Introduction

This text is best treated like a treasure-chest filled with diamonds, as opposed to, say, a treasure map. Conventionally a text operates through the sense of a sequential narrative in which something, some desired information, is progressively disclosed. Here, however, there is no sense of ‘going anywhere’ or of ‘getting anything’. The text communicates directly, immediately – gesturing again and again to what is present, what is the fact, here, now, always and everywhere. Moreover, ‘the text’ is in actual fact nothing but a bunch of small texts that are by-and-large unrelated to one another. So, like examining the contents of a treasure-chest, there is no real ‘order’ here: please just dip into whichever passage takes your fancy, as and when.

This dislocated, disassociated textual form is designed precisely with the disabling of ‘progression’, ‘movement’ and the senses of ‘being taught’, and ‘being in good hands’, in mind. For, the sense that reality is divisible (spatially – as, for example, ‘teacher’ and ‘taught’, ‘writer’ and ‘reader’ – and temporally – as ‘the beginning of the narrative’ and ‘the end of the narrative’, ‘prior to being in the know’ and ‘being in the know’) is precisely the illusion this text seeks to expose and disperse.

Nevertheless, the sense that something, a thing of form and therefore of distinction and separation, is being ‘grasped’ in one of the texts, or ‘pieced together’, ‘formed’ amongst a number of the texts, may occasionally emerge. The diamonds, strangely cold to the touch, may seem to be slotting together to form some kind of mosaic. But, without fail, the mosaic will depict nothing, add up to nothing. You see, these ‘diamonds’ are in fact nothing but shards of ice, melting in your fingers and vanishing. This text, then, is not so much a treasure-chest as a bucket of water! Not such an appealing image!

So what is this bucket of water, this text, here for? In fact, this is the wrong question, and a symptom of the mind’s neurotic tendency to suspect ulterior motive. This text is here; that is the fact. Just as life is here, life is – simply because it is! This book is just here, in these hands holding it.

So what will happen in the reading of this text? There are two possibilities. In both cases these little black squiggles will be translated into sounds, images and feelings called ‘thoughts’. One possibility is that this thinking will not only appear but will linger as solid, continuous formations that are definite, definable somethings, and are therefore separate, abstract and limited. This kind of thought-formation, thought-stagnation, is known as ‘ideation’, ‘ideology’, ‘belief’ and ‘doctrine’. Because it is formal and therefore limited and fallible, it is continuously threatened by doubt and death. Being formation, it is also separate and insular and therefore only itself: it cannot be the expression of anything else beyond itself. It cannot, say, express something called ‘truth’. This goes for all ideology and doctrine: Christian, communist, materialist, whatever.

The other possibility is altogether different. As these little black squiggles are being translated into sounds, images and feelings, what may very well happen, periodically if not perennially, is that the sense of something beyond the thoughts, or rather in the thoughts and in everything else as well, will emerge. The thoughts will give way to this sense, this omnipresence. To dramatise this a little, it may feel like the pages being held and observed are bursting into flames and burning a hole in themselves, disintegrating in these fingers so that nothing is left. And the fire is not only in the black squiggles and the thoughts they conjure, and in the fabric of the book, the paper and cardboard, but it has caught onto the hands holding the book, the body sat here before it, and has filled and encompassed the entire landscape around it, leaving only one fire, oneness.

And what kind of little black squiggles is this collection of squiggles made up of? Signature words include ‘oneness’, ‘unicity’, ‘nonduality’, ‘presence’, ‘consciousness’, ‘awareness’, ‘being’, ‘beingness’, ‘nothingness’, ‘emptiness’, ‘what is’, ‘is’, ‘isness’, ‘this’ and ‘thisness’. All of these words signify the same something, or rather no-thing, that this text is wholly and solely engaged in attempting to point out. The problem with language is that it pulls irrepressibly towards ‘the something’. It shapes; it generates the sense of defined (perhaps multifaceted, yet) limited form, that which occupies a certain place and period in space and time. And what this text tries to express is that which is beyond form, is in all form, is all form, and is therefore formless, nothing. It is the ‘presence’, ‘consciousness’, ‘thisness’ (pick any word from the list above!) in, to, and out of which all form appears.

Because of this communicative obstruction (the propensity of language to form) one will find that a disproportionately large quantity of this text (compared with other texts) consists of what is called ‘deictic’ language, language which points. This compares with descriptive and explanatory language, which functions through the solicitation of the sensual (for example, the descriptive ‘green’ operates by provoking the visual, the appearance of a colour) and therefore pulls towards the limited and the abstract, ‘the thing’. Deictic language, on the other hand, can largely avoid this undesirable (in terms of communicating what this text seeks to communicate) ‘imagination’. Rather than abstract, it gestures. The two purest and most helpful words for this are ‘is’ and ‘this’. Nevertheless, it should be noted that even these terms convey, insidiously, the formal. ‘Is’, for example, defines, forms, specifies by generating the sense of a something, that is not a nothing, not an ‘isn’t’. With the word ‘this’, the problem is not so much the conveyance of solidity, as ‘this’ can be ‘this nothingness’ as much as ‘this something’ or ‘these somethings’ (though there is undoubtedly a tendency for the conditioned mind to assume that ‘this’ refers to ‘a something’). The principal problem is that the very nature of gesturing conveys the schismatic of the formative: if there is pointing, something specific is being pointed to, and the senses of ‘pointer’ and ‘pointing’ are generated and excluded from this.

Having said all of this, imaginative, descriptive and also logical, explanatory modes of writing do have their own mechanisms for conveying the nondual; namely, as dramatized above with the fire image, through cancelling themselves out. This basically involves negating any sense of specificity that may be temporarily generated, rather like jotting something down and then rubbing it out, or proceeding to jot down so many other things that the page ends up saturated with black ink or graphite and nothing is said. Examples of this include, ‘This "whatever it is" that is being expressed here can express itself as a sort of syrupy feeling, but since it is in all things, it is all things, it is all other feelings too’; and ‘It is the seeing that there is only oneness…and it is also the "not seeing of this", and the thinking that there is only multiplicity and no indivisible oneness’.

That’s enough words on words. This alerting you to the kind of textual mechanisms going on here is simply one way of promoting a general awareness of ‘what is going on’ that may (or may not) at some point manifest as the clear awareness of knowing exactly what and how reality is. This present awareness is the bursting into flames…

This text came about during the six-month period immediately after this absolute present awareness had made itself irrevocably known. Scattered throughout are four distinct literary forms. There is continuous prose, both typed and spoken (through a voice-activated word processor). There is poetry, which is often born out of desire for something more visceral than the primarily deictic prose, and as such, it comprises a good deal of sensual and sensuous content (particularly since the addictiveness of rhyme and rhythm appears to me synonymous with the pleasurable compulsion of lust and intercourse). A number of emails are included for the qualities of intimacy and ordinariness they convey, as these qualities can sometimes greatly assist communication. And, finally, there is a large collection of what have been labelled ‘notices’, which were primarily born out of two impulses: desire for relief from the congestion of prose, and the idea of creating promotional notices that would advertise nondualistic discussions I, at the time, envisaged holding in Bristol. As such, they are concise, telegraphic ‘shots’ or ‘shocks’ of expression, designed to provoke interaction and immediate, present examination. The writing of all these forms was exhilarating and like quicksilver. This contrasts starkly with all ‘pre-enlightenment’ experiences of authorship, which were unfailingly leaden, knotty and forced. I hope that this thrill and fluidity can be tasted and enjoyed in your reading of this, and that the fire, already there, soon makes itself known, crackles that bit louder, burns that bit warmer, glows that bit brighter…