The immediacy of being we call the 'now' or self or sensory consciousness, is an immediacy that is nascent and undeveloped. We have not awakened (bodhi), in other words. Moreover, unbeknownst to us this same immediacy is the absolute, but one that has no knowledge of itself; which still abides in a state of avidya. As paradoxical as this seems, this absolute as Mind is, but it is not yet an object of itself. What still stands before it is the dissimilarity between its immediate being and its full awakening which has not been completed.
Thus there remains a goal to be reached which is Mind’s gnosis of itself.
For the average person, what they perceive as the phenomenal world, including their thoughts, is always inadequate for them. Nothing matches up with them, in other words. They are never satisfied. In such a condition, in which the subject is the undeveloped primordial Mind, it simply doesn't know what it is or how to see itself, directly. While everything is potentially okay, the average person feels off-kilter; attending only to phenomena.
Turning now to the sage, the sage’s attention, like a pure beam of light, penetrates through the phenomenal fog to such a degree that he objectively meets up with the source of the attending (i.e., Mind). Mind has found itself, in other words. This, I should add, is the exact meaning of samâdhi; especially of right or samyak samâhdi found in the Eightfold Aryan Path.
For the spiritual adept, reaching sagehood is a path of mediation and practice. As I am able to penetrate through the veiling fog of phenomena, attending to ever finer and finer states of focus, I eventually reach the limit of phenomena which is no phenomena. Here is utter emptiness—except for pure Mind, the primordial substance of all things. I am now directly attending to Mind as an object, which is empty of all fluctuations. But this is not a subjective state. It is gnosis. But it is also the overcoming of the physical abode of being reducing it to an illusion. Mind is the only reality, fullest attained Mind that is.
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