ALREADY THERE

   We should try to be unceasing in learning to be undistracted and mindful of what the mind seems to be doing.   Different kinds and varieties of thoughts and ambitions and notions are all fabrications of mentality based on previous impressions and conditioning; these are habitual arisings in mind and as long as they continue we will not be able to recognize or sustain the nonconceptual state free of distractions. Simply recognizing the gap between two thoughts, the innate natural state of pure consciousness is present.   This presence is what we really are, our true identity.  To stand free of fixating on mechanical thought processes is to train in the non-fabricated state of clear awareness.   There is no need to try to create a meditation state; the pure and perfect state is already available, already there as the background of all the different types of conceptual structures. Looking into the gap of non-conceptual identity it will be realized that what is looking is the looked for.  The subject is looking for itself but cannot find itself if it is looking for itself as an object.   Subject must recognize itself as subject, and this training must be kept up until realization of true identity occurs.

   The efficient way to proceed in learning to stay present in real identity is first to do a little introspection.  Introspection is analysis of the factors, qualities, characteristics, and conditions of the inner situation of feelings, reactions, and mind processes; introspection is inspection of the inner, while introversion of attention is toward the deepest core within, instead of extroverted attention to the outer world.    Introversion is the penetration, layer by layer, into the deepest Self and deepest reality, a movement of consciousness away from its usual surface functions, away from its circumference toward its pure and essential center.  Introspection involves an inner inspection and investigation into surface qualities, personality, and the mental factors that create ego and the dissipated mind. The most that can be accomplished through introspection is to uncover hidden hindrances in the mental condition so to make it possible to apply remedies or antidotes that may make for more ease in living through the dissolution of hindering habits and delusions.  Introversion, however, goes much deeper and is able to bypass all the fields and layers of introspection; introversion drives directly through to the core of Being.   While introspection is related to objective Becoming, introversion pertains to subjective Being.   Both of these processes support one another and are the bases upon which an integrated wisdom functions, because the relative and absolute, the phenomena and the noumenon are not two. Introspection and introversion are the two non-separate aspects of the one nondual functionality.