Now you know these four basics and the problems within them, you can now navigate the waters of any spiritual path or religion. Any one. It really isn’t so complicated. I just added a lot of extra words in hopes you’ll get it, but it is fundamentally quite simple. If I made it too simple you’d miss the picture, so I’ve hammered at the  fundamentals again and again from many different angles in hopes one of them penetrates through the cocoon of ignorance to let in some light.

In terms of us describing consciousness in tracing it ultimately back to its Source, all that exists are these four types of consciousness. Just four. From the standpoint of the real base, these four divisions are all illusory since it’s all one thing, the same thing in its innermost purity. So it’s not like that the makeup of consciousness is an infinite regression of knowers looking at each other as in a Godel Escher Bach drawing. It’s just four types of consciousness.

Spiritual study is so easy, but people fail to use their discriminative mind to find these four portions of consciousness. That’s why they’re lost and fall into all sorts of strange practices or interpretations of Holy books. They forget that some authors only got part of the way here, and many just wrote for their times. We cling to the words and try to make inconsequential things paramount when it’s just stupidity. If you cling to the Bible that way, you too are doomed to ignorance. You have to find its living waters and you do that by cultivating to its source.

The four types of consciousness can be reduced to three or two or one depending on how you do it. You can lump the eighth together with the seventh, and then you have just three divisions. Or you can have two divisions by lumping the sixth, seventh and eighth together as a single perceiving unit, and oppose that against the reflective consciousness made up of the five senses. Or you can just say it’s one thing because it’s all consciousness and the substance is not different. It is one in unity.

The first seven consciousnesses are no different from the base but arise in the same way that waves arise on the ocean as their support, and ripples within waves when it is all entirely ocean water. It is stirring consciousness just experiencing itself.

We can think of it like the ancient saga of four turtles that hold the world upon their backs. It’s not an infinite number of minds which know each other, like an infinite regression of mirrors reflecting each other in series. It’s just four, only four things we must understand.

We have the five sense consciousness that, as a group, provide sense impressions as the reflective consciousness. They reflect “the outside world” to us. That’s one big turtle.

To grab these images and cognize them into something with specific characteristics or limits is the second turtle of names and labels. It’s grabbing that first turtle in order to classify it.

You then KNOW this, you know what you’ve cognized. That’s the third turtle or seventh consciousness which stands behind the sixth consciousness. This is the intellect, the consciousness that can also think about things. So this third turtle is grabbing the second turtle. But we’re not done.

By the way, Shakyamuni also called this third turtle the “transmitting consciousness” because it stands in-between the activities of the sixth and eighth consciousnesses. The seventh consciousness stands between the sixth discriminatory consciousness and the purest essence of consciousness itself, overlaying the mental information with the sense of a self because of an error in clinging. That’s how it entangles the first six consciousnesses in its own fallacy.

Buddha also called the seventh consciousness, or “I am” thinking consciousness, the “defiled mind consciousness” or “afflicted mind” because it maintains this false idea of an inherent self as an internal type of addiction from is hard to break. It’s one of the main reasons why none of us are saints or spiritually enlightened, which is because we’re holding on to this notion of being an entity rather than turning around and realizing we are the source. We have to break this addiction of taking the internal seventh consciousness as a self, and then we can experience things clearly.

There is yet one more turtle. The knowing of the seventh consciousness is reflected back to the ultimate source, or fourth turtle, which is the base or essence of all consciousness. All the other turtles stand on this one, and also they are also composed of this turtle and only seeing this one because they are this one.

In a way, you can say they spiral out of it touching one another with the first turtle resting its head in its shell because that’s all it ever sees. It’s all self-referential. So the only thing you ever know and ever have known is just consciousness itself – that’s all you ever see, perceive or experience and it’s ultimately, in essence, the storehouse, container, or eighth consciousness.

It’s all just consciousness right from beginning to end. From start to finish it is all just consciousness that you ever experience. You just can’t see it so you remain blind and trapped within a world of confusion, trying to perform spiritual practices to no end. You think you’re seeing things in the world and that they are real, existent, independent things but that’s just consciousness you’re experiencing and you’ve lost sight of the source. What you’re seeing is an interdependence that arises all together, and you’re just cutting out pieces of it with your mind and thinking up things on your own and investing them with a reality they don’t have.

We can say that every one of these turtles has three modes of being. They each have a transformation mode or evolving mode because each and every moment they always seem to be changing. Although the purest, clearest base consciousness itself never changes, it, too, always seems to be changing in its unreal aspect because it manifests the world of miragelike conventional illusions.

Each turtle also has a performance or effect producing mode of being, which is another way of saying that they arise and perform their functiong. Each consciousness functions to produce results in the status of the mind.

And lastly, despite their changes they all retain their original nature, the base essence that never changes. Their essence, at its purest, is always never changing or non-moving. That’s their third mode of being.

Higher spiritual beings may be closer to the ultimate mental purity of the source than you are, but as long as they too are not enlightened, they are still caught in this self-made web of delusion of taking mental appearances as real. They too have all these parts of consciousness, but are just more pure in how they use them.

The seventh consciousness still perceives the constructed images of the sixth consciousness which categorizes the first five contributions. A grasped something is the sixth, knowing that and thinking about it is the seventh.

The authentification of that knowing is done by stainless pure awareness that is always present and never moves out of reach. Whatever arises as something known, whatever it is, is the body of the container consciousness that’s seen through the vehicle of these first components, so all you ever know is mind. It is all only Mind Only. Everything is just appearing within the one true mind. In one of the Gospels, Jesus tells the Pharisees "You will not be able to recognize the coming of the kingdom of God by external signs. Nor will you be able to say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'See there!' For the kingdom of God is within you."

In John 17: 21-23, Jesus says, “Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” In the Gospel of Philip  it says, “The Christ has everything within himself— whether human or angel or mystery, and (also) the Father.” It also says,  “The Father was in the Son, and the Son in the Father. This is the Sovereignty of the Heavens!” In other words, everything is Mind stuff.

Just like Jesus said, few people ever realize the Father because they never realize that all they are ever seeing or experiencing is Mind stuff, or consciousness. What is the source of the illusion or delusion?  The existence of the seventh consciousness is the cause of the dualistic world we take as real, and we search for God in the false world rather than trying to lift the cover of the dualism of subject and object. We take the apparent self and its external world for the true nature of things and blind ourselves from the source. The seventh consciousness is actually pure and clean, but because of wrong habits it filters the indeterminacy of the substrate of consciousness through discriminated categories that create a self and others.

How does this wrong habit come about? It’s like naturally learning a language to which you have been conditioned right from the beginning. Whether French or German, American, Korean or Chinese, you start getting used to a language that’s always present from earliest childhood and get conditioned to it.   Through constant and consistent association you pick it up as the natural tendency of expression, and assume that’s the way things are and then start attaching to it because it’s always there. The   beginningless habit energy of attachment to the base consciousness arises in the same way. It just comes about for no specific reason other than as a false habit you can let go of.

