just Notice, don't think

​Question:  I’ve read and re-read TGD and have gained more intellectual understanding but it hasn’t helped much with the deep ache of the heart.
 
In these times of uncertainty and insanity more intellectual understanding doesn’t really help. People are suffering and telling them that seeing through non-substantiality will clear everything up doesn’t make sense as how are they to do that when they don’t “see” it. Telling them to drop substantiality (in chapter 9) and not how to drop it except suggesting meditation which too is no guarantee, just makes the situation quite hopeless. It seems as if there is no way out of this despair.  Either there is “seeing” which happens of its own accord or there isn’t and there is nothing that can be done to make it happen.


Response:  You are correct.  More intellectual understanding doesn’t help.  It only increases the deep ache of the heart—if only because, in and of itself, intellectual understanding can never be brought to completion.  So, I did not write The Grand Delusion to assist ANYONE in expanding their intellectual understanding of anything—even though, as you indicated, it can’t be helped.  Intellectual understanding mostly accumulates.  As I state in the book, though, I’m only trying to help people wake up.  I don’t want to give people more ideas.  Mainly I’m just pointing out the faultiness of all beliefs—particularly our unexamined and unwavering belief in substantiality.  Forming radically new ideas is not going to help us here.  For this, we have to just see.  You ask me how.  The entire book points to it.  Just notice.  Please turn to chapter 37 where ANYONE asks: “Notice what, though?”  Then, very slowly, reread what follows.  I reiterate just a few echoes of what the dialogue was all about.