“Being what you cannot not be is being what is.” – Karl Renz
Something I’ve come to understand deeply is that awakening is no-thing. It is not a state that one achieves, a place one can go, or a position one can take. It’s not even a perspective, as it is prior to the arising of perspective, prior even to the arising of time. Awakening just is what it is. And while this may sound like a standard description of awakening, perhaps even a bit cliché, one of the ramifications of this recognition—because although awakening is no-thing and occupies no place, it can still be known—is that the laws that generally govern things do not apply to awakening.
Typically, when it comes to things, or objects, they are subject to various patterns and forces. One of those forces, as described in basic economic theory, is supply and demand. To be very broad, one can think of a certain amount of an object being available as supply, and the amount of desire or interest in acquiring that object as demand. The relationship between these two, with price being part of a trinary aspect of the model, is one way of describing how and why things are acquired, and what their value is.
Now, when we become seekers and enter onto the spiritual path, we can’t help but conceive of awakening as a thing. It’s just how the mind operates, how we’re conditioned. And the assumption seems to make perfect sense. After all, everything that we’ve ever gone after before, and achieved, was in the realm of things. Even the subtlest states of consciousness or emotional highs are types of experience, meaning that we experienced them, not the other way around. Thus, even the most subtle experiences are objects of consciousness, are things.
But as I said earlier, awakening is the recognition of no-thingness, what the American mystic Franklin Merrell-Wolff spoke of as, “Consciousness without-an-object.” And as a result it is not subject to the same patterns that operate in thing-ville. In particular there is no supply of awakening, and so there is absolutely no lack of it. There is also no abundance of awakening. If it were abundant then it could also become scarce. Being completely beyond both scarcity and abundance, awakening is.
And since there is no supply of awakening, then our demand for it is unfounded. Our sense that we can “get” it is mistaken. I’ve often had a subtle sense, in my own practice, of jealously or competitiveness with other practitioners. In some ways I secretly wanted to be the one who was more awake, or who could awaken more quickly. What has happened though, more and more, is that I see that awakening is the birthright of all human beings, is essentially what we are. Back on the personal side of the street, it’s totally acceptable to speak of deepening that recognition, but that deepening isn’t something gained, rather it’s the dropping of the mistaken idea that our Original Nature is a thing that we can acquire at all.
