Our awareness naturally receives the plurality of phenomena into itself, that is, into a passive unknowingness (avidyā). This condition is also what we recognize to be connected with our individuality which is a kind of reaction to this influx. Being thus individualized we are set off from others. We have a distinctive character. It is who we believe we are.
Many Buddhists seem to regard their awareness, even the awareness of awareness, as some kind of ultimate state. It is not. This awareness cannot behold the phenomenal world as empty of inherent existence. In fact, it is just the opposite. Everything is real for awareness insofar as everything seems to possess a unique nature which is a particular name and form (nāmarūpa) which in Indian philosophy arises as a differentiation within the original one.
By comparison, the vajra-mind ('vajra' which can either mean ‘adamantine’ or ‘thunderbolt’) is the absolute, itself, which from its own side shows all phenomena to be inherently empty in the sense of being no more than an illusion (neither real nor absent) thus lacking an unchanging, inherent nature. This multiplicity is not unlike the unceasing waves of the ocean which are really nothing as compared with the water, itself.
The vajra-mind by seeing that phenomena are never other than fundamentally insubstantial and illusory always returns to itself so that it is never other than real and itself (vidyā). The vajra-mind has transcended false reality in addition to a false self (individuality). You might say that it has brought a mysterious light into the world that awareness, on its own, cannot know. In this way, the vajra-mind begins to reveal both the infinite and the illusory.
Screenshot from text I'm reading, might be useful to some:
https://i.imgur.com/LhSsaRi.jpg
Posted by: Vyartha | December 30, 2018 at 09:29 AM