The Impossible Species | Self Help | Melbourne Australia - Gary Hipworth

SEBASTIAN: I read somewhere, that our Milky Way Galaxy has approximately 200 billion stars. Now we know, that a Star is really the SUN of its own Solar System. And also, that by force of necessity, every single solar system has to be placed in Space millions of miles away from each other. As obviously, otherwise the immense gravitational pull of each Solar System upon the other will create havoc. If this be the case, one can imagine the enormity of space required for just the stars in one Galaxy. And it is said, there are a100 billion Galaxies. One can conclude from this, the mind boggling immensity of the Void. It is awe inspiring. Any wonder, in the philosophy of Theosophy, the Void is considered to be the Absolute.

In your book, The Impossible Species, you have mentioned that there is no entity but only a process. The Buddhists also say the same thing. Now let us see what one means by a process. If a house-wife takes flour, eggs, butter, sugar, dry fruit and baking powder, and mixes them in a given order, then pours the batter in a baking tin and bakes it, she produces what is called a cake. The ingredients mentioned, underwent a process and were transformed into a ' cake '. Now we know that in the case of human beings, the process entails the action and reaction with nature, and each other. In a nutshell, the living of life itself. But in this case, a process to what end. It is alright to say we are not Entities but a process. But a process to what end ? I ask. Is it liberation ? If so, since you have stated there is no entity, then who is it, that is liberated ?

GARY: Life or evolution as a process to what end? (but remember always that our language can get in the way of clear understanding because the very nature of language is that it assumes there are entities!)

The universe does not appear to have a purpose, only individual living things have a purpose ie the individual wants to stay alive or the big picture is that life wants to keep copying itself and creating new forms. For example, a robot has no purpose of its own and so does not need goals etc like we do to stay alive.

Since the time that humans started living in cities and stopped being nomads and invented writing etc we have a sense of progressing to a better place through an ego living in time moving from the past to the future, but our early ancestors had a cyclical sense of time and a group consciousness, so unless we understand the context of our lives as recently developed egos with a serial sense of time we find it almost impossible to think outside this conditioning. Therefore, our sense of psychological or spiritual progress may be totally illusory too, except for technology.

Who is liberated?

Because the thinker is an illusion (ie only thinking actually happens) or put differently the thinker is a human concept without any foundation in reality as such, like a rock or a tree, there never was a 'who' in the first place, it simply disappears and the living process, i.e awareness, consciousness which was the there all along, is now primary. So find out what a concept or an idea is because humans are conceptual beings and this has been both a blessing and a curse.

An idea is real when it relates to something tangible like a rock or a living creature, but when the human mind makes up an idea to label our internal subjective awareness - and keeps on believing this is real over thousands of years of mental conditioning and reinforced by a memory process tied to our animal survival instincts - then the ego thinks it is real! I believe this is the wrong turn that humans have made that has led to all the suffering and bloodshed.

Who brings about liberation?

There is no 'who' to bring about liberation, 'you' just snap out of an illusion and wake up to what is actually going on. What brings about liberation is unfocused awareness that stops the illusionary thinker in his tracks because awareness and thinking cannot happen at the same time. End of ego! Of course it can start up again at any time too - because there is a lot of ego conditioning in every one of us, and living without the ego is a moment to moment process, not something where you arrive and that's it forever.

These are my own observations - only each individual can find out whether they are facts or not - and of course you know that this is the only way - no-one else can do it for you.

SEBASTIAN: A couple of months ago, I read in the ' Age ' that Scientists or should I say Astronomers, whilst scanning the skies, have now come across vast tracts of empty space, stretching for millions of miles. Empty in the sense that there were no stars at all, no black holes and no dark matter either. Just plain empty. There was no one at home. It was very unusual they said. Pondering over the matter I feel, just as we here on Earth have vast tracts of land, like the Sahara and the Gobi deserts, why not so in space as well. They are probably deserts in space. Who knows ?

I am wondering if the words Enlightenment, Nirvana and the Liberated state are synonymous in meaning. I think they are. Liberated from what ? In my thinking, liberated from the ' ME ', from ' BONDAGE '.

How does one, there is really no ' ONE '. Language again. Let us re-phrase. How does Enlightenment come into existence ? It doesn't come into existence. It is always there. It simply has to be allowed to come into play. Then why doesn't it ? Because there are impediments in the way. What impediments ? The ' ME ' is the greatest impediment. In order for Intelligence, Insight and Perception to function, we need to be in a Subjective state. Because as we are, in this mundane world, we are living our lives in a state of duality. You and Me. They and Us. The brain is so heavily conditioned to always think in terms of duality, that we just don't know of any other way.

And there certainly is another way. That is, to live always in a Subjective state. Thoughts need to cease. Just ' BE '. Not to react. In such a state, I am sure Intelligence, Insight and Perception will be fully in operation. And in this state, there will be no wrong done, no mistakes. If a mistake slips in, since we are human, it will immediately be put right again. And also, it will be found that when living in a Subjective state, working from morning to evening, there is no tiring. The being is always as fresh as a daisy. Joyful, always in a state of Bliss.

Now here is a third party, after having read the above, is blowing his tops off by shouting, " Then why the bloody hell has Sebastian not been replaced by " ENLIGHTENMENT " ! Crap, all crap.

GARY: Some thought is necessary for our survival ie thoughts based on facts, and thoughts that can create better living conditions for all. It is the ego that thinks it is real and hoards all its experiences in memory and compares its situation to others. That is the problem, so when awareness/ intelligence is operating the poor ego doesn't stand a chance because its silly immature game is exposed to the intelligent light of awareness.

I believe it all comes back to our 'immortal' survival instincts which go back billions of years in our ancestors and now have integrated with the human conceptual mind via the reptilian part of our brains. The problem for us humans is that we have a thinking mind that can foresee it is really mortal and so we are stuck in a nightmare situation, unlike the early life forms. So evolution did a very clever thing - it used a concept or idea to make us feel we are still immortal - after all an idea can float around in our internal subjective minds and be virtually immortal because it will not know death when the body dies anyway.

What does your body/mind do when it is confronted with the fact of its own real mortality? Does it escape into its mental world of concepts such as progress/ ego, etc or does it accept the fact and live with it?

If reality is changing all the time and there are no fixed, permanent entities, then what is true is that the vacuum state ie empty space is what we truly are even right now as we are also a particular form that will die one day.

Sebastian may want to be enlightened too badly and this is still the ego wanting something it can't have. The ego blows his top off - awareness simply sees the ego blowing its top off - that's enlightenment right there!