You have said “in order to see, to establish such a separation (between the perceived and the perceived), we should be able to perceive the perceiver, to see it as separate from the perceived. And that is not possible.”
Is the understanding from this end correct that this is all meant within the obvious context of guiding into Oneness, beyond the illusion of separation, but not yet Ultimate Truth?
That it isn’t possible to perceive the perceiver not because the perceiver is our real Self, but rather that it’s not possible because the perceiver itself at no time has real existence, hence also no perceptions stemming from that illusory perceiver, both mind/dream/consciousness, really never happened, just reviewed mentally as a faint echo, and can be seen within Oneness and with love/acceptance rather than suffered from through separation and belief in a separate identity and also split between perceiver and perception which are one and the same?
Yet that beyond all that, by going to the source of the next thought arising, prior to and beyond any thoughts/perceptions/dream/mind, only Silence that doesn’t know of any of this is our real Identity, since anything other than Silence is -while uncaused, really and cannot be- only ever perceived because of seeming ignorance of Truth, now hidden seemingly under many layers…
and that all seeing can only ever seemingly take place because it borrows its seeming presence from Silence?
That is what has ben unfolding here and a verification would be immensely helpful……
Thank you so much, whenever some time arises, dearest Francis, no rush.
Dear Maren,
This question is a very important one, both for you and for other truth seekers who have been misguided either by their own misunderstanding of the teachings, or by teachers who didn’t have a first hand experience of their true nature and were teaching their own intellectual model of reality rather than their experience of it.
Before we begin looking into the heart of your question, let’s clarify what I call “the perceiver’. In this moment, these words are being perceived on the screen, the thoughts that they evoke in you are also being perceived. The perceiver is that, whatever that is, that really perceives these words and these thoughts. There is an undeniable element of reality attached to this perception. That which is perceived could be an illusion, but the fact that there is consciousness perceiving this potential illusion is absolutely certain: even if the perceived is an illusion, this illusion itself reveals the reality of the perceiver, which is our real self, our”I“. If that were not he case, we would be saying that we are not the perceiver of our perceptions, that another entity than our real”I" is doing the perceiving, which would be absurd.
It follows from this that our real self is the perceiver that really perceives our perceptions, and that this perceiver is real, for an illusory entity cannot really perceive. The real perceiver is that which really perceives, it is the reality that perceives. In fact it is the ultimate reality that perceives, for a penultimate reality that perceives would still be an illusion compared to this ultimate reality, and we are only interested in our real “I”, not in a relative and illusory identity. For instance if we ask whether our identity survives the death of the body, we want to know whether our real “I” survives, and we don’t care whether our illusory “I” doesn’t, anymore than we care upon waking up whether one of the characters of our night dreams, including our own, dies.
Then, if there is only one reality, as our deepest intuition suggests, the reality that perceives, our self, our “I”, the Oneness, the ultimate Truth, and the Silence you speak of must be the same. If they are different from the reality that perceives, they must be illusions.
If there are more than one realities, one of these realities must be the ultimate reality of all, and must also be the ultimate reality of the perceiver, the ultimately real perceiver, the only one that matters.
What I am saying here is in fact very simple: our seemingly ordinary consciousness, the one that perceives the events of our daily life, is in fact extraordinary, universal, eternal and divine. It is the Ultimate reality of all things and of ourselves, the Absolute. This is the open secret, for all to see, known only by one.
Love,
Francis
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