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Finding Wholeness, Harmony and RestExposing the Conict in All Thinking Daryl BaileyNew Sarum PressUnited Kingdomnsp

 ,   Copyright ©Daryl Bailey 2021Copyright ©New Sarum Press 2021Al rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.Front cover image adapted from a painting by Daryl BaileyLayout and cover design: Julian NoyceISBN: 978-1-8383836-3-3

ContentsPreface ...................................................................................... v1. Life’s Greatest Diculty ............................................ 12. e Major Conict in Human Existence ..........193. e Delusion in Detail .............................................. 254. e Way Out of Delusion ........................................365. How Can We Live Without inking? ..............46Endnote ..................................................................................57Acnowledgments ................................................................59

vPrefaceWhat I’m offering in this work is a radicaly different view of our life, and a radicaly different view of our thinking process, radicaly different to the views that most people have.This presentation is meant to be considered in relation to your experience of life. It’s not a theory to be debated intelectualy. It’s a consideration of your actual experience and what that experience indicates.Many of you wil feel that this work is a very clear pointing to life as you experience it. Many of you won’t. I’m simply offering it for your consideration.Whatever your response is to this presentation, I reect that you are your own unique being, and I wish you wel in your particular life journey.

1Life’s Greatest DifficultyI want to consider a major difficulty that arises in the life of every person, and within society in general. It is perhaps the single largest barier to the hapiness and health of every human being and the largest barier to the hapiness and health of society as a whole.This difficulty has to do with the relationship of thinking to our actual experience of existence, and the fact that every thought that we have is in conflict with our experience of life.Let me repeat that statement: every thought that we have is in conflict with the life that we experience. Every thought is a confused assessment of life, an assessment inherently filed with delusion, fragmentation, conflict, and strugle.But before we discuss the delusion and conflict that is inherent in al thinking, I want to consider three simple facts about our life.

Finding Wholeness, Harmony, and Rest21. Existence is the hapening of this momentIf I ask you why you feel that you are existing, you would say it’s because it feels like something is hapening right now.That’s our only feeling of existing, the feeling that something is hapening right now.You don’t have to create the feeling that something is hapening. In fact, you can’t get away from it. Right now, it feels like something is hapening.Try shutting your eyes for a few minutes, and simply feel the hapening that you are. Feel the warm, vibrant hapening that you are.You don’t have to think about it, just feel it.You don’t have to make any effort in this. It feels like something is hapening, so simply close your eyes and feel it.When your eyes are open again, it feels like the biger hapening of the moment. So now, with your eyes open, feel the ful hapening of this moment, for a few minutes.After that, again close your eyes and feel the warm hapening that you are.When your eyes are open again, if you can, try feeling the hapening of seeing.

Life’s Greatest Difculty3Don’t focus on one smal part of the field of seeing—instead, feel the complete hapening that we cal seeing. Don’t cal it anything, just feel it.This may seem a bit od, to feel the hapening that we cal seeing, but you’l find that you can feel it.And now, once again, feel the complete hapening of this moment. What you cal the inside of you and the outside of you, combined, simply feel the entire hapening of this moment.Now that we have a clearer sense of this immediate hapening of life, I want to consider a few other things.2. There is no way of saying what this hapening isIf I ask you what this hapening of the moment is, you realy have no way of saying what it is.The feeling that something is hapening is what starts at birth. Babies have the same basic feeling that you do, the feeling that something is hapening, right now, but babies don’t know what this hapening is. Babies aren’t born with words, or labels, for anything.If you ask a newborn baby, “What’s hapening right now?”, the baby isn’t going to say anything. The baby can’t even understand a question.

Finding Wholeness, Harmony and Rest4But it’s obvious that the baby has the feeling that something is hapening. Any baby has the same basic feeling that you have, the feeling that something is hapening right now. But a baby has no words for it, no names.For the baby, it’s a totaly unexplainale hapening. There is the feeling that something is hapening, but there are no words for it, no thoughts about it.As adults, we have enless names for the hapening of this moment. We cal it awareness, a self, a world, existence, the universe, and we name a milion other things: thoughts, moods, bodies, trees, houses, people, planets, stars, and so on.If we consider this carefuly, we can realise that we’ve been taught to point to different portions of the hapening of this moment, by using different words. If we lived in another country, where a different lanuage is spoken, we would be taught different labels.The important thing to realise is that the words aren’t teling us what this hapening is. The words just point to different portions of the hapening.If we wanted to, we could use words like “buzzleboot” and “windyshout”, instead of words like “awareness” and “body”, to point to different bits of this hapening.It’s important to see that words like awareness and body don’t tel us what anything actualy is, they are simply pointers.

