The Seer

You may be familiar with those old ‘grandfather’ clocks which have a pendulum as the motive force and this pendulum often has a weight on the shaft that you can move up and down to alter the frequency of the swing. Imagine this pendulum swinging from one side to the other, with one extent of the swing representing happiness and the opposite representing misery. Or one being health and the other sickness, or any of the other opposites to which the body-mind is prone.

When we are completely identified with this process, we are equivalent to the weight being as far down the shaft as possible, swinging through the maximum degree of movement, from ecstatic to the depths of despair. If we become more aware of what is happening and therefore less identified with the body and mind, the weight is as though shifted further up the shaft and thus the arc measured out by each swing is less and our emotional ‘swings’ are less intense.

Sometimes, our detachment can be such that we observe all of the excesses of life around us but are quite unmoved – this is equivalent to pushing the weight right to the top of the shaft, where there is scarcely any movement. But this remains an experience.

This experience may last five minutes, or ten minutes, or a day, or a week. Maybe it’ll last a month or six months. If you’re very, very lucky it could last quite a while. But what’s crucial to understand is that this experience at the very top of the pendulum is an experience in phenomenality, even though it’s impersonal. It is still an experience. It has substance. It has characteristics. You can say it’s great. Therefore, there’s something there. That means it exists in phenomenality. And anything that exists in phenomenality has one basic quality to it: it’s subject to change, it will change. It carries within itself the very seed of its opposite.

‘What goes up must come down’, as they say, so that such a ‘high’ is inevitably succeeded by a low. Because enlightenment is not an experience, in terms of the metaphor, anywhere on the pendulum is still an identification with being an experiencer in the world, even if this is that of an observer near the top, rather than a participant near the bottom.

Enlightenment is rather the ‘positioning’ of oneself at the fulcrum of the pendulum. The fulcrum is that upon which the pendulum moves. The fulcrum is crucial to all the movement. Without it there is no movement. But the thing about the fulcrum is that nothing happens there. There is no movement there. There is nothing going on. There is no subject-object relationship, which is what movement is. There is just the Oneness.

From: ‘Acceptance of What Is – A Book About Nothing’, by Wayne Liquorman