Is there anything we can do to attain liberation? Is realisation the result of a process?
I’m reading a very absorbing book: Conversations on Non-Duality. It is the account of ’26 Awakenings’, interviews done with a variety of individuals by Conscious TV and published in 2011 by Cherry Red Books. Repeatedly, those interviewed say that liberation just happened and that it has nothing to with anything they had done.
In his video A New Way of Knowing: Â http://youtu.be/R1091_DMeCo, Hayward Fox likens our common state to a landscape patterned by the habitual course of well-defined river beds. He describes the activity of TSK as being like inviting the ocean to flow inwards onto the land.
Perhaps, in immersing ourselves in TSK experiments of being, we are mimicking liberation; acting ‘as if’ enlightened. Is it actually possible to replace one template with another over time or is liberation, by its nature, uncaused, instantaneous and a-temporal? Or is there even any value in thinking about liberation, at all?
Caroline
Caroline, thanks for sharing the link to Hayward’s you-tube water story. The power of the ocean to refashion the river-beds which feed that very ocean over time is an intriguing image. Perhaps that’s what TSK does: allows the ocean to replenish the trickling progress of old familiar ways in which we harness the eternal flows of time. As another way of speculating on the direction of flow and influence, I really like the Sufi story “Voices in the Stream”.
Very briefly, a stream tumbling down the mountains comes to the desert and a voice starts up, suggesting an alternative to pouring into the sands and becoming a swamp.
The winds cross the desert every day. All you have to do is relax into the welcoming arms of the wind and you will be carried across the desert and fall as rain in the distant mountains.
Then there is an interesting twist. The skeptical stream starts to feel more open to this idea–as if it has done all this before. — Michael