January 24, 1995 Tuesday, Private Session
Project Expand: The Non-Duality of Awareness and Non-Awareness, Permanence and Impermanence, Changing and Unchanging
We began with K’s questions drawn from the last session.
Question: Can the “uncreated” manifest itself?
Aaron: I am Aaron. It did not manifest itself but manifested unlimited expressions of itself.
Once upon a non-time there was energy. It did not begin, it simply was, is and will be because it is infinite and unlimited. It contained the attributes of infinite intelligence, infinite light, infinite love. It contained no self-directed will, it simply was.
Awareness and non-awareness are non-dual. One may conjecture that non-awareness was part of the experience of this energy. It opened into the experience of awareness. Its non-awareness rests within its awareness, rests within its non-awareness. Non-dual. When the paper is wrinkled, the perfect, unwrinkled sheet still exists within the wrinkled sheet. When non-awareness is predominant, awareness rests within non-awareness. Awareness is! Awareness became aware of awareness and offered this awareness the tool with which to manifest multitudinous expressions of itself.
Because it is non-dual, everything, change and non-change for example, reside within it. It manifested infinite expressions of itself. One distorted but useful expression which it manifested is relative reality. Because it extended to that relative reality all attributes of itself, it extended free will to that relative reality to create itself. Here is where we move into dependent origination.
What we will, for simplicity’s sake, call God manifested an expression of itself, by which I mean it offered its energy to that particular bias of experience which we label relative reality. That bias depends for its sense of direction on the distortions of that which chooses to manifest within the bias. Humans have chosen to manifest within this bias because it provides them a useful catalyst for expansion. Specifically, it provides them the pathway by which each mind-body-spirit expression may expand into pure-awareness understanding of its true nature and thereby begin to manifest its energy in the same way as did that which we have called God.
Q: about whether non-awareness rests in awareness or the other way around.
Aaron: We must define precisely what we mean by awareness and non-awareness. There was always awareness, but no awareness of awareness. This is a semantic issue. Your language lacks precision. That-Which-Is rested in an undifferentiated awareness, not yet aware – I won’t say “of itself” because there is no self to it – neither aware nor unaware of its true nature as pure awareness. Pure awareness is it. It is the source from which all else manifests.
Q: Regarding Aaron’s statement from last week, ” … because its first expression was as neutral, expansion and change and flexibility are part of its essence.” What about “the Unborn, Undying, Unchanging, Uncreated?” Are these two different uses of the word “change”?
Aaron began by asking Barbara to read from P. 29 of Vimalakirti, re: impermanence. ” … one day after the Lord had given some brief instructions to the monks, I was defining the expressions of that discourse by teaching the meanings of impermanence, … Vimalakirti came there and said to me, … do not teach an ultimate reality endowed with activity, production and destruction. Reverend Mahakayayana, nothing was ever destroyed, is destroyed or will be destroyed. Such is the meaning of ‘impermanence.'”
Aaron: I am Aaron. This cannot really be said in words. A map of the Grand Canyon does not express the experience of the Grand Canyon. I can only offer you the map. Your meditation must provide the experience.
Every construct of the phenomenal world is composed of non-self elements. Therefore, everything is in constant change as those elements become magnified or diminished within the structure of the seeming whole. The mountain is composed totally of non-mountain elements. It is in constant change because soil will wash away, trees will grow, fire will burn it, water and wind will affect the rock base. The mountain is impermanent on the relative plane. It seems to have arisen from conditions and will cease when those conditions cease.
We turn toward this “Unborn … Unchanging.” Looking at the mountain, every element in the mountain has as its core one true nature or essence. They are not different divine essences; there is only one. Please regard the starfish. The arms seem to be independent and separate; each may experience a different aspect of relative reality. One may break, for example, but all are not broken. Yet these arms have but one core, one reality. If there are one thousand starfish, each with differentiated consciousness, they all have this same divine essence or pure awareness as their core.
On the relative plane, the mountain is composed of non-mountain elements. One with a relative plane bias would consider those elements as separate but interrelated, yet every element within that mountain has one core, one Buddha-nature. On the surface, the mountain seems to change. When a million years have passed and it is eroded away into a desert, in relative reality it has changed. We say it is impermanent. Has anything changed beyond the way it manifests itself? Is the true nature of the desert any different than the true nature of the mountain?
