Not Religion, Not Science... Simply Direct Experience

The Natural State.  Simple direct experience... unmediated by thoughts, labels and concepts.

Religion and science are merely useful conceptual tools, do not be fooled by them.  What we seek both comes before and goes beyond these.  Practice concept-less seeing.

This is something our hearts sorely miss, in a world of conceptual distraction.  We want to visit home, but don't know how.  We often unwittingly seek it out through all manner of activity, be it novel experiences, psychedelic substances, breath-work or meditation... just to name a few.  Or even just a daily walk in the park.

Coming to a state of deep relaxation and simultaneously a lucid clarity, a base of pure stillness which is unchanging, in which the "experience" (what we call a body, thoughts, sensations and world), appears and changes in a grand symphony of multitude.  The deep relaxed clarity of the natural state of awareness is nothing magical or profound, it is the most normal and simple thing.

So close, so constant, and so simple that it is completely missed. It becomes an invisible background.  An apparent "I" arises, and from there begins the delusion and distraction away from the pure base of it all.

Novel new or thrilling experiences can automatically bring us to awareness, as the mind switches itself "on" for the new encounter.  But can we simply skip all this effort and get straight to the clear base of awareness?

Of course we can.  Awareness is always already here, it is evidently eternal, beyond abundance, never created and never dies.  It simply takes the mind practice to fully let go and suspend its activity.  By achieving this, the mind truly has mastery and control over itself.  Most of this practice involves training the mind to avoid being distracted and lost in concepts and labels.

To me, the skill of mastery over mind is more valuable than being clever.  It is the skill of Wisdom.

A key benefit of this skill is seeing the direct experience with clear eyes, like a newborn, which can be achieved not by learning something, but by suspending everything we have learned as habitual conditioning.  Reverting knowledge back to a tool for use when it is needed, rather than a distracting filter through which we see everything.  This is sometimes also called "Seeing clearly", and is related to  Beginners Mind.

At the end of the day, this too is all talk, mere words.  Not something to believe, just tools that I hope can inspire you to go beyond them, to the underlying reality that they point to.  Be still.  Be quiet...  Be.