Another analogy is to imagine a clear crystal placed on top of a red piece of paper. If you put the crystal on top of the paper, the crystal will look as if it’s red even though its real nature is clear clarity. If you assume the crystal is red, the error in judgment is because you’re not thinking clearly.

In the same way, pure awareness becomes colored by the perceptions of consciousness, and just as we then can mistake red for the color of the crystal, we make a mistake of assuming a false self when there is none. The clarity, the presence, the Nowness, the ultimate base is clear through and through but we lose sight of this and start attaching to  imaginary things.  

Buddha said you only have to get rid of the false self to arrive at the real self, to return to the real substrate of reality, and you do that by letting go of conceptions. That’s all you have to do. You practice the renunciation of letting go of your thoughts. If you let go of grasping, and the continuation of grasping that has been going on ceaselessly stops, then the pollution of clear perception naturally lifts. In Christianity we say you merge with the source from doing this, which is the immaculate ground of existence.

If you don’t let go of conceptions, you’re just cheating yourself every moment. You think you are an ego and become proud of yourself and then want more and more and more but you will never find a real thing in whatever you experience. Keep letting go of everything until there is nothing more you can let go of, and only then will you find the real you.

The problem is that you constantly cling to the body and its sensations as a force of habit, or you identify with your thoughts and emotions as yourself … all these things you take it as your self and then keep clinging to them wrongly.  You just weren’t told the true way, and no one showed you or corrected your error. It’s just an erroneous habit. In the Gospel of Philip Jesus tells us about this exact spiritual practice once again. He says, “Indeed come into the house of the Father, but do not hold on to anything nor likewise carry off anything.”

The problem in spiritual cultivation is all one of clinging. We have this idea of being an ego and then we cling to it, and create the habit of clinging to it, and that erroneous reasoning and the habit energy of carrying it forward are what end up blinding us from the truth. Consciousness arises because of a body, so the “I am” consciousness identifies itself with the body and we cannot let go of the body identity to assume our real identity of who we really are.

Right now, just go ahead and show me your ego! Stop right now and find it for me right now.

You cannot – you can only find thoughts or sensations or body feelings, but no such thing as an ego or self. You are just the absolute nature, so let everything go. Be a passerby. Don’t get caught up in whatever arises in the world because it all arises without your involvement. It will all happen anyway and do what it’s supposed to do without any need of your mental clinging that keeps you bound.

If you practice identifying everything to realize “you are not this, and not that or anything else that can be experienced” then what’s ultimately left over after you subtract everything else out will be the real you, the real self. You have to find that one and stay in it for your spiritual life to unfold and develop.

You don’t need to analyze the mind into infinite components to understand the basis of this because that’s wrong. It’s not like you observe the mind, and observe that you have a mind that observes the mind, and so on in infinite regress. It’s so easy that even a child gets it. There are only four components in total. Just four turtles you need to understand. You have to focus on methods that purify the second and third turtles, the sixth and seventh consciousnesses because the eighth is already pure and the sense organs produce pure reports.

You can even think of these four types of consciousness as a lump of clay. Clay, as you know, is made up of dust particles that are its substance. The lump of clay is no different than its particles because if it was different then you could never produce a lump of clay out of them. If there is no difference between the clay and its particle components, however, then the lump would be indistinguishable from its particles also. The clay and its components seem separate but are the same, the same and yet separate. The   example is simple enough. The various consciousness are no more than manifestations of the root consciousness, the true Mind. They are no more than manifestations of the One Mind and they are illusory, unreal manifestations because they never stay changeless but always depart.

If you just sit down and apply clear discrimination you’ll find the four parts just as I led you through them, but the fault of Christianity is that hardly anyone ever does this anymore. “Believe this, believe that” is common, but no one examines how you actually spiritually realize something … anything! Isn’t that crazy? No one is teaching you how to find God and I was able to lead you through in a few minutes. Why aren’t they doing this?

This is the crux of the matter, and everyone skips over this, the most crucial part. If you don’t understand this you won’t get anywhere no matter how many hours you participate in the Church congregation.

People don’t teach this in Sunday school but the real Christian spiritual practice is to trace this route back to the source, for that’s the only way you can find God. You cannot find God any other way except through the avenue of the mind.

If you don’t understand this information, how will you pierce the veil and rend is asunder to know God? Will you do it by attending Christmas or Easter services or by singing songs, reciting hymns or lighting candles in Church on Sunday?

We take Christ as our savior because he achieved this oneness with the Father we’re talking about, taught us how to do so, and promised he would lead us there. We need but copy his example.

Don’t be so prejudiced as to think that Jesus was the only one. Humble yourself to go check perhaps a spiritual school like Advaite Vedanta and you’ll see that the sages in the East also wanted to return to the fundamental source. So if they don’t say anything that offends us, why can’t we look at what they have to say, especially if it agrees with us.  The Apostles only recorded a few hundred of Jesus’s direct words of teaching, and who knows what they left out and if they even recorded it correctly. Only a few hundred! We already know they differ on so many details because humans are fallible, that’s just the way it is.  Frankly, they’ve left us a pitiful amount of all his teachings and words. If you stop concentrating on trying to interpret these differences and   turn inward and experience just the Source,   in that way you will win ever lasting life and spiritual liberation because those are the attributes of the Source.

One spiritual school may call the ultimate objective God, another Allah, another Brahman, another absolute nature, another Buddha nature, another true Self, another ultimate Source, but if they all refer to something real, eternal, pure, ultimate, infinite and the function of that real essence is pure, undivided awareness. There cannot be two  independent things that have these same characteristics but are different. Two pure, infinite, eternal entities cannot exist. There can only be one. Everyone is after the same One Thing, the same common ultimate essence. When different schools talk about God as a living being that’s something else but when they are talking about this original One, they are all pointing to the same moon, so-to-speak.

If the original essence did not function with the power  of radiant awareness, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. There wouldn’t be life or sentience or consciousness or being or however you want to say it. That’s just its nature, that’s just what comes with it. There’s no purpose to it other than that is what is.

The pure awareness of our original host has no shape or form and is perfect as it is, and it is always perfect. But when it comes into contact with consciousness, the world springs up. So the base of our spiritual  nature is actually the perfect, nonmoving, undifferentiated, indeterminant, formless Self that have the ability of awareness. That Self is what you are ultimately perceiving or experiencing all the time – just your true through the display of all existence. Anything you have seen, thought or understood you cannot be, so This One is the real you. It is totally different than anything that can be understood.

The base of consciousness is the body of all experience and the container for all experiences, so we can call it the container or storehouse consciousness. This is what you want to reach because this is where it all springs from. This, my friend, is the unfathomable God of which the Bible speaks. Please don’t turn this into a person. When you do that you slight the scriptures.

