I agree that there is awareness co-incident with manifestation; now - as I compose this reply for instance - I am aware of my nominal, cognitive "I" sensation (personal ego of "who" I am as a living, breathing embodied awareness with focal consciousness). I am aware of its essential illusory nature because I can experience it's actual broader context of nothing ("the emptiness that is full") when I stop intellectualizing for a moment and let my focal mind clear of thoughts, like letting a glass of muddy water become clear and settled by simply not disturbing it and *allowing* it to become clear and ... luminous, like sky.
Then I am poignantly aware - connectively so - of a
broader,
permeating presence of awareness, non-"I" or non-"me" but of with which "I" am part and parcel. The closest I have ever come to grasping this - which CANNOT be grasped, particularly with reason or rationality - but CAN be experienced is through the metaphor and actual experience of sleep and dream states. The completely UNKNOWN, nothing-that-is, I can only describe (as others long before me) as an abiding deep, dreamless sleep; which, while it *is* "sacred mystery" aka UNKNOWN and is completely free of any being, thought, manifestation etc and so on it yet *is* complete wholeness, utter unmanifested potential, empty yet completely full in its potentiality and utterly incapable of symbolic representation such as NAMING or IMAGING.
Yet ... somehow, this perfect formless potentiality has a capability of ... oh boy, words, words ... somehow it "stirs" from deep, dreamless sleep into focal awareness, like a spotlight. Or like overlapping raindrops on a puddle of water ... that's sort of a metaphor (for me) of how consciousness is; and how *I* can go to sleep and yet there are myriad other awareness points of focal consciousness keeping the overall physical manifestations of the consensual universe going; kinda like shift work
. So I can wake up to my regular programmed, consensual world that "everyone" and everything else has kept going while I zoned out for a "while" in the ineffable timeless unborn-and-undying. "'Everyone' and everything else" in the preceding sentence pointing to all-that-is-manifested.
The thing is, now in my consensually-awakened, manifested temporal state of "I" ... thing is, that I have for the past few years carried with me, even in this temporal KNOWING state, the awareness of that timeless unborn-and-undying permeating presence ... best I can think of to represent it is as the unmanifested CENTER of all things, *even* amongst that which is presently manifested in the now awareness. This CENTER is the common connection every manifested thing shares - whether animate or inanimate - within the unmanifested UNKNOWN. I describe the center as the UNKNOWN because you can never manifest the center of anything; Watts (Alan Watts) told a story of how one of his kids asked about god, where is god, and Watts said something to the effect that the best he could do would be to point to the center of things and say words to the effect that god was inside everything. Which, in the context of his other words, I can perfectly understand. He demonstrated to his child by having him look inside an apple to see if he could find god, if he could locate the inside of this living (or, for that matter, non-living as well) manifestation. Cut the apple in half. You are left with 2 smaller things, both having a non-physical, unreachable, unlocatable [spatially] or unknowable [intellectually] "essence," inside - coincident with the physical center of the pieces, yet "itself" non-manifest but, paradoxically,
present. Again, these are just words so to get it one might have to not think or intellectualize about it or try to analyze it but simply meditate on it (particularly out in nature, but even if only your yard if that's the only acess or whatever).
It hit me one bright morning as the sun was creeping up, sitting on my back porch drinking morning coffee. I just got it; no big flash or buddha in the clouds or anything. Just a very quiet, personal "a-ha" moment.
I - not the little, thinking, sensational "I" - but the whole enchilada, permeating all-that-is, "I-am-ness" awoke to itself even while the little "I" beheld.
Little "I" couldn't grasp it but in it's little realm of personal knowing, it knew.
That's when little "I" understood that timeless, encompassing "I-am-ness" was ALWAYS there all along. Unborn, undying, never absent, always present and PARADOXICALLY perhaps UNKNOWABLE, yet experience-able as long as a little "I" was manifested. It's from where little "I" gets it's bits of grasped knowledge and understanding - for a
time, just so long as little "I" is around. During deep, dreamless sleep as also [shortly] after death little "I" is no more (including no "surviving" personal thetan[soul]-continuity, at least not in the context of the same named, little "I" experiencer); the difference being that there is, of course, sameness of personal-experiencer-continuity coming out of night-to-night deep, dreamless sleep. It's my own speculation that there is likely no personal-experiencer-continuity of the personal "I" that just died, in an instance of death. In terms of death, the personalized little "I" is no more until the next little
unique right-now-moment stirring of raindrop-like little "I" focal experiencer-consciousness borning from the non-manifest "ocean of potential being," and resuming newly the game of ... hide-and-seek. :wink2:
And, yeah, for the more prurient amongst us, hide-the-salami might work as a partial metaphor.
You know, I have no idea whether any of this is coherent or just drivel; I'll have to take a look at it later because there's a good chance I made a bigger fool of myself in public than usual; but s'okay, I'll take any incoming potshots.
tl;dr version: Like the man said, "The tao that can be named [or spoken of] is not the true tao" - "S/He who knows does not speak; s/he who speaks does not know." That oughta tell you somethin'.