Beyond: Ineffable Peace

I have come to a place where I not only see thoughts, but I see the entire mind. It has come to the point where I see that nothing is really happening in the way that we normally speak of as things 'happening'. Stillness and silence are ways of communicating that the sense of personhood has become transparent in favor of what I will now describe.

I neither am nor am not. There is no Self, no ‘me’ as such. I am existence without a ‘me’. There is neither one, nor two, nor none, nor any other idea. Beyond words. Ineffable. Being beyond words is not a handicap or loss, it is a soft bliss of not knowing. Pure not knowing, without a ‘me’. There is nothing to know in that which is full and whose fullness dissolves all arising of questions. There is no loss. And there is no gain. No opposites apply to where I have come to. Pure existence alone is. There is no one to say I am that existence. One might say that pure existence says I am existence. But not even that.

I am unlocalized. I am neither infinite nor finite, nor any measurement of any kind. I am unbound and free as to shape and size. Ineffable. There are neither ‘places’ nor a ‘me’ to be any place.

I am neither in a body nor not in a body. The skin of this body no longer contains any sense of an entity. I must ‘think’ myself into the body; otherwise, there are no ideas about being in a body or not being in a body.

Things neither appear in me nor do not appear in me. There is no ‘me’ for anything to appear in, and there is neither an outside nor inside for anything to appear inside of or outside of. Ineffable.

As the sage Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj says, “I am neither conceivable nor perceivable”. This is my experience.

There is neither time nor not time. It doesn’t arise to be thought of. If I had to speak words, I would say there is no time. Timeless, eternal, etc, all point to ideas. One could say timeless if that meant without any idea of time at all.

There is now a still-point of pristine thought-free being where there is no sense of self but a sense of unbounded freedom which sees all but is untouched by any of it. Unspeakably intimate yet impersonal and untainted and untouched by anything. It defies explanation or description. Being everything, everywhere, yet no things or places are registered. No "me" to explain or describe. No residue of experience. No history or trail of experience. Dream-like. Always ‘here’. No other places and no other times. Just always here, for no one. It’s like here - is here. Wherever this body is or goes is ‘here’. No place. Full, but nowhere. Neither somewhere - nor nowhere.

Just Peace. Just the soft bliss of simple being, or not being. It has the tone of just repeatedly pinging itself over and over again, undulating, deepening its knowing of itself, becoming richer and deeper on its own level.

All the ideas of Oneness, I am That, I Am, etc, have become transparent because something happened to the ‘me’. It is still moving in conditioned ways, but it has thinned out to such a degree that there is no real orientation at all except conceptually. It is just as difficult to say I am not so and so, as it is to say I am so and so. I have no ideas about these things. They arise and play out spontaneously. I don’t feel connected to what plays out, good or bad. All extremes seem to have come to the center.

I have disappeared yet see from another place. This place includes all places because there are no places as such. So it sees from no place. How can I describe what a human mind cannot grasp? The remnants of the conceptual mind is in disarray, disoriented, still seeking and still trying to be included. All of this is seen. There is no desire to do anything about those movements except to continue to favor the pulsation of thought-free being.

The mental and emotional terrors associated with this revelation are understood to be movements of the conditioned mental construct which continues in the ever-deepening process of deconstruction; thinning out and becoming more and more transparent. The response to these terrors has been informed by an intelligence that has always been compassionate towards these movements. There seems to be a knowing and understanding that this undoing doesn’t have to be ‘violent’. Sages throughout the ages have spoken of ‘killing or destroying the ego’ or, alternatively, ‘allowing the ego to sink into the heart like a salt-doll dissolves when placed into the sea’. For some reason, the latter has been what has informed how those arisings are dealt with. I don’t feel I know anything about that movement unless I conceptualize it as I have done here. In truth, I have no idea what that movement is, and this that Is, is always choosing Peace, and so, the latter seems to be chosen. I have no ideas or beliefs that meeting it with compassion is meaningful or not, because in the stillness of being, all that is ever known is That One Itself on its own level. 

Trying to ‘do’ something about any apparent happenings seems as futile as going to a mirage in the desert for a drink of water. Yet actions arise spontaneously, and it is sort of curious when things arise that do not align with this Peaceful equanimity I have been describing. What I have come to see is that this inert body has its own journey, and it seems to be futile to try to interfere with it, other than the dissolving effect remaining inward-turned seems to have.

There is no residue from actions of the body/mind. There are no stories created around seemingly negative actions as there was prior to this shift. It is only more obvious and apparent now that this is so. It is sort of known in retrospect.

And although I speak of qualities like Peace, and the soft-bliss of simple being, thought-free being can be experienced as without any qualities whatsoever, which creates an angst in the mind, which again, is dissolved by favoring the pulsation of stillness and silence. In this sense, Peace is known to be eternal if one wishes to use the concept of time. But the deeper truth is that there is no past, present or future for Peace – there is just Peace in all times and places, despite there being no times and places as such. Ineffable.   

This is a summary of my current spiritual condition.  

—JM Flordia, USA