It’s not true we should take the sixth consciousness for our master nor take the seventh consciousness as our master either. We should not cling to discriminations since they are not inherent in  pure reality either. The basic road of spiritual practice is to therefore learn to let go of any obscuring attachments that stand in the way of realizing the clear base consciousness, the basis of the enlightenment mind, and that means all mental processes of attachment.  

How do you purify attachments, how do you empty them out, purify them, let them go or break through them?

You don’t try to use pressure to suppress or destroy attachment but just let everything go. When you try to suppress or destroy these mental knowing, that’s incorrect spiritual practice and yet a lot of people make this mistake. We cannot eliminate or annihilate the seventh consciousness, just as we shouldn’t eliminate the sixth, because if discrimination becomes extinct then we have no knowing. We just have to abandon attachments, like this clinging to the idea of being an inherent ego.

What you have to do is transform consciousness by letting the functions of consciousness actively do their thing   but without adding anything extra.   Then they will purify out naturally. You might object that you’re already doing that but you’re not,  You are always engaged in a subtle process of clinging and attachment than has become so commonplace that you don’t even realize it. That’s the habit energy you must break – it’s so subtle you don’t even know you’re doing it, which is why you’re out of sync with the Father. You don’t even know you’re using energy to attach to consciousness because you’ve become so used to the energy drain.

You have to relearn how to let consciousness function in operation without clinging. It’s the habit of clinging that is the cause of error. If you cease to cling and thereby stop obscuring, then the habit energy of grabbing will die down naturally and the  purity of the natural state will reassert itself. Actually the ground state of being is always pure in its essence and functioning, but you’ve wrapped the purity with thoughts to obscure it.

There’s nothing wrong with the first five consciousnesses. They directly reflect the contents of the container consciousness. The problem is the sixth and seventh consciousnesses. That’s where the problem is centered. So let’s look at the thinking mind of the intellect that is centered in the seventh consciousness.

What does the subjective consciousness, the 7^th consciousness perceive? You already know that consciousness is just experiencing consciousness, consciousness is just perceiving consciousness. The Kingdom of God is around men but they don’t see it. Mind is just perceiving itself.

Consciousness is always just perceiving the energies of itself but we think there’s really a real external, self-existing world there instead of recognizing we’re just seeing consciousness. We are only experiencing concepts in the mind, even though those concepts look like a real world. We think there is a real world we're experiencing, other than recognizing we're just experiencing mind, because of thoughts.

Then we get confused or "forget even further" and start believing that there really is a real being, self or entity inside us experiencing this all when it’s all the same thing …. The “me” thought is  part of  that manifestation, too, but we forget that. That’s why we’re in delusion.

Since it is all ultimately the eighth consciousness, consciousness is somehow perceiving the perfect base through veils or filters of limiting experience and that’s how delusion or ignorance arises. If you remove those filters you are spiritually enlightened once again.

So here’s the problem. The eighth consciousness or pure base is always there, presence it always there, pure awareness is always there, the nonmoving real is always there, indeterminate reality is always there. There are multiple ways to say it. God is always present in each and every thing.

By attaching to the ever present stream of consciousness as the base, more specifically in attaching to its "perceived portion" as a definite object rather than just letting awareness flow without clinging, the seventh consciousness generates a continuous image of the root  consciousness and takes it as a real permanent self. It just happens out of the incidental habit of close association, that’s all.

The thinking ability, the knowing ability we call the seventh consciousness falsely attaches to the base of consciousness because its function of knowing resembles a homogenous series similar to something solid, constant and unitary. It thereby evolves an apparent self that is not a real self. It creates a false realm of duality of subject and object by falsely discriminating out a subject or self.

How’s this happen? It does this through an incidental error of attachment that becomes a habit and then continues obscuring the source as long as the habit is maintained. But habits can leave. They are not permanent. There is hope of liberation.

In discriminating out a subject and object, the continuous event of consciousness   knowing itself at the contact point produces a habitual attachment that causes the delusion of   an individual self or being to appear. If there were no grasping of this apparent self, if there were no stickiness of perception, there would be no problem.

That’s how the notion of self-identity arises. It’s an attachment of consciousness to itself, a stickiness of perception. This is the arising of the I-am, and it’s bound with desire or self-love, a self-love for continuance, a self-love for existence. That’s why in Christianity and other spiritual schools we say you have to give up self-love and cultivate selflessness. This is why you have heard preachers say to practice selflessness, renunciation and surrender by giving away thoughts, desires and attachments to the small ego and turning everything over to God. That mental charity of poverty, of holding on to nothing, will win you the Kingdom of Heaven.

The seventh falsely transposes its faculty of perception onto an assumed independent self when that self has no reality of its own but is just a bunch of thoughts. Thus the mind of thoughts covers over or distorts the real perceiver nature of awareness by inventing an illusion via the habit of attachment. There is no real self, only various transformations of consciousness that don’t stay. The real self is the root of it all, the support or base from which everything springs – the eighth consciousness.

The fact that this ego doesn’t exist  but is only a thought, is why when we search for the ego or I inside ourselves we can never find it. That’s why many spiritual schools ask you to investigate where the sense of “I” comes from. They tell you to ponder deeply “who am I?” or “what am I?” or “What is my real nature?” They have you search inside for the answer in hopes you discover there isn’t anything there.

Awareness is empty of anything you can grab, hold onto, or label as a permanent, self-existing, independent self. It just doesn’t exist.  As Christians we can look inside, too. Looking certainly doesn’t violate anything. That’s how you’ll find the proof of what I’m saying and what the saints keep telling us. They are saints, so you should hear what they have to say. If you look, you’ll also find the same answer.

Christian dogma also supports the very same conclusion. Where is the problem? There is no problem. The only problem is people don’t want to use their discrimination. Maybe they’re too immature or lazy or weak, but they just don’t want to turn within and look to see if this is all true. Remember that none of this is religion. It’s all a natural, non-artificial investigation. Anyone can do it. You don’t even need the Bible to know this.

Even if you grew up somewhere without access to the Bible of Christianity you could discover this and  prove it yourself. That's a real, genuine spiritual path because you didn't need to know any special dogma to achieve anything. It is self authenticating, a true non-contrived, non-artificial path. This point is particularly important because if something is truly real, you shouldn’t need to have knowledge that there was such a being as Christ or there was a book called the Bible in order to be able to find it. And now you’ve proved that to yourself without having to rely on ancient words or letters. Free of dogma, you are able to reach the end point.

All you have to do is let go of thoughts, which means resting the mind. It’s a process of non-effort, and thus isn’t anything artificial anyone made up, and there aren’t any secret steps you have to know. You just rest. You rest the mind of the subtle clinging habit that uses up energy.

That’s why true religions all commonly declare this path. But you should not blindly accept what scriptures say. To become one with the Father and make spiritual progress, you have to see this for yourself and prove it in such a way that the words become your own testament from experience and you can teach others because you proved this yourself. Then you’re qualified to teach Sunday school. This is the real spiritual practice, not memorization of the Bible.

