These numbered posts are companion pieces to my weekly meditation and self inquiry classes and are written as a natural continuous unfolding of the topic The Eternal Path.
Read post nr 1,2,3,4 &5 first to allow the topic of, Walking The Path, to unfold.
Are you looking at reality through a cracked lens?
In my last post, “Can You Hear God Clearing His Throat”, I wrote that my teacher, the sadhu Baba Vivekanand, said to me: “It is not what you are looking at that is important, but how you look.”
What we are looking for is wholeness, Oneness. But what if our vision is fragmenting everything?
How to see truth? Just like there appears to be two paths in life (see post 1), there appears to be two main ways of looking.
The first is mainly concerned about WHAT you are looking at, not how you are looking. It is the look of naming and judging. Attachment and aversion. This way of looking is based in physical individuality, ego, in the sense of separation. Otherness.
This angle on reality sets up the field of things, including the thing I think of as me. If you think you, as a human being, is a real and distinct, separate thing, then the world of maya (illusion) will also appear to be real, separate and distinct. When you think maya is real, when you look through the eyes of division, you will see only things, and things are limited in time and space. Being concerned with things, you struggle with birth and death, appearance, disappearance on all levels. The reaction to short lived phenomena is aversion and attachment. Fear and greed.
The second way of looking is concerned with HOW we look, not what we are looking at. It is the look of contemplation, of wisdom. This way is based in spirit. In oneness. In Self.
How do we cultivate that less worldly way of looking, when normal education is all about the first way of looking with a view to form a personal opinion and initiate action based on the opinion?
The path to see with the eyes of Self, of pure awareness, is stillness.
If you familiarise yourself with stillness, if you are not afraid of emptiness, you will be able to perceive what is beyond the noise and crowds of the coming and going of things (including the things we call thoughts and emotions).
Basing yourself on the solid, timeless foundation of stillness, you will be able to perceive and examine in yourself how you look at things, rather than always being drawn out and away, into the multiplicity of birth and death. You will be able to liberate yourself from the smallness of thinking you are the ego-body-mind instrument.
Resting at peace at your own centre, you will merge with unchanging beingness, divine spark, pure awareness, love, zeroness, the eternal, unity, oneness… call it what you will.
If you look through the lens of unity, you will see all as oneness, no division into you and object. Nothing to judge as good or bad. That look is the look of love. The look of the divine. And we, carrying always in us the divine spark, have the inherent ability to see the divine in every thing, and in every one, and in the space between.
We are preprogrammed for awakening.
Why don’t we just wake up?
Because we have forgotten we are not our tools of navigation. Normally, our tools of perception (our five senses), in collaboration with our tool of interpretation (the mind) works in a way that makes us imagine a set-up of trinities: the seer(I-mind), the seeing (my ability) and the seen (the object). The same can be said about how we think about each sense.
This is a reasonably practical way to navigate our bodies around in the field of objects.
But what if that is only part of the story? What if the perception of being a thing walking around in the field of things, is not the full truth?
What if the “trinity of perception” is just how it looks to the ego-mind- senses construct?
Obviously, that thought, that sense that we are more than mortal flesh, senses, and individual mind, is as ancient as humanity, and equally ancient is the desire to understand what the non-material, non-individual is.
That desire makes us ask: How to see wholeness? How to know the spirit we feel is permeating everything, and how to know that that spirit is also who I am?
How to transcend the narrow fragmenting vision of seer, seeing and seen?
How to wake up that ability, that vision of oneness? How to know that we truly are all permeating Self, pure awareness, presently expressing and experiencing through the human body?
To be free, we have to arrive at the possibility of really seeing how we are caught in the spinning wheel of deception.
To see something spinning, moving, we must cultivate stillness. Not that we have to make the mind silent, it is not possible, the mind is the spinning wheel. We have to base ourselves at the centre of the wheel. At the unmoving axis. At our true self. From there we will be able to know how the trinity of seer-seeing-seen catches us, blinds us to the vision of oneness.
Think of ego-identification as a crack in your true being, oneness. Seeing wholeness through a cracked lens gives the illusion that wholeness is fragmented. That we are separate from the source. It gives us the impression that the “light” only enters through a crack.
Dropping ego-identification heals the crack in our vision. It shows us that “the light” is all permeating. That we are not separate from source.
That is how to look beyond the, Whose? What? Where? How?
To look with the vision of oneness where there is no observer nor observed, to sit at the silent centre, in pure awareness, without engaging with the busy mind, that is true meditation.
Vijay Shyam, 26.3.25
“The consciousness in you
And the consciousness in me,
Apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.”
