OUR INTRINSIC NATURE

Dear Friends,

I'd like to share my definition, first, of conventional designation. A conventional designation is a name placed on anything that can be conceived of, rationalized, materialized or that changes according to view. Basically, everything is a conventional designation except source. What we are doing is relating to life in terms of a view or an idea of life that we have adopted. Conventional designations as my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh has said, "Makes life easier." Sometimes it is necessary in our day to day experience to use words like "I" and "Mine" and "Theirs" and "Ours" but without the understanding of your intrinsic nature, you'll be deceived. Suffering, even the joys accompanying suffering are illusory, they come from the concept of "I" and "Mine." This is what I call the "Making of Mine."

In terms of survivors of abuse, and my own recovery, I have had to look at three root conventional designations that I have been holding as intrinsically wrong: Sex with a stepfather (parental figure), Sex with a male, sex as a child (rape). With the view that these three occurrences are intrinsically wrong, I would be held in the idea that a part of me, a part of my life was wrong. And that notion of wrong creates a pattern, a conditioned way of living and relating to life and the world. I can be trapped in what is commonly known as "Victimhood."

I don't say "victimhood" lightly. It's not the sort of victimhood that victims, or those caught in the view of self and other, call each other, it's the victimhood that we are forming within ourselves. What I have needed to do and what made all the difference in my recovery was this release of the idea that there is or was something intrinsically wrong with me, with an experience I had. And looking back on the experience I see it in a new way. An experience can never be the same, cannot really be stuck in time. It may feel that way, and it may appear that way, and one may suffer in the same way, with the same sort of pain and hurt, but it is not the same. How can it be the same? The experience can only be experienced truthfully as it is happening.

Whatever the mind does with what is experienced, whatever the body does with the experience, is removed from what the experience actually is or was. Now it becomes a perception, it is perceived, it is conventionalized, it is conceived of by the mind--and from that perception, without awareness, grows habit-energy. Habit energy is an unconsciousness manifestation of consciousness.

At the very base of who we think we are, is this notion of "self" and "other." At deaths door, on deaths table, everyone is faced with this notion of self. And those who succeed in vanquishing the notion of self will not return. Those who cannot release the notion of self will return, or will continue to live, in forgetfulness.

"Self" is defined as something other than what everyone else is. Although we have our separateness, there is a unique way in which all of us come-to-be, we are a unique flowering of consciousness as source, and it is only through togetherness that we exist.

"Wrong" is a conventional designation. It's an idea that we have adopted within ourselves, based on a certain accepted belief in society (or not accepted depending upon the source of the idea). If I continually hold onto the view of the three things about my experience with abuse that I felt to be wrong (emphasis on the "view" of it being "wrong") I subject myself to suffering, and the habit energy of "mine" never ceasing in the samsaric realm of birth, death, and the subsequent joys and pains associated with craving and desire.

Look into a conventional designation in terms of Kharma, or results of actions. Behind every action is a thought, behind every thought is volition, will and a view, behind every view is a habitualized relationship to an "I," a self, an entity, a soul existing separately from the source, that continually manifests experiences through the view of self and other, inside and outside, and all polarized extremes (i.e. Christian, non-Christian; Buddhist, non-Buddhist; friend, enemy).

What is not a conventional designation is that place which everything comes from, that thing which isn't a thing at all that unites us all, and is our intrinsic nature (in togetherness). Everything is consciousness as source, experiencing itself and nothing more. What we have been experiencing as life, really, is a delusion, an illusory concept of reality. Life cannot be contained within a concept, within a notion, within a thought, within an idea, an ideology (even the ones I am proposing now); life is far vaster than anything that can be materialized completely in one form, and yet it is all there in everything we can come in contact with.

What we have, and what we can develop is the expansiveness of our being. Having seen the darkness, the suffering, the joys in suffering--the delusion, the craving, and the stickiness to forms we release that which binds us to a material existence, one that in its very nature is impermanent. What unites us is intrinsically alive in its vastness, continually manifesting itself throughout the world of phenomena, the world we experience through our senses, our thoughts and our convictions. Life is too rare to be confined within a permanent idea of self, soul and other.

©2008 Brian Kimmel.