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“States” and “Degrees”
When Shimano says, “There is no east, no west, no man, no woman,” is he intimating that our relative conceptions are illusory? So-called “realization” is a recognition that no such separate thing actually exists as “enlightenment” (and, conversely, “unenlightenment”). Therefore, realization is merely the recognition and acknowledgement that there is not any (separate) thing which can be gotten, or “gained.” So, when one has clearly “realized” this, the pursuit of enlightenment—or the notion of transcending from one “state” (or condition) to another—dissipates of its own volition.
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The idea that there is any such thing as the “enlightened condition” or the “unenlightened condition” is a product of the human psyche: the nature of thought is divisive. The nature of seeing (perceiving) is inclusive. The psyche has a nonlinear aspect, as well as the linear. It is possible to perceive in an intuitive, nonlinear recognition which preempts analytical, linear thought. This perception is inclusive, in the way that your eye takes in all within its range—until you purposely focus it on a particular object. What is Ken Wilber saying about your “distance” from Absolute presence?
“You already feel this…it is the…present feeling—no matter what it is that you suppose you’re feeling! If you don’t happen to feel you are enlightened, that is your present feeling.”
Thus, when the definitional boundaries are removed (where they were formed, in the psyche), there is no actual “disconnection” between “states.”
That presence (or event) that sages have referred to is that which remains when all names have been dismissed.
Then, it is not any particular thing. Yet, if you re-apply all the divisive names to its unlimited presence, it is also all of the things that have been named: man, woman, east, west, etc. There cannot be, in other words, separate “states” (or conditions); there is but one overall, abiding condition (or state): that of the universally-present Absolute. If you wish to point to some phenomenal aspect of the Absolute and appropriate a name for it (“man, woman”), freely do so. But if you lose “sight” of the Absolute nature of your relative conception, there is confusion.
