The Road To Becoming A Warrior Part 16

In writing this I was asked a question that I want to answer because it is really the point of what it means to be a warrior. The question was about why I advocate logic when the traditional masters all recommend doing away with thought/ego altogether. The question was:

“If the I you refer to here is the perceiver then how can perception be knowing and what does logic have to do with truth if it too is a perception that is believed in?”

As you may by now know I disagree with that premise. We can use all our available information and states of mind because perception is just metaphor for reality. In other words there is an underlying reality that perception works from and correlates with.

We already live in the subconscious a full 90 percent of the time if not more. The idea of enlightenment is to be aware in that subconscious and in the consciousness.

Most people live that 90 percent or more on automatic. They are asleep. But if you have awareness while living in the subconscious you are living in the now.

It is true that different states of mind can be experienced by shutting down conscious thought. At that point you should also be hyper aware. If not you are still asleep.

But when not experimenting with the mind, you can take that living in the now to its full extent in consciousness.

This is in fact the way of Zen.

The idea then is to go beyond that, and beyond Zen and bring the two halves together: The conscious mind and the subconscious mind. If you can attain that awareness of now in all you do, meditating or going about your day, you are enlightened.

So because the subconscious is educated by the conscious, logic and critical thinking are the way to go.

This is just tweaking the subconscious because that is where you really live. Conscious thought is a tool, and the subconscious needs to be able to use it. You are its master, not its slave. You being the awake subconscious. The asleep subconscious, that is to say subconscious without awareness, is the state you want to get rid of. Not the tool that you need to educate that process.

Yes we have to train the whole through methods we all agree work to make us happier and more at peace with ourselves. Only when at peace can one wake the subconscious. Wake up the self. Wake up self realization in the true sense, not the sense of being an individual. We have to remove egotism, not ego.

Yes, you can attain enlightenment by shutting down most of your conscious thought like one does in meditation but it is not easy to maintain in the world outside meditation. Yet some masters do it. Many are not intellectuals. You don't have to be.

But I am talking about going beyond just waking up the subconscious. I'm talking about waking up the conscious subconscious. Integrating the self. Seeing things like you have never seen them before. Living like the child, and yet like the educated child. I don't mean formally or academically educated. I mean fully aware and fully logical/rational even in the subconscious.

This rationality is not thought. Thought has done its job and past. Now there is just rational awareness. When thought is called on, it is filtered through the logical mind to weed out speculation from fact and retreats.

When you get money, you spend it on the things you want. It is gone. But the thing you wanted is there. Logic is a means to an end, not the end itself.

This is why when Mooji is right when he tells us that we can forget about looking for enlightenment because it is already there. There is no journey to take. Enlightenment is just the result of making the subconscious aware of itself. You are already self aware, but as the Zen masters tell us, we have a lot of wrong thinking that prevents us from living in the self and in the now fully aware.

We only feel aware when in thought. Enlightenment is also being aware in a state of non-thought. Again, I want to make it clear that this is not “no thought.” It is a different kind of thinking. It is deliberate focus. It is will. Aware will if you like. That is what we are. We are will. But, there is a difference between fully aware will and will that is asleep and on auto pilot.

This has nothing to do with free will. Forget about free will. There is no such thing. Will is a manifestation of conditioning. It is your inner mechanism manifest. It is what is aware or asleep.

Horror of horrors. I am telling you are your conditioning. But that has been the point all along, has it not? We have been talking about ways to change your conditioning so the system that is you will be at peace. Forget about a cosmic consciousness. Forget about a soul. They are speculative ideas.

As far we know now your energy will still exist after death but not as you. It will dissipate and join other systems. There will be no more I. In that thought is the most ironically spiritual thought you can ever have. If you need a reason for existence if you are just not going to exist someday, perhaps look at the notions of Hegel. He suggested that the totality itself was tending toward a state of perfection.

If we are going to speculate on that idea then the human part in that would be very small and insignificant. But what if the Hegel is right and the totality eventually evolves in to a perfect state? You have perfection, or the god-state.

In other words, it is not that a god made us, but rather that we are making god in our own small and insignificant way. Perhaps as we live we encode the energy that we are. And perhaps then to die is just to give yourself willingly to the all. What higher sacrifice for god could there be? What bigger sacrifice for yourself?

But for those like me who don’t need a reason to live or a reason that I am going to die, I don’t care what the truth of the matter is. I just want to know what it is.

So my quest for enlightenment gave me what I wanted: inner peace. It also showed me the basic framework of reality. It showed me a connection to the all. It showed me how to use logic without being mastered by it, and how to live in the now.

Not only does the subconscious need to be woken up, it needs to be better integrated with the conscious. It needs to develop and use its best tools to help it integrate and reach peace and a wakeful state.

What is beyond that is beyond knowing and thus irrelevant. And I do not mean intellectually knowing because knowing is not intellectual. Knowing is just knowing. When you know then the intellect has already done its job and left. Intellectual knowing is parroting. You are regurgitating what others have told you without having experienced it.

If a man is racist, for instance, that hate eats at him. Were he to think logically about his hate for others he would drop his false notions because racism is illogical when one knows the facts. At that point he would be liberated from them and drop his hate. This happens all the time. When it happens the person has re-educated his subconscious and gained ground on realizing inner peace. He experiences and lives that process. He knows it because he has experienced that transformation.

Real knowledge is experience. But it is the interpretations of our experiences that are often illogical and irrational. So though what I call the logical mind you can reach the same states of peace that you can attain in other ways. And I can only conclude from my own experience that combining the methods will move the human race closer to the ideal; a compassionate, fully aware being.

How can we accomplish this by constantly only using half our capacity, half our minds? Our minds are not separated in to the conscious and the subconscious. There is no such thing as ego. That is the illusion. When the mind is fully awake the illusion disappears.