Now just as the sixth consciousness attaches to objects by grasping them, so does the seventh consciousness attach to objects, but  in this case mind objects since that’s all it knows. The seventh consciousness is the thinking mind and will, so its whole realm of operation is just mind. It only knows concepts. It attaches to what it knows, which is actually only consciousness itself   and in identifying with that knowing of concepts, mistakenly turns that knowing into an apparent I or ego or knower that it believes is real, blinding itself from the reality of pure consciousness as the only real self.

Consciousness only knows consciousness as that’s the only thing it CAN know, but the seventh consciousness forms an attachment to the knowing, and that attachment becomes an obstruction or unreality that filters the experiencing of the original nature. It self-references itself, like a dog biting its own tail, and mistakes the constancy of perception as a real permanent self, for the idea of constancy is just a thought.

Go ahead and look. The idea of being a self is just a thought, which is why you can’t find a self anywhere. It is only in a state of spiritual ignorance that one identifies or confuses that which is impermanent with that which is eternal, that which is impure or colored with that which is pure and unconditioned. Most people identify with the body as their self, but the body will die and then where is the self? If you lose and arm or a leg, is the self still there? How much do you have to lose before you say there is no self any longer?

There is a type of subtle innate mental attachment that builds up image of an apparent ego, self or entityness where there is none. If this habit energy were to only purify or empty out, you’d still experience everything perfectly but just cease to identify with the experiences that arise. Everything would still function fine, only now you’d be one with God and your functioning would be pristine and automatic. There’d be no change as to what really is going on other than for delusion to drop away, so there’s nothing to worry about in this process of purification. You’re not creating anything new that’s incorrect or wrong. You’re just letting go of the only thing you could call original sin or error.

One doesn’t disappear, one doesn’t become annihilated. Awareness still functions but it has no more stickiness of clinging, and thus is free of illusion and errant ways. The false idea of a separate ego or individuality eventually disappears — ignorance leaves – but acting out of the Absolute self, the big Self, the true nature, the Father remains and perception remains. The seventh consciousness faults in taking an image of the eighth consciousness to be the self but that’s not true because the image is just an image, not the self. That’s the problem to be solved within religious striving. We’re all clinging to a made-up imaginary self ego, and we’re usually taking the conscious experience of the body   as our self. You have to let go of this and that’s spiritual practice.

I told you that the seventh consciousness assumes a master inside that isn’t there, and that the sixth consciousness isn’t the master as well. The sixth consciousness or discriminating mind gives rise to its own problems. You have all these experiences that arise in your mind due to discrimination. You see, feel, smell, taste things.   Sometimes you take what the sixth consciousness serves up for dinner and take that to be the real self. Most usually people identify with the feeling of the body as the self.  

Just as Jesus indicated the sixth consciousness was not the master, which is   other spiritual schools also tell you to quiet the mind, we also know from Christian dogma that we must give up the self to become one with the Father, so the seventh consciousness is not he master either. We also know from Scripture that Jesus reached the stage where he lost his sense of personal individuality and merged with the Supreme, the Father, the Absolute state, the Original One. We know this because he came right out and said it, “The Father and I are One.” (John 10: 30-34). This is why we take him as our teacher – to realize God is to become God and that’s why Jesus become Christ.

Basically the road of spiritual practice is a road of mental purification to accomplish this feat. We can say that mental attachment or delusion becomes extinct, but we don’t say that consciousness becomes extinct. We say the small self leaves but one gains the true self. We say one gives up everything but gains everything. We say ordinary consciousness becomes purified so that it becomes wisdom, a direct knowing or direct passing through of awareness without clinging.

Here’s how it happens …  

If you engage in the correct sort of  spiritual practice, your mind of discrimination empties out or clarifies so that it becomes able to see all things without distortion. Discrimination still functions but without clinging, and without clinging there is no distortion.

Shakyamuni explained that the seventh consciousness automatically begins to be transformed as the sixth consciousness of discrimination, of mentally constructing and then clinging to names and labels, is transformed. The seventh has no power of its own to eliminate delusion, because its delusions are all innate rather than distinguished. Through spiritual practices that involve purifying  the sixth consciousness, the attachment to the self is gradually eliminated. You don’t need to know the exact how-it-works process, because all you have to do is let go and achieve it. Once again I’m just supplying the technical details in case you’re interested in the process.

When you let go of the habit of naming and holding to discriminations, the seventh consciousness of yours loses its stubborn insistence there is an “I am” and thus you eventually realize the equality of yourself with all things. It’s not that “we are all God’s children” but that everything is God, period. You can actually reach a stage wherein self and others are one whole and there is no difference between anything. It’s a stage of universal unity.

The base of pure consciousness, when you finally let go, becomes like a great omnipresent mirror that can see all things without sticking, so it can reflect everything in the universe perfectly without getting caught up in the displays. That’s what it’s always doing anyway in its radiant shining, but you just don’t realize it.

You don’t have to create anything on the road of spirituality. You just have to let go of your own views and the real nature of things will clarify out naturally to reveal what is, and what is is what we’ve been talking about. That’s what’s always there but you’ve just been obscuring it. The real essence is fully present in each state of consciousness, each and every moment so realization of what always already is is the point, and you already have everything in consciousness that is required.

The very beginning of this road is for you to take a moment to realize that all you are ever experiencing is consciousness, and to “GET IT,” to experientially see this. You are consciousness touching and feeling consciousness.

I’m not talking about an intellectual acknowledgement of this. You have to sit there, close your eyes, think about it and then see it, taste it with realization, authenticate this with a personal understanding because you lived a realization. That’s all … you’re just seeing, hearing, thinking this very moment.

This panorama of thoughts, feelings, forms, phenomena, sensations are just consciousness and not anything else but it’s hard to realize this so Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is around us, but men do not see it. Don’t be that way, be the opposite way.  Be one who sees it. Be someone who realizes that the Kingdom itself is   consciousness, it is all you ever experience. So Jesus said in the Gosepl of Thomas, “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."  

The next step after this first realization is to just let go and start watching consciousness itself. In Christianity we call this cultivating “quietude” or “silence” because you sit down, close your eyes and then watch whatever arises in your mind but without clinging to whatever arises. Sometimes we call this “surrender.” As you do this, in time your wandering thoughts will die down to produce a quiet realm.

The problem is the  habit of attachment to thoughts which you must break, and if you can do that then consciousness will naturally clarify. You just let the mind give birth to whatever arises, but you don’t attach to it. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, “Be passersby.” You just let everything go without attaching to it.

That’s it, that’s all you do. In the Middle Ages the saints would sit in prayer for hours just watching their minds, offering every thought over to God by not clinging. That’s how they would learn to empty themselves, and in time their busy minds quieted down and they began to enter into this silence.

