The Great Embrace of the Third Alternative

For most people it seems that the only way to relate to the experience of living is through the mind. That the pictures and words that stream through our heads, unbidden, actually accurately describe and should rightfully dictate how we feel about what happens in our experience. To suggest to the average person that the voice commenting in their head and the pictures and memories that pop up along with that commentary is not who they are, seems absurd. What are we if we are not our thoughts, memories and the sensations that accompany those stories in the body?

There is a the persistent sense of someone being here, a “me” for whom this is all happening, and we automatically go on to assume that the thoughts and images constitute that sense of “me” - they seem to offer evidence, despite the fact they are forever changing. However, even the simplest investigation will reveal that whilst those thought-stories are always changing, there is something else which is persistent - something real which is seeing all of that, which is not a thought, which is not an “I”. You could call it pure awareness or being. The ever present actuality of pure awareness-being lends reality to the flickering “me” which is embedded in all the thought stories. It is the very energy which allows those thought stories to be known at all. It is the light by which thought-stories are projected, and it even lovingly livens their illusory play. This play generates characters and objects in world which all seemingly interact as separate things in a linear continuum thought of as time. Yet when one looks closely we can notice that the only place this entire play is actually happening is in the thought-stories themselves - in the imagination.

Believing that the stream of thoughts and images in the head is who we are, and that this story is also somehow accurately describing the world around us, is at the heart of duality. Because the stories, concepts and pictures in the mind are intrinsically dualistic. Conceptual thinking must be dualistic in order for us to, on an physical level, negotiate our biological survival. This thing over here is ‘me’, and that over there is a table - this distinction is useful. It helps me to feed the right thing and not bump into the other. This is poison berry and that is an edible root, or that is predator - I should flee, and that animal is prey - I should catch it. So the thought stream operates in binaries, or opposites, which slices the world up into separate things which are for or against us - on an organic level this is useful, on an emotional level it becomes hell.

Based on what the content of that limited binary thinking is telling us about the world, there is suffering. This dualistic fixation, which is a primal separation terror from the original wholeness of being, resultantly manifests as perpetual pushing and pulling in our experience. Wanting this and not wanting that. That pushing and pulling creates tension and anxiety in the body of varying degrees of intensity, and in combination with the thought stories - to which that anxiety in body effectively is the somatic ‘sound track’ - we believe ourselves suffering.

When we are living from the story there is a fundamental violence in our experience that seemingly cuts us of from the whole, leaving us incomplete. There is a sense of loss, a feeling that things as they are, are not quite right and we go about trying to arrange the world in configurations that we hope will return us to that sense of completion. The thought-story dissects the world into separate things and those things are assigned a binary value. There are quite literally infinite polarities that blossom out of this primal binary (self/other, good/bad, happy/sad, joy/suffering etc). What once were useful conceptual binary oppositions for survival on an biological level (poison/food) are taken by the thought-story to be universal on all levels and this then cascades into a nightmare of mental lies about our emotional worlds, mental worlds and finally our spiritual worlds. By buying the dualistic thinking because we genuinely believe it is what we are, we become trapped in the horror movie playing through the mind.

The truth is that essentially we never were that thought-story flowing through the head and we can be free of the torment it churns out by recognizing that fact. The story generates black and white scenarios - when living through the stories we seemingly only have the two alternatives to ever choose from, such as; good/bad, happy/sad, enemy/friend, enlightened/unenlightened. When we live from Reality there is the luminous third alternative.

The two extremes inherent to the self-story, range from the grossest level of concepts (me/you, this/that) on to the more refined emotional-feeling level (joy/fear, like/dislike) up to endlessly subtle and sophisticated ideations. Anything the mind produces in the thought-story, even the subtle ‘spiritual’ thought stories which arise in the mind will inevitably ever only seem to offer apposing extremes as possibilities. Even non-dual philosophies such as Advaita or Zen, which we heard would free us from this trap, seem to generate binds in which there are always more conflicting extremes to choose from. We find ourselves torn between new binaries which generate a new variety of stress, compounding with the grosser and grosser levels of anxiety flowing out of the dualistic self-story.

The story has gotten even more refined and seemingly more subtle in its sophistication, no longer is the internal war waging simply over wanting security and not wanting pain. Now it has become about new, apparently spiritual, polarities such as - awakening/ignorance, effortlessness/effort, meditation/non-meditation, freewill/determinism. The thought-story plays the duality game with any new material it gets, because the duality is hardwired into the story’s structure. As long as we take ourselves to be that story we only have these two alternatives to choose from - our bewilderment grows and grows as we discover even our spiritual search, which promised libration, becomes the fuel for more anxiety, more psychological suffering.

If the dualistic nightmare of the self-story only ever gives us the two apposing alternatives, then the message that I am interested in communicating is the ever present third alternative. The third alternative is neither of the two extremes which the self-story presents in innumerable guises, yet it also includes both. The third alternative is the space in which the two extremes of the story arise - it is the ground of the two extremes as they dance in ever more complex patterns as the story. It is the Great Embrace of those two extremes. The Great Embrace of the third alternative denies neither extreme and is also never divided between either of them.

This is because the two extremes beginning with self/other - all the way up to effort/effortlessness or nirvana/samsara are imaginary story constructs. As such they have no inherent reality other than that which is ascribed to them by belief in a self-story. Whenever suffering arises in the story you can be sure that it has been because there is resistance, wanting to grab control and choose one or reject the other extreme. Yet, available always is the third alternative which has no bias, and rejects or grabs nothing. The third alternative is what you are. It is ground on which the story arises and as such it includes all of it. Every single speck.

Simply put - when you recognize that this unconditioned awareness-being is what you are, and that the story is not you and never was you, the third alternative wells up embracing the opposites. Mysteriously, the quality of suffering that was pervading experience becomes translucent as its imaginary nature is exposed, yet never denied. We are no longer sure if we were ever suffering at all, or what suffering is for that matter. There are feelings in the body, there are pictures in the head but none of these are taken to be what you are. The spaciousness of awareness-being which has always been in the background, ignored, becomes increasingly obvious.

When we are presented by the two opposites in the story, no longer do either of them scare or titillate us quite as much, as we naturally choose the third alternative. The third alternative has its own flavor - it tastes like wholeness, and smells of paradox. The mind becomes confused by the presence of the third alternative because it contradicts all the coding in the story. There is a kind of confusion that happens in the story, as the third alternative pervades it. The mind is no longer sure if your are someone or nothing, if you are improving or reverting, or if anything is happening or not happening. Has anything been gained or lost? Is everything different or has nothing changed at all? All reference points become meaningless in the dimensionless space of awareness-being, as the opposites collapse into the third alternative.

The chaos of reality, which the conceptual mind has always structured with the story, is revealed to be beautiful without it. Experiences that normally would have been feared becomes enjoyable or interesting whilst experiences that would been highly desirable become ordinary and possibly less riveting. You are joyfully living in paradox, as everything flows spontaneously from the energy of awareness-being manifesting as reality that you see around you without interference or preference.

The Great Embrace of third alternative does not blot out any part of reality, or substitute it with a new shiny version - it very simply completes the picture. Nothing seems wrong anymore.

"Not effort or
the absence of effort,
neither choice nor
the impossibility of choice,
neither self nor not self,
neither nothing nor something,
neither emptiness nor form,
neither unborn nor born,
the third thing..." - John Astin