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My acts are irrevocable
Because they have no essence...
Where are the doers of deeds
Absent among their conditions?
Imagine a magician
Who creates a creature
Who creates other creatures.
Acts I perform are creatures
Who create others.
When I discover that i am you - that I am the trace of your traces - the ethical problem of how to relate to you is transformed. Loss of self-preoccupation entails the ability to response to others without an ulterior motive that needs to gain something, material or symbolic, from that encounter. Of course, the danger of abuse remains, if my nondual experience is not deep enough to root out those dualistic tendencies that incline me to manipulate others. As long as there is sense of self, therefore, there will be a need to inculcate morality, just as infants need training wheels on their bicycles. In Buddhism, however, ethical principles approximate the way of relating to others that nondual experience reveals; as in Christianity, I should love neighbor as myself - in this case because the neighbor is myself. This makes ethical responsibility for Buddhism not the means to salvation but natural to the expression of genuine enlightenment. It is what might be called the "nonmoral morality" of the Bodhisattva, who, having nothing to gain or lost - because he or she has no self to do the gaining or losting - is devoted to the welfare of others. The Bodhisattva knows that no one is fully saved until everyone is save. When I am the universe, to help others is to help myself. To become enlightened is to forget one's own dukkha, only to wake up in - or rather at one with - a world of dukkha. The career of the Bodhisattva is helping others, not because one ought to, for traditionally the Bodhisattva is not bound by dogma or morality, because one is the situation and through oneself that situation draws forth a response to meet its needs.
How much suffering and fear, and
How many harmful things are in existence?
If all arises from clinging to the "I",
What should I do with this great demon?
"as of today, Oct 27 2006, the war in Iraq entered a new phase...all coalition forces shall redeploy to Kuwait in the South and Kurdistan in the North. Thus strategically positioned to protect necessary petroleum resources and remain in force to make tactical defensive responses to Sunni and Shite repositioning of political bases. Iraq will divide into a tripartite region with independent governing bodies. Much of US forces will be shifted to Afghanistan and air power and airborne assault responses shall be ready to respond to humanitarian crises and/or destabilizing radical militant activities."
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on
some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain
or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe any thing but the perception
The 'subject' is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.
According to Buddhism, the deepest, most pernicious erroneous view held by sentient beings is the view that a permanent, eternal, immutable, independent self exists. There is not such self, and deep down we know that. This makes us anxious, since it entails that no self or identity endures forever. In order to assuage that anxiety, we attempt to construct a self, to fill the anxious void, to do something enduring. The projection of cognitive objects for appropriation is consciousness's main tool for this construction. If I own things (ideas, theories, identities, material objects), then "I am." If there are permanent objects that I can possess, then I too must be permanent. If I can be identified with something permanent, the I too must have a permanent identity. To undermine this desperate and erroneous appropriative grasping, Yogacara texts say: Negate the object , and the self is also negated.
Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, "What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?"
Bodhidharma said, "Empty, without holiness."
The Emperor said, "Who is facing me?"
Bodhidharma replied, "I don't know."
-- Blue Cliff Record
I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This
gives you a clue.
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