself, for it was so obvious that it was only the resistance to seeking, the very effort to become free of it, that was keeping it alive. For what is seeking when there is no resistance to it? What is resistance like when there is no resistance to it? What are fear, and anxiety, and insecurity when there is no idea that those experiences should be other than they are (or if such ideas are present, there is no idea that such ideas should somehow disappear)?

What happens to the experience we call “suffering and separation” when there is no effort to liberate ourselves from it? - John Astin

Rocky Beach and Sunset Light

Rocky Sunset

Pathless Path

The path to God, the path to ultimate reality is as Krishnamurti said, a "pathless path." In the end, there is no path to the ultimate because there is only the ultimate. Everything is made of That, the source and suchness of all things - every tree, every person, every flower, every atom, every star - all of them made of the same ineffable mystery, the wetness in every wave...

We may imagine that we are on a journey back to God, but how can there be a journey to something that is everywhere and everything? We walk to our temples and mosques, our churches and synagogues, our yoga centers and meditation cushions, to find God, to find Truth, but what is sought is already present, present before the first step is ever taken, and present as that very step. What is sought is here before the first thought ever arises to seek It, and It is here as that very thought. Truth is present, before the mind ever imagines it has been lost. But Truth is also the imagining, God seeking God...

We seek God but there is no escaping God for there is only God, only Spirit dancing as everything that is seen, everything that is touched, everything that is felt. We search for something else that will make us happy, some other experience or moment, but the happiness and freedom we seek is already here as this - this experience, this state of mind, this moment. Every breath, every sensation, the clarity, the confusion, the seeking, and the end of seeking, all of them God, all of them the Truth, all of them, enough. - John Astin

Lakeside Cliff

Water, Fire, Sky

Foggy Cove

The Hungry Ghost

When I get this one question answered, there will be no more questions.

When this one desire is finally satisfied, there will be no more desires.

When at last, I have found what I’ve been searching for, there will be no more searching.

We’ve heard it all before, haven’t we, heard all the false promises of the me? It is the voice of a hungry ghost, an emptiness that will never be satisfied because there is nothing there to fill. . . - John Astin

Rock Slope and Sunset

Arc of Land, Arc of Light

Skyfire

The wanter

. . .the wanter is the problem. No matter what the desire, nothing will be fixed by having it fulfilled. Nothing. Having a want fulfilled only leads to more wants – anything we get, we want to keep, which leads right back to fear. The wanter has to be seen through as unreal. That’s the only way. . . - Annette Nibley

Here Comes the Sun

Winter's Here

Last Light

Dogwood and Maples

Disguised as the Obvious

On the spiritual search we hear about something called our "true nature" and we also hear that the ego is an illusion - a problem we must somehow get rid of. Fascinated by this proposition we go about looking for a way to somehow dissolve the ego and then get hold of this thing called our true nature, awareness, being or any of the seductive terms we have heard about. The next thing we might hear is that we have to find out if our ego exists - to investigate the self and see where this “I” sense is coming from. However, when inquiring into the existence of a separate self, or “I”, the mind will simply not be satisfied with the answer it finds when it sees the unavoidable. Perhaps there will be a strained mental search, furiously scanning that field of experience which you think of as yourself, and yet nothing will turn up. Unsatisfied the mind will continue searching, irritated, like an insect flying up against a glass pane it is unable to see.

It is as if the mind were looking up at the heavens and asking “what number is the sky?”, always finding the only answer it can ever find - an empty blue expanse. Unsatisfied it continues puzzling, enquiring, desperately looking for the the right number - it must be a number, it thinks with certainty. Perhaps it then begins dreaming about what sort of number the sky might be - probably a really BIG number, it speculates, unable to accept or even notice the the vast expanse of blueness right in front of it.

Similarly, when investigating the reality of what you are with the expectation of finding an object, or thing, your conceptual mind will never accept the evidence that what you are is not a thing. The investigation is based on a false premise. The mind can never contain what you are - it can only attempt to make slippery mental image about it; offering a fleeting, highly unstable signifier known as a thought. As with the sky in the afore mentioned example, what you are in reality is like that obvious blue expanse which can never be reduced to a concept - certainly not the ‘number’ that the flawed question demands. Until you are willing to drop the expectation for the answer to look a certain way, you cannot find what is always disguised as the obvious. And when the expectation is dropped, before you lies the truth plain as day; open, available and effortlessly ever present like the heavens above. - Chad Barber