SIX ESSENCE VERSES
Abandon attachment to rising thoughts.
They will then subside back into their source.
Recognize the silent gap between thoughts.
Sustain attentive presence in the gap.
Flexible in unobstructed freedom,
Relax into wholetime lucid gnosis.
These six verses describe a fundamental practice through which a practitioner can become more attentive, more mindful, and distinguish more clearly between pure awareness and the activities of the mind. Piercing the veil of habitual obstructions that prevent the clear and lucid recognition of pure awareness is accomplished by repeatedly noticing distracted perception and learning to not forget one’s presence. Nearly everyone almost continually gets caught up in the wandering mind because attention is lax. The wandering mind will continue to go its own way until attentive presence notices the rising thoughts. When this automated mental process is noted it will stop its automated, mechanical process and the attachment to objects of desire that the rising thoughts are related to will also dissipate. Thoughts are a contraction of consciousness itself and when attention is actively present because of intention to awaken, then thoughts get absorbed back into the essence they emanated from. Thoughts are objective themselves and come from their subjective source. All objectivity, whether externally or internally perceived, has its source in subjectivity, consciousness. Between thoughts sometimes a gap can be noticed. This gap has no thought arising in it and is the background and source of all arising thought. This background is the very ground of being and becoming and everyone’s essential real identity. When it is clearly recognized then it is possible to become more and more stably present in this essential ground. Stability in this awareness entails the recognition that this fundamental ground of being is one’s true and eternal identity as well as the recognition that all objectivity is simultaneously a congealed form of consciousness energy. Consciousness is all there is and there is no thing that is not it. Understanding in this way dissolves all hindering obstructions and freedom emerges. It is not stressful to realize freedom; rather, the more one relaxes into stable recognition the more lucidity arises. This is the gnosis, the knowing.
Just by recognizing and noting the thought as it starts to arise in the mind stream, it will be liberated spontaneously. There is no need to do anything more than just note the arising thought; noting the thought, it is simultaneously dismissed because attention is not “caught” by the thought because attention is focused on the gap between thoughts. The primary interest and intention in purposeful direction of attention is toward the silent gap between thoughts, not in the “noise” of the thought stream. The gap is not like the incessant stream of thoughts that swell and billow in the mind like waves upon a stormy sea. The mind, when not being directed purposefully and not being used for determined thinking, creates a storm of distraction; this is mental diffusion, a state of hindering patterns of dissipation where there is no notice of who is caught in the thoughts, where they go to once they are replaced by other thoughts. Being carried off by lax attention within a diffused thought stream is not the path of awakening, not the path of holistic apperception. But once the silent gap is noticed, a hint of real identity is felt, and when this is repeated many times over a substantial period of time, then apperceptive knowing becomes more and more familiar, more close, more ordinary, and doubt is transcended by certainty and increasing stability in this discipline of contemplative science. The time comes when we don’t have to imagine what the basic real identity is, or what holistic apperception might be like, because the recognition, the understanding is that it has always been naturally present in presence. When we drop out of presence our consciousness gets obscured, diffused, distracted, and dissipated, yet our natural essential identity is always there.