You can’t do this immediately because it takes practice to let go of attachment and let the clinging unwind. When they totally let go, then would find the host, the master, the ultimate source, the Father. It’s just like Jesus said in Mark 13:33-37. You have to keep watch constantly and then one day suddenly it will happen, you will realize It. You will come home. You need constant, diligent practice effort otherwise you will never achieve this awakening.

As the silence, or the non-existence of wandering thoughts,  gets deeper and deeper and the habit of clinging begins to unwind from letting go, the thoughts which cloud your unity with God are eventually washed away. You don’t progress all at once but   in gradual stages and then there is a sudden final breakthrough. At that point you lose the sense of duality, of being an independent self because the false ego disappears, and you achieve unity. You realize that there is only the Self witnessing all.

We want to be like Christ, we want to emulate him because he reached this stage of selflessness. But people never think about what selflessness means. Only in oneness with God, the Father, the original nature, do you lose all sense of self because the identityness of the “I am” disappears. Consciousness returns to its source, and with consciousness goes the  ”I am” since that is one of its products.

In letting go of the products of your mind, eventually things will clarify out and wondrous transformations will occur along the way. In letting go of your insistence that the mundane reality you see is real, you will be able to access all sorts of spiritual states and powers because they will slowly appear as you let go of the coarse layers of the false world. This is what our Christian saints achieved, and what the saints of other traditions achieved by the same sort of practices as well. It is achieved no other way other than by letting go. It’s just a path of mental purity, of not clinging to consciousness.

When Jesus would withdraw into the wilderness, perhaps this is what he was doing although we don’t have the records. We know the Christian desert Fathers would withdraw into themselves by watching their minds, and then eventually lose the sense of self as their thoughts died down. Plenty of Christian saints have described this very exact same thing from all sorts of Christian practices.

Now you know the key, the big secret the organized Churches have been keeping from you. This is what happens on the road of Christian spiritual practice, but certainly not from going to Church on Sunday and attending services. Those are activities that just gain you a bit of merit. Now you know the details.

The objective is to reach the root of all existence, and this is it. But if you just follow normal Christian activities and think this is it then you’re wrong, for Jesus said, "If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a hole."

Remember that the starting point is to recognize that the world out there you see is not real but an illusion. It’s not the real, unchanging, ever present One you can rely on that is possible for you to become. It is not the state of bliss that is free from pain and sorrow. It’s just a world of ever changing moments that’s more like a dream, mirage or illusion. There is nothing you can produce that’s forever. It’s like writing a letter of the alphabet in the water, for as soon as you draw the letter it disappears.

That’s yet another analogy to help remind you  that whatever you experience is actually just your “mind stuff”…that’s all you are truly ever experiencing.  What you experience when you eat the apple or see the apple is not the apple, but just a scenario of consciousness, a changing perturbation of consciousness. You never see an apple…you’re just seeing discriminated pictures of consciousness that you take as an apple, and you forget about this linked chain event process of knowledge that brings you that information. You are not seeing an apple, the real you is only seeing the mind, only seieng ocnsciousness, only seeing concepts. that's all that the true self is experiencing. The false self is a concept, so of course is enmeshed in the world thinking it's real. You have to give up that false one.

You can only experience your mind, so I’m telling you that you should get to know the source of your mind. Whatever you have, whatever you experience is only because of consciousness, so what gives rise to consciousness is the root or base or essence of your being that is God, the real nature. You only experience your mind’s knowing of consciousness, the awareness of consciousness. That’s it, that’s all.

If you point your spiritual striving to finding the root source of it all, and then you’ll find It. If you really look, it’s guaranteed you’ll find it because it cannot escape you, it’s always there. If you stop attaching to objects in consciousness including the idea that you are the viewer, you can regain the full experience of being the pristine, immaculate, clear awareness that is one with the source. That’s the stage of spiritual enlightenment.

There is nothing higher than this. When you become that awareness you are everywhere. That’s why Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." He also said “I am the light of the world.”

You find awareness everywhere because it is everywhere, it never quits, it always shines, it is self-illuminant, self-effulgent but men do not see it, they cannot recognize it, they cannot know it using their present mental habits, and thus it escapes them even though they every moment are using it. It is a difficult spiritual task to recognize it because we get attached to the conscious viewing of the outside world rather than looking within and recognizing the base of consciousness itself.

Forms appearances, the phenomena people perceive are to be regarded as forms born of a dream or vision that have never been created. They are illusions since there are no such things as self or  others … it’s all just one whole no matter how big or tiny you make it. The external world exists only in conformity with mind-only, and its intricate network of infinite causation owes its rise to discrimination rather than as things truly born. The things we see and experience, the phenomena of the mind, are of the nature of a vision, and thus being illusions are unborn, unproduced, non-created. They are in a state of non-production.

Jing transforms into chi,
Chi transforms into shen,
Shen transforms into emptiness,
Break the emptiness to return to the Tao.

It should really be more properly translated along the following lines:

When jing transforms, your chi arises (comes out),
When your chi transforms, no-thought (illumination, spirit, prajna wisdom, spiritual knowing, etc.) arises,
As illumination clarifies, you can realize emptiness,
If you don't hold on to the emptiness realization then it will deepen and eventually you'll attain the Tao.

I've used translators, helped coordinate translation efforts or made donations  for the translation of   all sorts of spiritual books — Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu and so forth. So I know how difficult it is to get things translated. Most of my own progress has been because I've relied on the translated texts of countless traditions to help piece things together. If a book in English can help someone increase their level of wisdom or gong-fu, then I'm all for it. If it can be trasnlated into another language for another culture, I'm for that too, especially if it can be done ont he cheap (because I know how expensive it is). You see,  I'm very careful how I spend my money when it comes to charitable donations.

For instance, I would never give to the American Cancer Society because it spends hardly a cent of its budget on cancer prevention education when they flat out admit that diet is the major role in cancer causation. It also has a vested financial interest in chemotherapy, and supports witch hunts against individuals pursuing other cancer cures less than blessed by the billion dollar cancer medical establishment. The American Diabetes Association is another example — diabetes is a blood sugar problem and due to what I consider a conflict of  interests, the doctors of the Association have flat out said there's no relation between the amount of sugar you eat and getting diabetes. Nonsense….look who's donating to them. The American Heart Association? Well the cholesterol fixation is a overblown hoax (just as is terrorism), chelation that can help people is attacked, surgery is preferred over dietary changes, and supplement research should be sponsored for how to make them MOST effective rather than trying to rule out anything in one go. Most of the large orthodox organizations (including the Wildlife foundations) seem to grow so large that after a point they lose their way, their focus, their purpose and end up, in my own opinion, doing  very little to  help people except  maintain the status quo of vested financial interests.

That's just my opinion, so ignore it. But note that  you can see how strict I am. What passes the strict test certainly passes the loose tests of worthwhileness. For years I would watch which efforts my teacher supported and did not, and learned a little bit of his own thinking process which I usually found, in the end, surprisingly accurate even when we disagreed with him.

