The Desert of the Real

Top-down thinking informs us directly and unmistakably that whatever reality we might currently behold is certainly and knowably false. It’s just that simple; awareness is knowably true, appearance is knowably false. Hearing it from me, however, isn’t enough; you have to know it for yourself, directly and unmistakably. 

Within the context of what is knowably untrue – appearance – you can perceive and believe whatever crazy shit is projected on the inner wall of your dreamstate bubble by whatever mechanism projects it, but when it comes to what’s true, that’s what you behold when your bubble pops and you’re left in the infinite blackness of nothing forever (where you’ve really always been). In truth, you are the perfect intelligence of infinite consciousness, aka, Brahman, aka, Godmind Alfie. 

My advantage in this arena is top-down thinking, from which perspective every piece of the puzzle falls perfectly into place. It is a totally unfair advantage over bottom-up thinkers, but I didn’t ask anyone to handicap themselves so hopelessly; everyone is perfectly welcome to come and look and see for themselves. Anyone, including you right now, can switch to top-down thinking and understand everything about everything – conceptually, anyway – by this time tomorrow. This is the power of the initial nondual insight you’ve already experienced (or so I suppose), so I’m just suggesting you take fuller advantage of an advantage you already possess. Not-two is not just another New Age flavor-of-the-week; it is Pashupata!, the thought that destroys the universe, and you have it, so why not press the big red button and see what happens?

Top-down thinking, in conjunction with Spiritual Autolysis, is the best – and to my mind, only – path to awakening in or from the dreamstate. I like Ramana’s self-inquiry thing as much as anyone, but have you ever heard of anyone having any success with it? For top-down thinking, you already have all you need in the form of the initial nondual insight; that’s your starting truth. Once you have your starting point, it’s just a matter of starting. After that, all you need is a means of externalizing your thought process out of Maya’s reach, to wit, writing. Practiced diligently, and powered by a raging internal combustion engine (your heart put to its right and proper use), this process can only succeed – or so it seems.

It also seems that there’s no other pathway up and out of the sewer-dungeon of perpetual delusion, as a history of near-absolute failure to find the only thing that can never be lost would seem to bear out.

I recently had occasion to have to think in my head, and I was shocked and appalled by how terribly terrible I am at it. Pure slop. In no sense did it resemble what I now think of as thinking; just a total embarrassment. Compared to the externalized process of writing things out, this thinking-in-your-head stuff is for the birds. By externalizing the thought process, I have become an enlightened spiritual swordsman, but if I were restricted to thinking inside my heart-controlled head, I couldn’t cut my way out of a wet paper bag. My heart and gut and dumbass brain are adequate for daily navigation, but for anything important, like spiritual awakening and Chris Nolan movies, I would never rely on the internal thought process. I am now firmly convinced that the only viable road to authentic awakening is engaging in the writing process of spiritual autolysis from a knowably true starting point, i.e., not-two. 

As far as I can tell (without trying super-hard), no one, no matter how intelligent, can awaken from the dreamstate, or even two steps in it, via bottom-up thinking. Super-smart people come up with all sorts of crazy-ass beliefs – and that’s fine, this is the place for that – but truth is not accessible from within delusion. Conversely, it’s hard to imagine that anyone, starting from the top and working their way down, almost regardless of intelligence, could manage not to find the answers to every question. I mean, it’s all just sitting there, right out in the open. How we manage not to see it is the only real mystery around here.

Every discrete point of awareness inhabits its own dreamstate universe; me in mine, you, perhaps, in yours. Maybe there are countless zillions of us, as it appears, or maybe there’s just me, and perhaps you, as may also be the case. Nothing in a dreamstate is true, so it’s just a matter of what you prefer to believe. That’s the nice thing about belief, if doesn’t have to make sense, and you can jump around wherever you want. What do you like to believe? What’s your belief of the day? I myself like to believe awareness is true and appearance is false, so that works out pretty well since, unlike whatever bullshit anyone else believes, what I believe is actually true. 

