Like Fire to Flame....

An excerpt from an awakening journal from An Eternal Now, available here from the excellent blog, Awakening to Reality.

"When we look at a candle, a flame is burning brightly, flickering moment by moment, not having a fixed shape.

We may question, where does the fire come from? Does it come from north? South? East? West?

Does ...it come from the candle? It would appear so, but before the candle starts burning there is no fire. When the fire starts burning, it appears out of nowhere - the candle and a sudden spark ignites the fire, but the fire came from nowhere - it is merely dependently arisen, without a place of origin - entirely fresh and new.

Where is it? The fire is constantly flickering, cannot catch a location at all. Merely dependently arisen, no substantial core that can be pinned down or located. In fact - try moving your hand across the fire - it's totally hollow and transparent.

Where does it go after the fire is blown out? Does it go north, south, east, west, up or down? Doesn't apply. For what is dependently arisen, ceases upon the cessation of conditions, and is empty of an entity. The notion of an entity that persists and goes somewhere does not apply at all. Fire is empty of IT-ness. There is no fire-ness of fire.

For what dependently originates does not come into being, and what ceases upon the ending of conditions has no destination, nor can it be said that a 'thing' has been 'annihilated'. It simply means the absence of conditions for further arising.

Look at your current experience. How is it any different from flickering fire?

Isn't it the case that whatever you think, see, hear, and smell, are spontaneously appearing out of nowhere via dependent origination? That it is constantly flickering, unlocatable, insubstantial? That there is no destination to which things proceed to and remain - rather, they simply cease upon the parting of conditions?

If you are to pay a little more mindfulness to your experience, it will not be difficult to directly observe your experiential reality constantly dissolving moment by moment like your fingers drawing on a pond utterly vanishing without a trace upon its inception.

We however have ideas of substantial reality that exists objectively, causing obscuration and proliferation that grasps at solid self and things.

For example we imagine that there is an observer, a self, that is peering out through the eyes at an objective world. The objective world is seen to consist of solid entities and objects each with their own inherent characteristics.

We reason ourselves that if we close our eyes and open them again, we will again see similar shapes and colours. We then reason to ourselves that these shapes and colours are inherently present as the characteristics of objects regardless of whether we are present to observe the objects.

We fail to consider that for example, dogs see no colours, beings of other realms can see something different, and if we look at the quantum level we see mostly void. We fail to consider also that 'colours, shapes, and forms' are merely our visual experience arisen due to specific causes and conditions. There is no such thing as vision without colours, shapes, and forms. And there is no colours, shapes, and forms without vision. They are synonymous. In any case, they are simply dependently arisen experiences. Our framework of there being an observer observing the world of objects are baseless, no such delineation can be found in our investigation. There is no seer that is seeing objects, nor objects that stay the same and exists apart from our observation of them. There is rather simply a wide array of appearances, which are dependently arisen but no solid entities can be posited or established whatsoever. Whatever object we investigate to see if they could be characteristics 'belonging' to truly existent objects are found to be more of the same hollow and substanceless, dependently arisen appearance, like an empty shell which only 'appears' but do not pertain to any true existence or core. Being dependently arisen, nothing whatsoever exhibits the characteritics of inherent existence - core-like, singular, partless, independent, unchanging. There are no objects behind the colours, shapes, forms that we experience moment to moment... nor a seer behind the seeing.

It is also not the case that objects pass through our field of awareness or experience. To say that "things arise in awareness" is fundamentally wrong already since it implies there is "things" that can

arise and pass away in some unchanging "awareness". But actually both "things" and "awareness" are merely conventions that point to a single self-luminous experience. In actuality there is no 'awareness' other than what is seen, heard, smell, taste, touched, thought, awareness is simply the self-aware, self-luminous quality of each experience, and there is no sight, sound, smell, ... etc that is not the self-luminous display of mind. In short, there is nothing apart from the suchness of every manifestation. Language and thought falsely construes artificial dualities and frame our experience in these false constructs causing confusion, ignorance, clinging and suffering. Awareness is empty of any intrinsic identity - being merely a convention, like everything else are also conventionally designated without any substantial ground to be found."