I'm no expert but when an organization passes my muster, like www.Kiva.org for micro-banking, I dare say it's usually pretty good.

Well I found a great way to help contribute to the translation of enlightenment texts — http://www.daitangvietnam.com/index_en.htm. The TUE QUANG WISDOM LIGHT FOUNDATION has developed a computer program to help trasnlate Buddhist sutras into Vietnamese and I dare say it is so good, so cost effective and so quick that I had to contribute.

As they write on their website,

At the present time, we have completed the translation (Stage 3 of Program) of all sacred texts in the Chinese Tripitaka (over 70 million words in 9035 fascicles/files). All 2372 sutras in the Chinese Tripitaka have been translated by computer in 28 hours. Please read through the sample translations of the Amitabha Sutra, Medicine Buddha Sutra and the Diamond Sutra below. These short sutras have been translated in less than 10 seconds. Larger sutras such as Kinh Hoa Nghiêm-Avatamsaka Sutra (80 fascicles) in 11 minutes, Đại Trí Độ Luận-Great Prajnaparamita Sastra (100 fascicles) in 17 minutes and Đại Bát Nhã-Great Prajna Sutra (600 fascicles) in 50 minutes.  We are making corrections to these files and updating them with modern Buddhist and Chinese-Vietnamese terms.

The Masters and experts at the Buddhist Institutes in Việt Nam are ready to start  the editing and review of these files (Stage 4 of Program). The editing and review phase will occur over the next 10 years. It will only require a relatively modest budget of $300,000 USD for sponsoring about 50 editors in Việt Nam. 

If you're looking for a wway to generate merit of the path, then consider donating to an effort like this. I encourage you to do so. There is a link on the page.

Here's another one I like — for $30 giving light to some family. Geez! Only $30 to change a life. Think about what you normally spend $30 on … and what you do with light such that you tak eit for granted.

http://www.dlightdesign.org/

Now, double, triple or evn quadruple that for the dharma, because if you weren't able to get in touch with cultivation knowledge of any kind - Taoism, Advaita, Buddhism, Kashmir Shaivism, yoga, Esoteric School, etc. - you'd be as lost as the billions of other people in the world following organized paths and just generating a bit of worldly merit for better behavior, that's all. Think about. You only get the dharma because you help support and spread the dharma. I don't care what path I support with my money as long as it helps lead other people to the ultimateend, is virtuous and does not promote desires. So if the Kashmir Saiivites wanted to build a temple in India, I'm all for it. Same for Taoists — if they have the real Tao  school. See? So nothing beats trasnlating the mother texts themselves.

Once again: http://www.daitangvietnam.com/index_en.htm.

A wonderful set of memories encapsulated on the web.

http://the60sofficialsite.com/

http://www.meditationexpert.com/blog/real-world/recession-or-depression-its-here-its-started

I've also stated that one of the contributing factors, amongst many, is the fact that we have no strong base of manufacturing jobs because of all the outsourcing. Why? "Free trade."   As I always say, free trade to help the consumer matters not when the consumers are all unemployed - at some level the domestic unemployment rises to a level where it's ludicrous to keep reciting the mantra of "free trade, free trade" as the salvationist cure for public welfare (because no one has money to buy goods, no matter how cheap they might be).  Somewhere I have an article on this as well…

You will see cracks developing in the free trade arena as this recession deepens, and also within 20-30 years you'll definitely see cracks develop in the US  between all its constituent parts.  Not from anything I'm doing - but from what the politicians are doing in their policy choices. Already we've seen cracks in the US world hegemony because of its dollar policies and military involvements, and we'll see more and more nations delinking from the dollar and the focus on export economies as they switch to starting to build up their own internal economies rather than export-for-hire. All because   the last several decades of economic policy errors have to have their consequences. Some of these principles I explained in my book on Kuan Tzu.

Another "silent" contributing factor to all this  (that no one has been mentioning) has been the increasing say corporations have been having in White House and Congressional affairs since the end of the Reagan era. Democrats and Republicans have converged in their economic views, and both listen to the mega-corporations who seem a more tangible presence to the politicians (and a more tangible election checkbook) than millions of individual wage earners and small businessmen in a nation. The best bank is to store money amongst the people, but in giving corporations equal say to individuals, the vast money they represent in one entity, and perks they can promise politicians, has diverted the entire legislative system to favoring the corporations over the individuals. What is best for the corporation is not necessarily best for the public when outsourcing is the norm. Now we must switch back to the local economy, local manufacturer, local farmer, local community …

Corporations, unless owned by a single individual/family with strong ethical and moral guiding principles apart from "profit maximization", focus entirely on that — making more money. Whatever makes more money is what is pursued, which means events/goals/targets that may not be good for the public but which are legal and make money. Often the methods used are untheical and illegal because money is the only goal and benchmark.  A pure profit maximiation focus means an weakened public and social fabric/sector  in the long run under such a system that no longer has checks and balances as we once did.

This is just another way of saying that the fat cats on Wall Street have been getting rich because the system over the last two decades has been slowly twisted more and more in their favor to help them make profits, but THEIR profits have little trickle down effects to your livelihood or standard of living. It helps the corporation but not the population of the country, not the wage earners, not the real substance of the country; the country is for the people, not the corporations. NAFTA is a perfect example — it destroyed US jobs. It WAS a great sucking sound, as Ross Perot correctly warned (but people laughed at him). And this is a perfect example of how the corporations are getting richer and the common man, left without a job, is suffering. It will get worse.

So the moral — put some money in cash, invest in agricultural markets (as the need for commodities is growing due to growing world demand, and food is always necessary), expect the last two quarters of 2008 to be brutal, and a trader's market of ups and downs until then. We might even see a false recovery between now and August, but the last two quarters of this year will be brutal. If President Bush and Cheney get us into Iran, as they hope to do, the situation will turn even worse, but there seems little we can do about that since even the news  organizations no longer criticize the White House or look on events with a discerning eye for the public's interest.

This IS how the world operates, and how the big boys think. I believe George Bush and Dick Cheney consider themselves as understanding oil like no previous presidents, though of course, their understanding of the best policy to undertake for strategic national economic interests, that will be consistently followed by subsequent US Presidents, shows them (and Donald Rumsfeld) woefuly lacking.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq

Water is the other large concern so far unaddressed. There is a large global push for corporations to have the ability to privatize, and thus gain control over public water rights. China and India may one day fight a war over just water; it may seem as if it is over some other subject but the real goal will be for control of water. Witness the water problem in US states that has just started, and imagine the pain global warming may bring. Agricultural problems I'm not even getting into, other than we may see the blooming of South American economies (Brazil, etc.) as we saw for Asia in the 80's because of agricultural output.