That’s what it really all boils down to; what do you want to believe? What’s easy? What’s comfortable? What does everyone around you believe? Assuming that you are a discrete point of awareness, as I know myself to be, your dreamstate is probably similar to my own. We could sync up, confirm our overlap by comparing notes. Does your universe have a Jesus and a Buddha? Does your reality have an Adolph Hitler and an Abraham Lincoln and a Desmond L. Silva? (What’s that? No Desi Silva? So you don’t have a bodyswap spa next to every Starbucks? How frightfully dull. You do at least have Starbucks, I hope.) It’s not that you’re in your private dreamstate universe and I’m in mine; it’s that, to me, you are merely an appearance in my awareness. As convincing as I may find you to be, as real and like myself, I can never know if you actually exist, and frankly, I fall somewhere between doubting you do and knowing you don’t. From the bottom-up perspective, this is advanced philosophical calculus. From the top-down view, this is day-one stuff. Chuck your heart in the sink, open your eyes, learn to see, and all the mysteries disappear.

So what does Maya make of all this? How does she keep the cows in the herd and wrangle strays back into the fold? Corruption. More accurately, emotional corruption. More accurately yet, fear. In an eyes-closed being, the source of all emotion is fear. Fear sounds double-plus ungood, so instead we call it love and repackage it as meaning, importance, and context. Now we can go to work every day and go on vacations and celebrate holidays and take sides and enjoy all the marvelous benefits duality has to offer; a false universe of somethingness within the true void of nothingness. 

There’s a reason for it to be this way. It works perfectly well and no one seems to have a problem with it except, maybe, you, advaitin. You’re the boat-rocker, the agitator, the one who wants to get to the bottom of things. Just roll over and go back to sleep is probably my best advice, but you seem to have other plans.

Anyone who subscribes to a false narrative is asleep; no two ways about it. That’s what it means to be just another cow in an endless herd. Intelligence does not avail in this regard, only thinking does. The only true narrative is the shoreless sea of nothing forever. When you find your private island full of people and places and events, you are completely and utterly under the spell of delusion. There is no island, no people, no self, no universe; there’s only awareness without appearance, consciousness without an object. Anything else is a belief, and no belief is true.

Are you not entertained?

Switching metaphors, the core lie is a huge, shadowy mass in your mental-emotional attic that dominates the space and sucks in all surrounding light and air. It’s the defining feature of the space, but we can never really see it or focus on it. There are many such shadow-masses in your attic, but the core lie is the biggie. We just sort of work around it while pretending it’s not there. What is it really? The truth of love, the end of selfhood, the void itself? All and none of the above. It’s just a huge dark mass that we dare not look at. Mine was mountainous and monolithic, with no clear outline, just a massive, looming,  darkness-exuding presence.

My experience of waking both in and from the dreamstate occurred when I could no longer tolerate this dark, musty, scary attic at the center of my being. The initial nondual insight in my case was this; truth exists. That lit my internal space up like a million suns in a single flash. After that initial insight, it was just a matter of going through my attic, tearing down all the curtains, opening all the windows, pulling off all the dusty sheets, sweeping and cleaning, and removing shadow-masses one by one with the aid of a transpersonal co-destructive intelligence. Nothing was created or preserved, only destroyed. Sunlight and fresh air were the keys to bleaching my inner attic down to the floorboards. This process took me nearly two years of demanding and focused exertion, but when I was done, I had a clean, bright mental-emotional space with no shadows or dark corners, and no alarming smells.

Is it still like that up there? I don’t know, probably not. As clean and spot-free as we get it, we can’t live in our attic, can’t reside in contextless space. There’s no there there. We have to come back down and live in the house, in the body in the neighborhood in the town in the country on the planet. These are all just the broader dimensions of the same mental-emotional space, the dreamstate cosmos. It’s still totally absurd; that doesn’t change. I live in a state of unsuspended disbelief. I can’t be fully swept up in the movie I’m watching, but I can let it flow over me and try to relax into the experience. The main way I do that is by maintaining alignment with my particular pattern and performing my right function.