I offered “change” as an attribute of this pure awareness/ pure energy/ pure light. “Change” herein is the fluidity to manifest its energy on the physical plane and, once entered into that plane, to reconcile its expression with the laws of relative reality.
We might think of this pure energy as a river. It reflects the sky as blue or gray. Its temperature changes as it moves from icy mountain peak to sunny plain. It will pick up impurities – distortions from soil or waste that it encounters. Maybe it will evaporate completely. Is its true nature any different? God is unchanging and its expressions are infinite. It is always permanent and impermanent, changing and unchanging.
Why should the Unconditioned exhibit the characteristics of the conditioned, such as change? Can you see that it must be both, changing and unchanging, or it denies relative reality? “Fluid,” “open,” even “infinite” cannot exist without change. What if this “All That Is” was unchanging, unfluid in its expression? How could it expand? We have talked of this question, Can an infinite God expand? If it already is everywhere, where would it go? If our answer is “No, it cannot expand,” then we put a finiteness on infinity. We limit the unlimited.
This is not a paradox. If it is already infinite and already everywhere, and yet is still fluid, changing, expanding, then “Unchanging” is its ultimate reality and fluidity, change, expansion are the ways in which it manifests. Because there is no duality, unchanging and changing are non-dual. Again, no paradox. Here is where your meditation must carry you when words fail. Rest in that place where you are the Unchanging and then you will know.
More questions we didn’t get to these today:
Barbara: Is non-being dual with being? Is the experience of non-being outside the experience of the Unborn?
K: There does seem to be some sense of the positive being more “real” than the negative: light vs. darkness, presence vs. absence, etc. (e.g. “Giving” and Receiving” can be seen as dualistic notions as in yin/yang but are also both of positive polarity.) Are we stuck in the human concept of positivity which is rooted in duality? Is the positivity you speak of when referring to God something entirely different, encompassing the human or relative conception of positivity/negativity? Earlier discussions and the RA material about negativity being a distortion of positivity would seem to reflect this idea.
How does Aaron’s earlier teaching about negativity “coming back” to positivity in sixth density as its only option fit in with this discussion?
The Course in Miracles defines “evil” or “sin” as the mistaken belief that separation is real and, therefore, illusion. (RA: “evil” as a distortion of love.) So, eventually, all beings “return” to an experience of total positivity (sixth density) because that’s all there is on the ultimate level. (Yes, I realize we must work with our experiences of negativity as real on the relative plane, not denying them.)
I think I’m having trouble understanding the difference between neutral energy and positive energy as Aaron defines them. My understanding so far has been that, ultimately, there is only positivity (again, not as defined by the human—although, identifying myself as a human at present, I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about when I refer to this “other” positivity at the ultimate level!).
You’re probably thinking I’m getting too intellectual here, but I am drawing on my experience also as I write. When I have an experience of deep love, which seems all-consuming and ultimate, anything “negative” around me is transformed into what the Course labels “calls for love” because it is seen with “different” eyes (pure awareness?). There is a sense of only love as real and negativity or “evil” as confusion/illusion/rootless. When I am caught in identification with the ego, negativity is my pervading experience but is not experienced as all there is; it is rather a sense of something missing, a lack of some sort. So, experientially, positivity and negativity have different qualities.
Note from Barbara: While cleaning up the transcripts, Aaron spoke to this question:
Aaron: It was biased neither toward service to self nor service to other because it knew there was no self or other. It was willing to explore both biases as basis for growth. You are correct that, as the wrinkled sheet of paper contains the ever-perfect sheet, so positive polarity is always present, even within the negative bias. Thus, there is only positive, but there are varied expressions of positive. This positively polarized energy’s first expression was as neutral. Negative polarity is another expression of positive polarity. We will need to more clearly define positive polarity.
(Note from K: Earlier, in talking about the “wheel” I asked Aaron, so the “nothing” becomes “something” through the turning of the wheel? He said, yes.)
Thank you both, dear friends, for this opportunity to learn.