The Spirit Works

Wei Wu Wei Books

BOOKS FOR DREAMERS READY TO WAKE UP

Welcome to the wonderful world of Wei Wu Wei. What there is to know about “reality” is contained in these eight books. I love them all. My copies are dog-eared due to serial reading. As soon as I finish one, it’s on to the next, until I am back to the beginning, only to do it all over again. Why do I do this? Well, his answer would be the dream features me doing that in this dream. There never was a ‘me’ to do anything. When you first read this kind of an answer in his books, your inclination, in the name of resistance, is to think he is being “clever,” or “cute,” or even “metaphorical.” As your reading progresses, however, it begins to dawn on you that he is telling the absolute truth. In his interpretation of Buddhism, there is no relativity. There is no one to sort of be a person. In fact, he makes it very clear that as long as the dreamer retains any investment in the lie it is a ‘real person,’ with a ‘real ego,’ he is no closer to the truth than the day he set sail, in the guise of a ‘seeker,’ determined to discover truth.

The truth is the dream is always what ‘right now’ is; it is always ‘on,’ and it features ‘the dreamers’ mostly using time to play the part of ‘real people’ by pretending they forgot there is no one to be anything at all, let alone a person. The dream precludes the possibility anything is any more real than content in this dream. This dream features ‘the dreamers’ occupying the full spectrum of knowing, from those who know and never forget to those who know and depict ‘not knowing’ so convincingly they are immune to the truth they are dreamers delivering a personhood charade in a dream.

This dream, the one the dreamers, posing as people, refer to as “reality” is not about people. That’s not possible. As Hui Neng said way back in the dream, “from the beginning, not a thing is.” That dreamer wasn’t kidding when he made his statement, and the Buddha wasn’t kidding when he said “all life (in the dream) is about suffering” (because no dreamer can ever be anything but what it is). The same holds true for Wei Wu Wei. The telling of the truth reflects the stages of his awakening in the dream, but by the time you reach the end of the series, he is one with the truth that this Mind-generated dream is all about ‘the dreamers’ and what they do in this dream to pretend to be ‘real people’. Lies can’t cancel truth. No trick, no matter how clever on the dreamer’s part, can turn a dreamer in a dream into any kind of a person. The dream is a cliff hanger because ‘the dreamers’ resist truth and cling to lies as if someone’s life is at stake. This is what most dreamers get to do in this dream. This is ‘the plot’ in this dream, and, because no dreamer can ever be anything but what it is, the option to ‘wake up’ is imminent. You are a dreamer stuck in the fiction you are a person, or you show signs of ‘waking up’ in this dream.

It was from his eight books that this dreamer abstracted the core of his message and put it together as a way of providing dreamers with the reminders they require to let go of who they aren’t so they can enjoy who they are. Bliss includes the acceptance of the fact there is no one to be anything at all because everything can only be content in this dream. There isn’t anyone to have an ‘ego’ to struggle with, or modify. Upstream of the lie the dreamer is a person, it is liberated from the defense of the lie the ego exists. The lie the dreamer is a person depends on the lie someone exists to have one. It is the seeing of this clearly that elicits a smile, then a laugh and finally a crescendo of humor that triggers the endless ripple of ‘understanding.’

FINGERS POINTING TOWARDS THE MOON; Reflections of a Pilgrim on the Way 1958, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London. (out of print) 2003, Sentient Publications, Boulder. Foreword by Ramesh Balsekar. ISBN 1-59181-010-8

"There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being."

WHY LAZARUS LAUGHED; The Essential Doctrine Zen-Advaita-Tantra 1960, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London. (out of print) 2003, Sentient Publications, Boulder. ISBN 1-59181-011-6

"Of the many earnest, and how earnest, people we may observe reading, attending lectures, studying and practising disciplines, devoting their energies to the attainment of a liberation which is by definition unattainable, how many are not striving via the ego-concept which is itself the only barrier between what they think they are and that which they wish to become but always have been and always will be?"



ASK THE AWAKENED; The Negative Way 1963, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London. (2nd ed. 1974)(out of print) 1973, Little, Brown & Co., Boston. ISBN O-316-92810-0 (out of print) 2002, Sentient Publications, Boulder. Foreword by Galen Sharp. ISBN 097 1078645

"This 'real' nature with whose revelation the Chan Masters are primarily concerned, or the Atman-'I' of the Vedantists, is not the far-off, unreachable will-o'-the-wisp we are apt to imagine, but just the within of which we know the without. It is just the other side of the medal, and it lies wherever our senses and our intellect cease to function."


ALL ELSE IS BONDAGE; Non-Volitional Living 1964, Hong Kong University Press. (Reprinted 1970, 1982). ISBN 962-209-025-7 (out of print) 1999, Sunstar Publications. ISBN 188-665-634-7 (out of print) 2004, Sentient Publications, Boulder. 1-59181-023-X

"The purest doctrines, such as those of Ramana Maharshi, Padma Sambhava, Huang Po and Shen Hui, just teach that it is sufficient by analysis to comprehend that there is no entity which could have effective volition, that an apparent act of volition when in accord with the inevitable can only be a vain gesture and, when in discord, the fluttering of a caged bird against the bars of his cage. When he knows that, then at last he has peace and is glad."


OPEN SECRET
1965, Hong Kong University Press. (Reprinted 1970, 1982). ISBN 962-209-030-3 (out of print) 2004, Sentient Publications, Boulder. ISBN 1-59181-014-0

"Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal centre? As long as you do that you can never recognise your freedom."

"Wherever there are others there is a self,
Wherever there are no others there can be no self,
Wherever there is no self there are no others,
Because in the absence of self I am all others.
That is non-objective relation."



THE TENTH MAN
1966, Hong Kong University Press. (Reprinted 1967, 1971). ISBN 0-85656-013-8 (out of print) 2003, Sentient Publications, Boulder. Foreword by Dr. Gregory Tucker. ISBN 1-59181-007-8

"Having found no self that is not other,
The seeker must find that there is no other that is not self,
So that in the absence of both other and self,
There may be known the perfect peace,
Of the presence of absolute absence."





POSTHUMOUS PIECES
1968, Hong Kong University Press. Foreword by Wayne Liquorman. ISBN 0-85656-027-8 (out of print) 2004, Sentient Publications, Boulder. ISBN 1-59181-015-9

"If we clearly apperceive the difference Between direct apprehension in Whole-mind And relative comprehension by reasoning In mind divided into subject-and-object, All the apparent mysteries will disappear. For that will be found to be the key Which unlocks the doors of incomprehension."




UNWORLDLY WISE; As the Owl Remarked to the Rabbit 1974, Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 0-85656-103-7 (out of print) Note: this book published under the further pseudonym 'O.O.O.' 2004, Sentient Publications, Boulder. ISBN 1-59181-019-1

ABSENT PRESENCE

HERE I am!
NOW I am!
THIS-I-AM!

- WEI WU WEI















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