I now reside in a dreamstate setting I describe as across the river and up the hill; apart from the things of man, but still a part of them. In the world but not of the world. The world is still projected on the inner walls of my dreamstate bubble. I am still aware of appearance. Even though I have unsuspended my disbelief, I still watch the movie and sometimes engage with it. Why not? What else? My final curtain will come down, maybe years from now, probably years ago; time itself is a dreamstate exclusive. That’s how the dualistic dreamstate works, everything has a beginning, a middle and an end; first act, second act, third act. Creation, preservation, destruction.

This is the mental-emotional fog that self-inquiry cuts through like a laser. The problem is that children oughtn’t be allowed to play with lasers, so we make toy versions and scatter them lavishly about. (Ease of access is a major factor; why read or write when you can just watch videos?) In our current context, these toy lasers are pop-nonduality, the sweetness-and-light, all-is-one nondual variation, suitable for mass consumption. That’s the velvet glove on the iron hand; the soft, friendly, happy exterior that newcomers – victims of the initial nondual insight – can caress and rub up against with their friends and their existing lifestyle and their cherished beliefs. It’s not until we strip off the glove and deal with the iron hand of radical (authentic) nonduality that we can transition from sewer-dungeon below to blue skies and sunlight above. 

Nonduality is not a belief system. All belief systems subscribe to a dreamstate narrative and are therefore false and, for our purposes, irrelevant. There’s no nondual system or teaching or belief; there’s only the initial nondual insight and whatever you’re able to make of it. It’s all so simple and obvious that it’s practically impossible not to see, which is why we’re calibrated to a 24-to-1 heart-to-mind ratio. We must be capable of thought, but a sharp mind must be wrapped in a blubbery heart. It’s not ideal, perhaps, that we walk around in a constant emotional fog for this setup to seem to make sense, but that’s the only way it works – and in case it’s not clear, it doesn’t work for us. That’s what you’re up against if you want to understand the real reality of your situation, or at least, make strides in that direction. Again, truth is super-simple; there is no self or universe, there is only awareness and appearance. Awareness is true, appearance is false. Tat tvam asi. Thou art Alfie and Alfie art thou. That’s not belief, that’s what remains when belief is eliminated.

As anyone who seriously contemplates the absolute nature of truth can tell you, life is meaningless, nothing you do matters, you’re going to die (and it will be as if you’d never been born). I don’t like it, you don’t like it, nobody likes it, but without a heapin’ helpin’ of sugary belief, there’s no way around it. It’s not that I believe in meaninglessness; it’s that I directly perceive the knowable impossibility of meaning. I have falsified meaning, just as you can; anyone who looks will see as clearly as I do. I’m not special because I see what’s perfectly obvious; everyone else is special because they somehow don’t.

Nonduality is way past religion, spirituality, philosophy and scientism, and can’t be lumped in with them. It is its own thing, totally above and apart from anything else; sui generis and nonpareil. Pop-nonduality resides at those lower elevations among the perpetually fog-bound, but authentic nonduality delivers you to an elevation of clear-blue-sky perspective not accessible from a bottom-up starting point. I sometimes listen to podcasts by and about ridiculously intelligent people, and I find them to be what Mark Twain called “frankly and hysterically insane.” I mentally raise a valid objection to every sentence, sometimes every word. 

“We…” they begin.
“Objection!” I cry.

I don’t want to go off on a tangent about how great I am, but it can’t be denied that I am a perfect master. On paper, there’s no limit to the number of perfect masters that can exist, but there could never be a more-than-perfect master. I see all that is and nothing that’s not; there’s nothing higher than that. I have arrived at terminal altitude of perspective. I am a perfect master, and no, I don’t get free oil changes with that, or a little gold ribbon to stick on my memory board, not even a hearty handclasp. What I do get for my trouble is clarity, lucidity, a dreamstate view undistorted by emotional filters. Because of this, and not because I am cerebrally advantaged, I can receive the philosophies and cosmologies and sundry beliefs of great minds and thinkers, and totally, effortlessly obliterate them; sentence by sentence, word by word. That’s the advantage of top-down thinking, and if I can do it, advaitin, so can you. 

That’s the game, those are the prizes, and you’re free to press play whenever you want.