Our teaching is essentially based on understanding and what understanding means in the context of truth. Truth here is our real nature, which cannot be objectified. The understanding required to approach truth is thus different from the usual way we understand the world of referents and objects. So the first step is to see the difference between what is understandable–objects–and what is beyond conventional understanding–the objectless.
On the level of the mind, ordinary understanding, the nearest we can come to objectless truth is a clear perspective, a vision of the objectless. I often call this a geometrical representation. The contents of this representation are what could be called the facts of truth: that the mind has limits; that truth is beyond the mind; that truth, our real nature, cannot be objectified, just as the eye cannot see itself seeing; that truth, consciousness, was never born and will never die; that it is the light in which all happenings, all objects, appear and disappear; that in order for there to be understanding of truth, all representation must dissolve. When this representation, the last of the conventional subject-object understanding, dies, it dissolves in its source–the light of which the mind was informed but could not comprehend. In other words, understanding dissolves in being understanding. We no longer understand, we are the understanding. This switchover is a sudden, dramatic moment when we are ejected into the timeless.
To say that truth is one is a mental conjecture that calls for objectification. Because we cannot objectify truth, it can only be spoken of in terms of what it is not. As it is beyond subject and object, we call this way non-dual, advaita.
Understanding, then, calls for complete openness. When we look from the point of view of the male or female, we only see form the level of gender. When we look from the point of view of the personality, the “I-concept,” all is personal, in object-object relationship. But when we take a stand in globality, consciousness, awareness, then there is only consciousness. From the point of view of gender, or the “I-concept,” we occupy a mere fraction of being. But when we are in our wholeness, we see only the global. The moment we knowingly occupy our globality, or even have a glimpse of it, the chess board is completely changed. From this point of view, which is no longer a point of view, we see things related to one another, because everything now refers to awareness, to silence. All that is phenomenal, all that is objective, only has reality when it abides in, when it refers to, silence, to stillness. So the changing of the chess board is a result of having the forefeeling, or a sudden glimpse, of reality.
-Jean Klein
from Open to the Unknown. Third Millenium Publications
To read more from Jean Klein see here.
Sat Sangha Salon 