Original Nature

Friday, May 06, 2016 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

Jie He

What is our original nature?

A simple question, but one that tends to show up sooner or later in a person life. Why would anyone want to know this? What benefit could it serve?

Since this question often relates to meditation, and to know what is our original nature conceptually, we must explain some of the levels of being we go through in our daily life, and what exactly meditation will do to the psyche.

Meditation is a way of training conscious attention in turning inward and into the Self. This tends to be a very subtle process. Until it is not. Doing this, you venture deeper the more you practice, as the Self is the one place where no-one else can actively go, although others can point in different directions for you to go.

What you will discover at some point, is that you as a form that is consistent and true, does not exist. Instead of consistent and rigid, you will find the Self as fluid, a pattern. One pattern is strong; another pattern is weak. The more you perform a certain pattern, the more that pattern will become the idea of you, the Identity. The I entity.

When you go through the first layers, you will notice the superficial identity is largely based on others. 
Because Self cannot exist without the contrast of Other, it is natural for you to identify and build this Identity based on the reactions of others (mother, father, friends, relatives, people you don't know...). The strongest building block of social pattern (ego) is the perceived reaction - meaning the reaction you expect or wish to have from others. As a result, actions which involve and rely upon the feedback of Others have the most power to build superficial Identity.

The more these patterns become clear to you, the more you will wish to be mindful of them. 
There will be an inevitable wish for change, or alteration. Being mindful of pattern works the same way as looking into a mirror. One is bound to find imperfections and things to alter. 
This is the sphere where most of “you are not your body” comes from. It happens due to an inevitable sense of duality which arises when looks inward and a subconscious idea first emerges. You are watching these patterns, which means there must be a watcher, an I behind the patterns that is not the patterns. Then you go further and say this I is not the body either, but eternal and the same in all beings.

This is both true and false, as with being Mindful you will notice both of these and the level of truth of either depends largely on perception.

However, Mindfulness today has become a very "Westernized" concept. 
Today Mindfulness is acceptance through denial. That is, seeing oneself as doing specific things and having certain feelings, then accepting those feelings, but not allowing these momentary emotions to change your overall inner state or have an effect on it. At first this is impossible. The reason why is very simple. The Entity which does not wish to have a certain inner state already had it when he or she experienced it and decided he or she doesn’t want it. In a sense there is often no acceptance, only a pushing aside.
Accepting an inner state means feeling it completely. 
You can only perform an inner alchemy and freeing the emotion by accepting your emotion as it arises, as you can only transmute something you give attention to. By pushing attention aside, all you have done is looked the other way. Pointed the mirror elsewhere. Yet the state remains just as it is, right here.

As you do this and meditate, you begin to unravel feelings and emotions which seem to stir out of nowhere. 
They will continue to arise as long as you try and push them aside, instead of observing them and accepting them as being a part of your being - a part of your form and current state right now. 

Through acceptance you again start to notice other patterns in which you realize that these feelings are not the I that is watching. In this layer of pattern, you will learn firsthand about the nature of duality. A great doubt might stir in you, which for a while will dominate the psyche in a very direct sense. 
Since you will be actively splitting the mind into the watcher and the watched, for a a while not realizing they are the same process, you will notice a question showing up in your head: what then is me? 
This question is natural, as are the feelings associated with it. They are your chance to notice how you have created this - along with every other pattern - yourself; the pattern of there being two, of the one who is asking the question, and that which is being asked. That the two are not one and the same thing will seem normal in this state. That is, This body, and Not this body. Yet despite it seeming real, it is an illusion created by the Self by a certain kind of thinking and feeling. The realization of this will allow you to progress further, since before you truly realize this, you will always be pulled in two different directions of conceptual thinking created by superficial patterns. 
As a fun side-bump, the dissonance created fuels any resentment or anger entwined in the patterns you already have in your mind, and so all these emotions will increase in potency. And yet through this you will probably feel that you are actually "angry or irritated for no reason".

The more you do this, the deeper layers you will have to deal with. Deeper fears and deeper anxieties, but also deeper layers of bliss, as fear and anxiety cannot exist without its equally strong counterparts.

Through this, the process of going backwards in your experience of the Self will continue. Deeper layers of pattern and stronger emotional responses as the patterns are triggered by you poking at them. There cannot be a mind-pattern without an emotional component and a corresponding mental state, so experiences of strong emotion are normal. 

This eventually brings one before something our minds know and have drawn deeply symbolic representations of.

It is not a coincidence that the symbol for the flower of life is called a flower, and that it symbolizes complete unity. It is also not a coincidence that the symbol for the final crown chakra is an unfurling lotus, and that opening it requires one to let go of all attachment. But the most important letting go is not of material possessions, but mental ones. Especially of letting go of being attached to what we consider the positive emotion.

But what exactly does this mean and how does it relate to our Original nature?

Freud called this symbolism the want to return to the womb. In its true meaning it is not sexual. What awaits there and what the symbolic meaning of “return to the womb” means, is not something psychology discusses much, since the oceanic state is not what humans normally experience in everyday life.

It is that our Original nature is not that we are not our bodies, nor is it that we are a spirit. But that both of these concepts do not have any meaning besides in the mind. 

Both the concept of Spiritual and Physical are the same thing though different perception and different labels. 
Both words are man-made words, and both divide man’s original nature, which in neither body nor spirit, but simply is. 
The physical form is spirit, and spirit is the physical form. The body is alone the body, and spirit is alone the spirit, the experience of either still perception. 
You shift your point of view, and you are just a body. 
You shift your point of view, and you are a spirit. 
Both lines of thinking divide what is fundamentally one and the same thing given a different name and concept only after the experience of Oneness has already been experienced. So everything else was possibility, and remains possibility.
Because of this, everyone can have this experience, and everyone can be subject to this understanding, as the feeling of Oceanic arose before anything else ever did. 
Before someone told you what an arm is, or before you knew you liked Sally, there was the feeling of Oneness.

In our original nature, there was no concept of Me and Other, no concept of Spirit and Mind, or Spirit and Body, or Body and Mind, all were the other. All implied the other. All had the possibility of being either. 

What you in fact did in your original nature was float weightlessly, not aware of Self, yet having an experience of Self through having the experience of Other, yet not being aware of Other. You were not aware of the Self in the sense which you are now, and your Original nature was the experience of Self as the Other, and Other as the Self.

Spirituality can be another word for a way of Seeing into the Suchness of things, which does not necessarily mean seeing things as they are. It is why true seeing can only be known through experience.

You inevitably realize, when you are truly honest with yourself and what you are, is that Spirituality is a game just like any other. 
Just like consciousness plays at being a bird, a human, a tree or a rock, so too we play at being this, being that, instead of feeling that we are all of these things.

Why spirituality is the highest and potentially the most dangerous game, is the same reason every game is serious and potentially dangerous. Because it convinces you that it is not a game. By doing this, the game is successful in playing itself and continues to change its own rules until it again convinces itself (you) of its seriousness.

The way to figure out something is a game for sure is easy. The moment it manged to convince you that it's not a game, you can be damn sure that it is. Or to give a more graphic example. You know it is a game for sure when it convinces you to hold behind your own back a stick which dangles a carrot before your head, unaware that you are holding the stick yourself.

In this manner your original nature is always right there, although it is difficult to be it, as over it we all have layers of experience which are more immediate and have our notice. They are the dangling carrot fooling our presence that the carrot is all there is.

So how can I be this original nature now?

It is in practice. It was never anywhere else. If it could be attained any other way, by reading this text, thinking, introspection, analyzing or wise words, then why don't you have it already, since you have been immersed in these activities since birth?



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