Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog

Profound mindfulness, deep awareness, and real meditation are not three separate things.  They are all one in the same.  Unlike what many so-called experts may tell you — including people who call themselves gurus, zen monks, priests, or spiritual guides — one doesn’t need to concentrate on a fixed point, on one’s breathing in and out, on a mantra, a prayer, or on anything else in order to be really mindful or deeply aware.  Actually, doing the aforementioned things — to get something out of them — usually makes the mind duller and more mesmerized.   As in hypnosis, concentration (purposefully done) tends to limit the mind to fixed points; concentration is an exclusionary process.  Concentration and similar forms of effort all cause the mind to focus on details and to engage in a concocted plan (or plans) in order to get some kind of result.  Profound awareness, however, is not exclusionary; it goes beyond mere details and is never the mere result of some blueprint or mentally formulated plan.  

One can practice methods by so-called experts ad infinitum; one can concentrate on one’s breathing, one can concentrate on a repeated mantra or on a so-called special prayer, (or on any other image or set of images that the mind focuses on).  These limited means — manufactured and provided by others — will never bring about true, pristine, and real enlightenment.  One might get some relaxation or some feelings that the mind construes as being “invigorating” from them… but these things will never be real and profound enlightenment.  A stale, limited means, psychologically, never leads to an unlimited, vast end.  Profound awareness is not something that you can rotely learn from any book, any blog, any guru, any zen monk, any priest or any authority (including your own so-called central, inner authority).   Real awareness (which may flower into true enlightenment) is never exclusionary and is never the result of some rote practice or structured technique.  Effortless, non-separative observing without all of the preprogrammed conditioning — simply put — is not merely the result of more preprogrammed methods, procedures, or images put forth by yourself from what others have provided.  Therefore, methods that so-called experts give to you, sell to you, or entice you with, are absolutely out.  What they offer is not cogent, not viable, if you have significant awareness.  And if you don’t have significant awareness you’ll be more than willing to play their games, give them money, adhere to their plans, worship their idols, or travel across the globe to be with them.  If you want to be second-hand, then, by all means, follow their methods; however, one thing is for sure: second-hand never comes upon real enlightenment.

It takes no time for the wise mind to be empty of all of their methods, blueprints, schemes, and concoctions.  Methods and techniques take time; however, not being conditioned by them takes no time whatsoever.  Methods and procedures have nothing to do with pristine, non-manufactured awareness; and without methods and procedures, time is not a factor, time is not operating as it does for most people.  I will not give you methods to practice… or plans to rigidly follow.  We think that someone needs to show us the way, the path; we feel that there is security in that “showing.” However, real insight, real profundity functions in a motiveless, directionless, unplanned way… which is not at all to say that it is haphazard and chaotic.  Most of us are perpetually relying on the methods, systems, images, and constructs of others; then we think we need further methods and systems to go beyond all this, which is absurd.  The very way that most of us observe things via separation (from a so-called center) is the result of stale methodologies learned from others.  There is no path that leads to the pathless.  There are no procedures — that take time — that lead to the timeless.  

Our Neighbor (1) Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2017

Our Neighbor (2) Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2017