How can you eliminate the impermanence and find the ultimate?

by Vic Shayne,
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment

Let me preface this by saying that I can only answer the question that is in the headline from my own experience…

Several years ago I began listening and reading Nisargadatta, Ramana, and Krishnamurti. They all say the same thing: Embark upon a course of self-enquiry to find out who you are at the core.

Find the permanent within the impermanent
The impermanent world is where all the attention lies for most people: Find the permanent within this by a process of elimination. Is the body permanent? No, it grows old, gets sick, and dies. Are thoughts permanent? No, they seem to arise and fall without your control. If they were part of you, under your control, then you would simply be able to shut them off. People meditate for decades without ever being able to permanently shut down thoughts. But anything that is temporary is not you. And how about consciousness? Consciousness is the entire movement, creation, destruction, action, forms, and potentiality of existence, but it also is impermanent because it apparently changes.

The Absolute, of course, cannot be described, because it is prior to the mind, consciousness, body, and thought. But we try to use metaphors and analogies in order to have some sense of a goal. The Absolute is like the space that permeates everything. If you have an object on a table, it is sitting in space. If you remove the object from the table, the space still exists unmoved and unchanged. This is like the Absolute in this sense.

All the world’s a play
Somehow, through self-enquiry, the egoic mind and the world become analogous to a stage play or a movie. It becomes obvious that there is really nothing that exists outside of “you,” with the word “you” being a vantage point or perspective. There is nothing really happening; it is all just a projection, and the projector is you. At some point it’s as if something clicks and suddenly you know this. Until then, all you have are ideas about enlightenment.

So, to answer the question, it takes persistent and astute observation without any judgment. It is a bit of a struggle at first to not get carried away by the egoic mind, which means to not buy into its fabricated world.

Find the watcher then let it go
When you eliminate all that is impermanent, you focus upon the point of view that is unchanging and stationary. We are so used to — conditioned to —being the actor in the play, so to speak, that we do not pay any attention to the one who watches the play. Self-enquiry is about finding this watcher that is always there. But you have to be careful not to personalize this watcher or commit to it, because it, too, must vanish.

Time, persistence, observation, and non-judgment seem to be the ingredients needed. Observation means paying attention to your thoughts, what you tend to think about, how you think, your relationships, how thoughts appear to rise and fall, who you take yourself to be, and so on. You look to find out if there is really any doer. You observe whether it is possible for you, as a character in the play, can really do anything at all without a precedent, without the entirety of consciousness having a role in what happens. Nothing in this phenomenal world exists in isolation, including you as one of the billions of characters.

Where we begin
The whole process begins with understanding a certain framework that includes a cosmology of sorts — there is a biological body, a mind, a brain, the sense of self (egoic mind), consciousness, and the Absolute. Use this information to just observe these things.

The guru and desire
There is a certain amount of trust as well. If you have a guru or a teacher who is fully awake, then you trust him or her that self-enquiry will eventually lead to uncovering your true nature. The guru is only a pointer, not a source of information and knowledge. Eventually the knowledge must cease so that direct realization takes place. To get to this point takes a tremendous amount of unceasing desire.

The mind turns in upon itself
Turn all thoughts back upon the self instead of on the apparent outside world, because everything you see and know is coming out of you. This is quite an impossible reality to grasp by the mind, but one day you discover it is true. There is nothing that is permanent except for the Absolute that underlies everything, even consciousness.

There is a razor’s edge between using effort and the egoic mind versus merely observing. When the effort of the mind is used then you remain in the realm of the unreal and impermanent. When you just relax into observing then it is consciousness that is observing without the impediments of the egoic mind.

Eventually the permanent will be realized.