The play of ignorance, 2017

THE PLAY OF IGNORANCE

With the seeming separation of subject and object, the subject is marked by lack.

The primary lack is the absence of stable identity with the consequent sense of vulnerability to fluctuations in experience, whether this appears to be internal or in the environment.

This existential lack feeds a sense of lack of the features that surround the subject which are taken to be attractive. This generates pulsations of desire, need, longing and a sense of frustration when the object is not quite what we want.

The primary lack also feeds a sense of danger, in that by opening myself, to what I want, I am also open to aspects that I don’t want and so aversion easily develops, ripening as anger and hostility.

Subject and object are born together and are mutually sustaining. They arise from the thickening of energy when its patterning is repeated in order to create the semblance of stability and reliability.

Actually, each moment of the pattern is fresh, for ‘repetition’ is an illusion based on the delusion of the real existence of enduring entities.

There is no essence or substance to what we take to be ‘subject’ and what we take to be ‘object’. These appearances only seem real and substantial due to the activity of reification.

This activity, the creativity of our mind, generates the delusion of self and other, subject and object, as really existing entities. If we see that this is true about either subject or object then both dissolve.

Imagining that subject and object are separate and self-existing, the energy/activity of grasping at them, shaping them and attempting to control them, is the dynamic that sustains ‘them’.

Our investment of focus and identification in the emergent ‘object’ fluctuates, moving rapidly across the spectrum between the polarities of distanced observing and identificatory fusion.

The unborn primordial ground or basis or source which is open and empty effortlessly gives rise to energy patterning which we experience as ‘me’ and ‘not me’.

Me includes body, voice, mind, identified through the activities we know as thoughts, feelings, sensations, movements, gestures and so on. We take the source of these arisings to be something internal, inside ourselves, the core of ‘me’.

Similarly we take everything else to be external, with each ‘not me’ being generated by its own individual thingness.

This dualistic interpretation is how the display of the ground arises without awareness of the ground and so seems to generate its own self-creating and self-deluding ideas about what is occurring.

The ground becomes apparent when we awaken from the dream of duality. The ground is the ground of both awakening and dreaming. There is no other door to freedom than awakening to the ground.

James Low. November 2017