Using the skeleton key to unlock the treasure of all experience
Knowing this one thing makes it possible to unlock the hidden potential in all and any experience. This includes dual and nondual experience, all spiritual practice and techniques, and all psychological/ ego experience. This is the skeleton key to the treasures of reality.
And why not? This is the very bedrock of all individual experience, so it’s operational in all your experience.
Understanding the Skeleton Key, There is no experience without YOU
Why is there experience? Couldn’t all of existence exist without self-reflection and direct knowing?
There is no experience without a perceiver. Thus:
“I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known, so I created the world.” Wikipedia
Creation is a manifestation, which includes the elements needed for perception and experience.
The Skeleton Key to All of Existence
Here it is, the image of all of existence you’ve been waiting for! The skeleton key.
Underlying all of manifestation, the ground and birthing place of existence is the Absolute, represented by the black circle (it lies beneath the white layer at every point and in-between).
As we approach the Absolute, we experience various manifestations of space and emptiness. Turn your head to the right and look – interpenetrated with what you perceive is this ground of the Absolute. Which is possible to perceive, but your eye can’t see it.
The white background represents the cosmic manifest light of creation, which is not the sun’s light – photons and such. This light is pure clarity, pure transparency, so pure at its source it barely exists at all. Part of its nature is non-separable awareness and dynamism.
Within creation, experience needs three active elements.
3 Necessities for Experience
Using the skeleton key perspective, we identify three necessities for any and all experience:
- Point of perception: individual consciousness, soul, me, I, mind, etc. Awareness is the underlying fundamental element.
- A form: the other, anything that can or may arise in awareness and consciousness, including the vast field itself.
- The logos: change, dynamism between and including the perceived and perceiver. If nothing changes, there is no contrast, thus no perception. Think of it this way – atoms vibrate, constantly changing. Reduce that to the nth degree – now we’re talking!
Without these three elements, there is no experience.
Hidden in plain sight
Or perhaps – hidden behind plain sight.
If the world was created to be known at its deepest and most subtle levels, then how can this most basic piece of knowledge support knowing and perceiving this?
Two pesky flies in the ointment
Oh, there are many, many things in the way, but here are two basic ones:
- Vision dominates our “knowing.” Vision has conditioned us in many ways, and these two get in the way.
- We look to understand
- We look forward
- We look out ‘there,” even when we look inward. Give it a go – reflect on your current inner experience. Aren’t “you” somewhere looking at your experience? In your head with attention (looking) directed at your heart or something else?
The three necessities are always there
Aren’t they? You, the perceiver, is observing something, and there is some dynamic connection – otherwise, there would be no wavelength to register via our senses.
But, here you are – perceiving, experiencing, and underlying the thinking, reacting, being, whatever – are the three necessities for experience.
So, how do we use the skeleton key to unlock the doors to perception?
Stop Looking, Start Perceiving & Exit 3D-VR – HA!!
Okay, first of all, in the Diamond Approach, we don’t reject our experience regardless of what’s happening – and for good reason. Here is a perfect example of why:
Everything we’re looking for is right in front of our eyes, we’re just not perceiving it. Alright! We don’t have to go anywhere. We just need to figure out how to perceive. Uh oh, sounds like doing and we know that doing won’t help.
Mirror-like Awareness
There’s a reason it’s referred to as mirror-like. What you perceive is there, but not there – you are not an object in the mirror, but you appear in the reflected field.
Buddhists call this condition “mirror-like awareness”: The self is completely transparent to itself, can see and be itself fully, just like looking in a mirror. We then see things just as they are, without opinions, without projections, without ideas, without distortions: completely objective. When we realize mirror-like awareness, that transparency, clarity and complete colorlessness is seen at the same time to be complete perfection. This awareness makes us clear about ourselves, all the way to our true nature. So we are clearly and transparently cognizant of our condition at the moment. In the work of self-realization, the self regains its light, which is perception, which is awareness, which is clarity, which is understanding, which is consciousness. The inner journey is a matter of increased awareness, increased consciousness, increased clarity, increased perception, increased understanding, and increased knowledge, which inherently embody the spiritual qualities of love, compassion and so on, and the various faculties of functioning. Self-realization is the realization of the potential of the self with full awareness and appreciation. – The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization
With the skeleton key insight, we understand that we are of awareness and are awareness. Not the thinking kind, not the paying attention to kind. We are the awareness behind the awareness. If the mirror does not exist as a physical object, but the appearance and recognition of forms is possible without a reflective surface – then what?
We sit, stand, walk, talk, do whatever, and we perceive without looking – while our eyes continue to see (same for our other senses). We sense into what is within the mirror – this is not within like inside a room, or inside your head, or inside your thinking. This is the inner of the inner, the underlying all-encompassing clear light that isn’t light like we think of it.
We sense awareness – not the object of awareness, not the activity of awareness, not the results of awareness. We are the awareness “awaring” itself. We let go of goals and the need to figure it out and remember it for our journal. All of that will happen without the need of “us” being involved.
We are simply aware of taking a step back (so to speak) from our awareness to be aware of awareness. When we become aware of this, we take another step back, and then another.
And we relax, we let go of needing to experience, of needing to know our experience. We don’t look at, out, or in – we perceive the gist of it. We are the peripheral awareness of existence. Everywhere.