U & nothingsness are one ! ( 21 Nov 2006)

You and nothingness are one

You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account,
you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safeguards, you are as
nothing. You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may
simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it.
You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective
violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge or amusement;
but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your
relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choicelessly aware of
the escapes. You are not related to it as a separate, individual entity; you are not
the observer watching it; without you, the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and
nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two separate
processes. If you, the thinker, are afraid of it and approach it as something cont
rary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably
lead to illusion and so to further conflict and misery. When there is the
discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear - which exists
only when the thinker is separate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a
relationship with them - completely drops away.

Book of Life - August 13th
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Action Based on Idea

Can action ever bring about freedom from this chain of cause-effect? I have done
something in the past; I have had experience, which obviously conditions my response
today; and today's response conditions tomorrow. That is the whole process of karma,
cause and effect; and obviously, though it may temporarily give pleasure, such a
process of cause and effect ultimately leads to pain. That is the real crux of the
matter: Can thought be free? Thought or action that is free does not produce pain,
does not bring about conditioning. That is the vital point of this whole question.
So, can there be action unrelated to the past? Can there be action not based on
idea? Idea is the continuation of yesterday in a modified form, and that
continuation will condition tomorrow, which means action based on idea can never be
free. As long as action is based on idea, it will inevitably produce further
conflict. Can there be action unrelated to the past? Can there be action without the
burden of
experience, the knowledge of yesterday? As long as action is the outcome of the
past, action can never be free, and only in freedom can you discover what is true.
What happens is that, as the mind is not free, it cannot act; it can only react,
and reaction is the basis of our action. Our action is not action but merely the
continuation of reaction because it is the outcome of memory, of experience, of
yesterday's response. So, the question is, can the mind be free from its
conditioning?

The Book of Life - November 21