The Tool of No Separation
La herramienta de la no separación
A reflection on how the practice of seeing no separation is itself just a tool, and how the discriminative process of discovering what we are not can undermine the conceptual foundation of the sense of "I."
The Tool of No Separation
A reflection on how the practice of seeing no separation is itself just a tool, and how the discriminative process of discovering what we are not can undermine the conceptual foundation of the sense of "I."
Realizing there is no separation is another technique, another tool, another practice, another form of getting to the same thing. Any practice can have its opposite practice. You can even create a map where you say: first do this one, then the opposite one; do that one first, then the other one. You realize something on one side, then you realize something on the other side. But the practice of seeing there is no separation is just that: a practice.
Once it is seen, there is no further need for seeing separation or no separation. It becomes irrelevant. Once what we call realization or disidentification happens, the tool is no longer that important. Seeing that there is no separation is a tool, a practice, a mechanism, a way to make something happen.
The process of discrimination
What I am pointing to with discrimination is something experiential. You can check it for yourself. If you observe your hand and feel your hand, you cannot be your hand. This is hard for a rational mind to debate. Very few people would argue with it, because they also know that you can be amputated and still exist. So almost everyone would agree: I am fully not my hand.
But then start there, and get closer to what you feel and think you are. Apply the same process. This is the process of neti neti in Hinduism. It asks: what am I? Not this, not that. Not this, not that. Anything that I am aware of, I cannot be. That is the process of discrimination. It is answering the question: who am I, or what am I?
Getting closer to identification
As you proceed, you are going to encounter emotions. You are going to encounter thoughts. You are going to encounter what I describe as a not-okayness, something that is constantly not okay in our experience. And you are going to get closer to the mechanism of identification itself. It will turn out to be identification with a concept of what I am. But it is really subtle, because if I say "concept," you might think of something like the concept of a door. That is a concept, yes, but the sense of "I" is also founded on a concept. The more you engage in this process of discerning what you are (which is actually seeing what you are not), the more you start to undermine and remove the support of this belief that we are a concept. The sense of what we are, which is actually a concept, is hard to convey. It has to be talked about in many different ways.
The falling away of the concept
What can happen through this process is the separating, or falling away, of that concept. What we have for decades experienced as "I" can stop. It can stop for a second, and you will now have the contrast: what I have always believed myself to be has completely gone away, and I remain. But that second "I" is not a concept. It is not a thing. It is what can be described or pointed to as being. But here, it is all words.
That falling away of the concept, even if it lasts only a second, usually begins as just a glimpse, and something remains. This can go deeper and deeper. What can stop is everything: all experience, all sense of anything existing can stop, and something remains. It is not a thing, but there is a knowing of everything stopping.