Life’s Greatest Difculty5When the words point to a certain portion of this hapening, we cal that portion a “thing”.We point to one shape and cal it a wal, another shape, a floor, and another shape we cal a body. Sometimes the shapes are very vaue, like the shape we cal a thought, or a mood, but we feel there is a shape, or pattern, of some kind, and we give it a name. We point to every shape, form, and pattern that we can possily find, giving them names, and caling them “things”.It’s important to realise that, in our experience of life, every “thing” is changing.Everyone eventualy says that, in their experience, everything is changing.It’s obvious that things like thoughts and moods change quickly; bodies and relationships change slowly; mountains, galaxies, and the universe, change even more slowly; but everyone agrees that they are al changing. Every so-caled “thing” is changing.For people who study it very closely, like the physicists, they say that everything is changing al the time, in gross and subtle ways, so everything is realy a process of movement. Quantum physicists generaly say there are no actual things, there is only process, movement, aion, or flow.

Finding Wholeness, Harmony and Rest6They experience existence as the flow of something they cal energy.This is the same basic fact that a felow named Ashtavakra declared, twenty-eight hundred years ago, when, in the Ashtaakra Gita, he stated that al things are like waves moving in an ocean, that al things are realy like the unformed, flowing movement of water.This is also what the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, was pointing to, twenty-five hundred years ago, when he stated that life is simply flowing like a river, always changing, never the same from moment to moment. This is what Jesus was saying, two thousand years ago, when he said there is only spirit, something that has no form. He said it’s like the lowing of the wind, or the flowing of waters. He equated spirit with what he caled the waters of life.The early Chinese Taoists also stated that everything in life is flowing like a stream of water, and there is only the way that it flows. The word Tao means the Way, the way that everything flows.The Budha, too, stated that life is an unformed hapening, that it is like the flowing of a river, never pausing for a moment, or an instant, or a second.James Joyce, the true master of words, said it most succinctly, when he stated that “Finnegans Wake”. He was simply pointing out that what seems to be the arising

Life’s Greatest Difculty7and passing of finite forms, again and again, “fin agains”, are actualy an unformed flowing, like a wave in water, a “wake” behind a boat. “Fin Agains Wake” is simply saying that al aparent things are actualy flowing like water.Philosophers, from times earlier than Ashtavakra, up through to Budha and Jesus, then on to more recent times, with Nietzsche, Whitehead, Heideger, and a myriad of others, including physicists, like the impeccale David Bohm, have been pointing to this same simple fact of change and flow, throughout al of history.And so has everyone else.Every adult person that you know of wil probaly agree that everything is changing. That’s our most commonly shared experience of life.You don’t have to focus on a lifetime of experience, or teachings from history, in order to experience this. You can simply feel it in the hapening of this moment.If we sit down and do nothing, if we simply feel the hapening of this moment, we find a warm, vibrant, shifting occurence, making itself obvious.If you sit quietly, doing nothing, you’l discover that the hapening of this moment, the hapening that you are, is a moving, shifting, vibrant, event. There is the feeling of the breath coming and going, the heart beating, the tingling of the body, vibrations, pulsations, waves of energy, heat and coolness, tightness,

Finding Wholeness, Harmony and Rest8looseness, heaviness, lightness, a little twinge here, a little shift there, sounds coming and going, thoughts coming and going, moods coming and going, and so on. If the eyes are closed, there is the dance of light and dark, in what we cal seeing. If the eyes are open, there is the movement of the eyes and the shifting of the entire field of seeing. If the sitting feels pleasant, there is an urge to remain sitting. If it is unpleasant, there is an urge to move and shift and maybe stand up. Eventualy we wil be compeled to stand up and go on to other aivities.Al of this reveals itself clearly, when we simply sit quietly, doing nothing.The Budha asked us to sit quietly, to meditate, to feel the warm, vibrant, moving, shifting occurence of the moment. To experience the simple, vibrant, unformed hapening that we are, that life is.Jesus pointed out that we are spirit, like the flowing of water, and that, if you go some place private, and sit quietly, you wil find the waters of life flowing inside you.Whether it was Budha, Jesus, the Taoists, or anyone else considering the actual fact of our experience, they were always pointing to this fact of change, movement, and aion … the warm flow of this moment.If we consider this thoroughly, what we actualy experience, we can realise that everything is changing. Every thing has a beginning, a changing, and a fading away. Thoughts, moods, bodies, people, houses, plants,