Many African nations, by the end of this century, will probably be colonized again by foreign powers who seek their mineral resources but need some way to legitimately grab them. The likely excuse will be that the Africans are doing a terrible job at self-rule because of constant wars, brutality and the terrorizing of their own people. There actually is a great deal of truth to this and the fact that many countries, such as France, England and the Netherlands, might actually do an astronomically better job governing various African countries to the greater benefit of the local populations  even if the whole purpose is to   secure vital resources for themselves. Such may be the foundational rationale or logic promoted to justify such actions. In the past few hundred years of European history we saw all sorts of false rationales to promote the opening of markets or control of markets (grabbing of local resources) - mercantilism, industrialization / modernization, Christianization, promoting democracy, etc - when the real reasons were purely capitalistic. No matter how evil or corrupt a king, he needs a mantle of legitimacy for his acts or rebellion is guaranteed rather than just possible.

So think about these things as you watch the slow turn of the world. Twenty years away is not so far far away. It is not so far fetched, for instance, to consider that the US itself may split into two or three countries in the next three or four  decades based on language lines (history shows this event is an extremely common fate, so thank our politicians for stacking the odds in its favor) and in response to the population's distaste for the super-encroachment of federal powers into their lives where meddling is not due. Compound this with a war brought to American shors, or recognition that Washington leadership  no longer represents the population's interests in its acts, or some other such now "implausible" (it always is until it happens, such as the mortgage crisis) set of events. That was the cause for the break from England in the first place — taxation without representation, a governing of a people whose welfare or interests seem divorced from leadership actions. So think carefully about these things as we bobble from one extreme to the next.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiIL-w_jD8o

As to the early Aztec, Mayan and early Egyptian Empires,  due to a lack of records we really don't know enough to make them the top priority empires I encourage people to study. The Akkadian and Sumerian empires, however, I would include on the short list of Chinese, Roman and Byzantium empires to particularly study in order to "learn from history" as a lot of material survives from these civilizations.

I also usually recommend the biographies of Plutarch and the Greek histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. I like the Greek histories much better than the Records of the Historian, a Chinese history, and the framers of America's founding documents studied the Greek histories in order to design a Constitution and Bill of Rights that might last.

Best of all, I usually recommend to people that they read the Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldun. This Arab history is pathbreaking with its ideas on the philosophy of history, sociology, and the transformation of societies, power and economics. Much in it reminds me of Chinese Taoist works with their ideas on transformation, but this is an Arab creation and few people read Arabian writings (Ibn Khaldun was from Tunisia).  I believe in reading the best of the best, and this is one of the best historical works out there.

Other notable Arab historians include Ibn Abd-el-Hakem (History of the Conquest of Egypt and North Africa and Spain) whose works were similar in style to Herodotus, and Ali al-Masudi who was actually known as the "Herodotus of the Arabs." Other notable histoprians include Hamdani and Al-Jahiz.

You see, although I write a lot about Chinese and Indian cultivation and cultures, I have no particular inherent bias to Chinese or Indian works, and really wish we had more original works by ancient Indian and Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian authors, as these represented immense kingdoms. You learn much about  human behavior and governing by studying histories of empries and man's development of methods for leading great masses of people, which is why I advise people to study history. I simply focus on Chinese and Indian cultivation because these civilizations have left us the most records on what to do and what will happen. The root of it all for the WORLD is actually India, not China.

On a side note, I really wish someone would take Greek and Roman classics and turn them into cartoons as Chih Tsai Chung did for Chinese works, as it's a project I've long hoped to do. I can write the books but cannot make the cartoons — the beauty or attraction to people is all in the cartoons.

For a short synopsis of the Muqaddimah, which I am particularly recommedning today, you can find more at 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah.

You can actually find it here:

http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ik/Muqaddimah/Int_Mat_Bk_One.htm

My short list of history books from different cultures includes, in no particular order:

The History of the Peloponnessian War 
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans 
Muqaddimah - Ibn Khaldun
Records of the Grand Historian - Sima Qian (Ssu Ma Chien)

Modern Authors you Might Enjoy:

History Begins at Sumer
The Conquest of Mexico, The Conquest of Peru - Prescott
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy - Burckhardt

Liao Fan's Four Lessons, which have been copycatted dozens of times throughout the centuries (attesting to its great influence), accurately captures the real principles of how to change your fortune and destiny that the New Age Attraction magic crowd has no clue about.

Now it's available on video — for FREE:

http://www.amitabha-gallery.org/Liaofan1.htm  (I like the introduction to Liao Fan, and you can see that he was, indeed, like Benjamin Franklin in his desire to study everything. True cultivation people are like that.)

http://www.amitabha-gallery.org/Liaofan2.htm

These were suggested to me in an email from James Chagula who found them on this page:

http://www.amitabha-gallery.org/movies.htm

Lao Tzu's Treatise on the Response of the Tao is a related work you might read.

In The Story of Chinese Zen, and Basic Buddhism, Master Nan corrects many of the strange academic notions about Zen prevalent today. You can also find such insights in Working Towards Enlightenment and To Realize Enlightenment. You can find printed copies of these books on the interent now and then.

The idea I hate the most, aside from the fact that Zen is some sort of flippant mind game or clash of witty remarks, is that Zen is some sort of intellectual mental thought realization — so many writers and academics miss the  point entirely that the great Zen masters were cultivating samadhi dhyana along the way to enlightenment and achieved high states of attendant gong-fu, as just mentioned, but ignored them or wrote about them in only a few short lines.  It was considered a great breach of Buddhist discipline to become attached to  body gong-fu or to demonstrate superpowers, so masters only demonstrated it once or twice (if at all) before they were ready to die.  The higher their stage, the more closely they held to the rules of discipline in this regard.  For instance, if you constantly demonstrated superpowers, people would mistake this for the path, FOR SURE. As a result, academics miss the cultivation picture entirely. You can see this idea corrected in Working Towards Enlightenment and To Realize Enlightenment, but you will hardly find a single writer on Zen or Buddhism today who references any of these books that correct the mistaken notions.

It always makes me laugh to open up the bibliography of the popular spiritual / cultivation books today and to see what other books were referenced in the bibliography in the back, and you will almost always see the real cultivation books missing. Just nonsense books referencing other nonsense books that lack any real cultivation content. But of course, nonsense is what sells — cultivation involves work and that's just too hard, and the target too lofty. It's what you're supposed to be after when you decide to go to the Church, temple or mosque every week, but ceremonial attendance is a lot harder than trying to transform yourself, isn't it? So who wants to do that, and which set of religious functionaries would dare risk their income flows expouding the true way that hardly attracts anyone?

Go ahead and start flipping through bibliographies to see for yourself who cites whom, and then step back to ponder why. I have previously mentioned several really great Christian cultivation books that recount the gong-fu of Christian monks who cultivated very well, and the same for Jewish kaballah, and you will not find such GOOD books cited anywhere. The establishment ignores these, but these are the saints of those traditions. Why is it that this type of book, of the real cultivation exploits of the adherents in their own tradition, ignored (and it's not because their stories and gong-fu results match the path results of adherents in other traditions because people don't even think that hard)?  I'm tired of writing about it — you figure it out yourself this time. I've told you the principle over and over again. 

