OVERCOMINGS AND SUCCUMBINGS
Most of what have been called prerequisite or preliminary practices refer to specific traditions of yogic or meditational practices, and the different goals or levels of accomplishment aspired to. For just about everybody, the trials and tribulations, overcomings and succumbings, will be quite enough prerequisite preparation, arriving at a point where the “profound and terrible” questions can be asked. In order to answer such biting questions, much study and thoughtful reflection must be done, and this too is a prerequisite preliminary to contemplative practice. Somewhat farther along we find that there are no preliminary practices or studies or analysis that will reveal to us our primal, original, pure, and perfect identity as pure consciousness; we are already where we have been trying to get to.
There is no method for entering into what we already are, for arriving at the place where we always are located anyway. From the standpoint of our ultimate reality there are no things to do or accomplish or attain, and it is conceptual error to presume otherwise. Thinking this way is the very reason we stay caught up in a whirligig conditionality, absorbed in continual expectations, fear, hope, and anxiety. When we practice remembering the truth of the world process and the truth of our real and universal identity, we find we have never left our nondual essential nature. Expecting future results from practicing contemplative science is valid in a relative respect but invalid in a noumenal absolute respect. Relatively, it can be posited that we re-cognize our true being in the future time. And this is valid only if it is admitted that re-cognition has not happened as yet. In the context of noumenal realization, we are already that which we seek to cognize, so the re-cognition of this truth is going to be in the present moment, not in future time. It is the realization of unity-consciousness. So in our contemplative practice we should have no fear or anxiety over continuing to wander through our states of delusion and non-rememberance, as the recognition of these states and their processes are the very modus operandi required to be used for learning to relax in the lucid and pure presence of consciousness that we always have been.
