Failing on the Spiritual Path

Adyanshanti said that the path to enlightenment is about failure. You fail every single practice until you just give up.

Because every practice is just a tool. It's just a construction. You're creating a temporary ground, a temporary construction in order to deconstruct the experience, but then to deconstruct this side of the experience, whatever they, you need to create a ground this side, right?

So with Vipassana, you're fabricating a “vipassanizer”, an observer.

That's the secret of the entire path.

You just fabricate a secret to see at the end that the secret isn't even there. But you have to take graduate steps for this realization to land properly.

Another way to put it is that any spiritual/awakening practice is about deconstructing the body, the different sensory experiences, size, sound, space, smell, thoughts, whatever… You deconstruct sensations down to the level where you can realize everything's a construction.

So for the self-inquiry question of why do I need to fabricate an inquirer. It’s the same mechanism. You fabricate an inquirer to inquire and come to the realization that even the inquirer is a mental construct.

To realize everything is a mental construction is to have a cessation experience.

You’ll see that you're not actually deconstructing reality as much as you're recognizing every sensation, everything, even perception itself is constructed.

You enter a cessation by deconstructing your sensory, your field of experience to a point where you blink out of existence.

But right before you enter a cessation, you'll see that everything's breaking down. You know every sensation is breaking down through different sensor doors, and then you break down everything so much that everything just disappears. Even consciousness is just a fabrication, that can be taken apart.

And then you see the sequence of different sensors coming back online. First awareness comes back online. Oh, that you see that awareness is just particle-by-particle sensation.

And then after you come abiding that awareness for a little bit, you see that, oh, size is coming back particle-by-particle, then sound is coming back particle-by-particle, the body's coming back particle-by-particle.

It's all being constructed from moment to moment.

So the process of cessation is not just going to the unconsciousness, it's actually seeing how everything can be broken down, particle by particle, and then entering the state of non-existence and then watching how existence re-emerges by watching how you come back online and how every sensation just is constructed moment to moment.

Every single moment is a mini sensation and meaning reemergence from the cessation. That's why Adyashanti describes this state as dying into the ordinary or moment to moment.

So actually every single moment in your experience, you're undergoing the simultaneous between going into a cessation, coming back out, it's happening simultaneously. The contraction expansion is happening simultaneously. The Big Bang and the Big Crunch are happening simultaneously. All the time.

That's when you release the duality between life and death. And that's why the Buddha said the Realization transcends the duality between existence and non-existence, which is the same thing as saying transcended duality between emptiness and form, between deconstructing and construction.

And we, I think we talked about last week, how the sutra deals with the deconstructing part. You deconstruct everything into emptiness. And then the Vajrayana style where you have a whole tradition dedicated to the reconstructing part.

And then you have the Dzogchen where you combine both the expansion and the contraction happening simultaneously. And then you just kind of move around the world doing parkour with the mind experiencing both expansion, contraction, both construction and deconstructing happening simultaneously.

And it sounds complicated, but that's just the way it is. Things are always popping in and out of existence simultaneously.