Transcending misidentification

Fundamentally, what Buddhism is trying to tell us is that who we really are cannot be found within the psychophysical being, that is, the five aggregates (P., pañcakkhandha).  Our search in other words will be in vain.  It is only with the transcendence of the psychophysical being that one returns home, so to speak, and finds their true identity.  All the rest is misidentification.

Transcending misidentification, however, is no easy task.  It cannot be accomplished through the intellect or by the imagination.  These are the only tools we have or are aware of.  Delusion is our world.  Who we are is who we are not.  We are constantly deceiving ourselves.  It is like we have the sense of making forward progress but we're only going around in a circle.

All this is implicit in the literature of Buddhism although at first it doesn't seem like it.  In our eagerness to understand Buddhism we often misread it.  The Buddha’s message gets mixed up with our own expectations of what we imagine Buddhism to be.  In other words, we don’t read Buddhism with an open mind.

For Buddhism, a human being is illusory or void in the sense that it is comprised of the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness).  These aggregates can be characterized as impermanent, suffering, and without a self.  In this light, nirvana is the transcendence of these aggregates; logically, the awakening to our true nature or self. 

One must consider also that this transcendence includes the transcendence of subject and object or the same the experiencer and the experienced.  Enlightenment or awakening is not a matter of me experiencing the absolute.  It is really a matter of me transcending myself and its journey to experience what it imagines the absolute is.  You in the absolute become single for about 1/10th of a second!  

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[Jung]

Finding your self dwelling in a body and universe steeped in sheer uncertainty, you always deal with the limiting reigns of probability in any given moment and point of space.

This painful enigma of inevitable suffering is the grand illusion Spirit has to overcome to find its way back to its true nature by transcending the aforementioned. It is but a single leap of doubtless no-action and yet perfect step forward into the great void of the Unborn Mind.

This path of awakening is, has been, and will always be laid out by super beings of limitless compassion, The Buddhas. The path creators and elevators of the humanized Spirit into the true and permanent reality of the deathless.

Here discovery of the gateless gate [into the Unborn Mind] is the first step in the right direction.

Observing and listening carefully inwardly to its most subtle dharma in your awakened Spirit while treading upon the ground of first enlightenment is the rest of this singular path of the Pure Mind.