Back to the Zen way to cultivate. As to Zen, the Diamond Sutra of Buddhism opens with Subhuti asking Buddha how to achieve enlightenment. The passage is usually translated incorrectly because the translators don't know the Zen method themselves, but in a loose translation it has Buddha saying that that very moment anyone wants the Tao it's already there (THIS moment is IT!)– the true mind is already calm, open, clean, it's there. (Why? Because we are always using this clean omnipresent perception, we are always in it but just misuse it. You are using it this very instant but don't realize it.) Subhuti responds that he understands this, but ordinary people do not, so please Buddha do speak more. And then the Buddha goes into a long lecture on cultivation and performing merit to get the Tao because people don't understand the quick Zen way of directly achieving the Tao in one moment, this very moment. That's the Zen way of no method, no effort.

In the Surangama sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha also talks about the quick Zen way to realization, but then also talks about cultivating samadhi and all sorts of other topics. You have to search for the quote to find that he talks about how to directly cultivate the true mind to reveal it, to see it, to perceive it, to attain self-realization and see the Tao, gain the Tao, beome enlightened. Then he says the next best way is to cultivate samadhi as a stepping stone. In the Complete Enlightenment Sutra, he also talks about the quick Zen way, but then talks about other topics in case people won't get it either.

Shakyamuni Buddha always has a back-up plan. When you read the sutras carefully, he always mentions this quick way, and then spends reams and reams of words describing other slower, less advanced ways, too, such as cultivating samadhi, because the high way is only for those with great prajna wisdom who already understand what a non-clinging mind is. But most people need methods because their wisdom isn't high enough, their mind isn't clear or open enough already so they think they need a method. Hence the Yoga schools purposefully set out to cultivate samadhi and gong-fu, but with the Zen way you pass through samadhi and end up cultivating gong-fu naturally on the way to enlightenment but without those being the target. It is scenery you pass through rather than the  target. See the difference?

So what is the Zen way to enlightenment? Here it is in a nutshell, and it's so simple that no one ever believes it so no one practices it because it's so simple. That's why they create all these other methods for themselves and drop into them, becoming bound. Nevertheless, if you practice according to this path constantly, continually, learning how to do it every moment (which is why you sit down and take time to meditate, so nothing distracts you as you try to learn this habit of mindfulness which eventually becomes no habit at all since the effort disappears), you can reach enlightenment quickly. What is it? Let go. Let go of the mind that thinks, let go of the mind, let go of thoughts, let clinging drop away. Let go of whatever arises in the mind. If you truly LET GO then you immediately break through the five skandhas without any time requirement or obstructions, and there's no need for tantra or effort. That moment is it. It is always there, so just let go. THAT is cultivating clear awareness, clear perception. With one moment of no thought, you immediately are free of all five skandhas.

I'll repeat: with one moment of letting go, you are immediately free and clear of all five skandhas.

That's all you have to do.

Notice there is no emphasis on tantra, or this or that or empowerments or initiations or lengthy definitions or spinning or memorizations or worship or cremonies or anything like that. Yes you can cultivate samadhi so that you can change your body quickly to help you accomplish this better, deeper, for longer period of time, more frequently. I recommend a Hinayana foundation for practice in today's world. But if you just make this heroic effort in cultivating mindfulness (of letting go) all the time, then you'll get all the gong-fu as well. But what arises in your mind-perception-awareness-knowing, you let go of. You don't cling to it at all. Just practice that in all times and places, and in time the whole mental realm will become one great realm of crystal clarity. The target is to be in a state of clear awareness of what arises at all times. Things will always arise - you cannot for instance destroy the rain, or prevent it or get rid of it. All those methods are wrong. But you can be clear about it without clinging, without pressure, without annoyance. It's just a dream.

Even in cultivating physical and mental gong-fu, you must  let go. That's the problem with tantra — no one lets go because tantra, by the very definition of the fact that it's tantra, involves force or clinging, so who succeeds? "Letting go" means "emptiness" — it does not mean a blank mind, but a clear mind that sees all thoughts and things that arise, but does not cling. It doesn't push them away, push them aside or grab onto them.

So after this big long blog post on tantra, now I wipe that away to show you how easy it is to just cultivate the Zen way and pass or even jump over countless gong-fu states and purify the five skandhas without effort, but as my Teacher says, no one ever believes in such simplicity, such non-artificiality. No one ever makes the heroic effort  in practicing mindfullness to accomplish this because they don't believe it could be that simple. Actually, when you think about it deeply, it HAS to be that simple, that non-artifical, that immediate.

To be sure, the body and habit energies initially stand in the way of accomplishing this fully for more than a second, so those who try usually give up after a few seconds and fall into cultivation byroads instead. That's why in the past the great monasteries told people to practice, and set up schedules and situations enabling people to practice for long periods of time sitting in meditation. You need some way to break the old habit of mental clinging  and establish mindfulness until that new habit evaporates into true absence of method. But that's not the point.  The point is, don't think cultivation involves anything fundamentally complicated. 

This is it, this is the way to the Tao. Empty, free, open, non-artificial. If you want to change the body quicker to help in this, you can cultivate anapana. If you think you need to spin chi channels or chakras or need to do something, then for those with that sort of mentality you can practice a yogic tantra as I revealed. Which one do you want?

There are dozens and dozens of methods. I have hundreds, even thousands of methods. Don't say this one or that one is superior because the one that works quickly and effectively and virtuously for you is great, just don't waste time. It's hard to get the dharma, you may not have it next time. You may not have it for the next several times, and THEN think of all the time wasted … but we're saying "wasted " assuming you even get in touch with it again, and who can say that with the way things are going? Don't THINK the way you selected is the best either just because you like it or selected it, as that's like being born born into a religion and absorbing all the ideas that it's the right one without questioning it or investigating other cultiviation schools and techniques. Silly…or I should say "ignorant."

Don't be confused about cultivation. The end target is the same. The highest way is the Zen way just revealed, but so few have the wisdom to really let go and apply it. So they usually end up cultivating samadhi as a stepping stone or foundation, but in the end they have to turn to the Zen way anyway. ALWAYS. After all the gong-fu is achieved via the route of tantra, yoga, Taoism, Sufism, Kaballah, Shintoism, Sikkhism, Saivism  or whatever, you have to let go and cultivate an empty mind of letting go. Maybe I should call it relaxed mind because thoughts still arise and you know them, but don't attach, and that's the meaning of empty mind - it doesn't mean speck free of thoughts even though that often happens as a mental state. So it's always THAT METHOD in the end. But now you know.

If you practice Confucian cessation-contemplation, in time you will achieve empty mind - but no one practices this today. If you just match your thought with your breath, your central channel will open automatically and you don't need any secret, strange tantras