Secular

Secularness is Threefold in Asheyana:

• The Individual is Experiencing

  • Individualism is embraced in Asheyana. The perceptual duality that sentient beings are known to experience is the common ground that all sentient beings share. Community is also respected as a contextualizer for one's individualism. 

  • There is no other life to experience than what one is experiencing right now, although the concept of past lifetimes and future lifetimes through the mechanism of rebirth can be contemplated for ethical guidance and motivation to proceed along the path.

  • Experiencing joyless anxiety is not due to individualism, but due to an individual clinging to a solid sense of identity or craving for immediate gratification. Community can mitigate some of the causes and effects of this joyless anxiety, but the antidote is to be found in the individual's journey along the path.

• The Mind is Illuminating

  • Ratiocination is embraced in Asheyana. Knowing and thinking can be refined and structured to help one progress along the path. Embodied consciousness, direct perception, and intuitive familiarity with one's subjective realms are also welcomed as aspects of one's experience.

  •  Arisings in one's experience of sacredness, divinity, of the supernatural, the transcendent, the mystical, the otherworldly, or of other spiritual or religious description are known to be expressions of one's own mind. Imaginative visualization can be used to reclaim solidified projections of one's own mind.

  • Seeing for oneself how the solidity of certain thoughts, ideas, and notions can dissolve into Insubstantial Basis can begin to orient one's knowing to the temporariness, the impermanence of oneself and of others.

• The World is Wondrous

  • Anonymity is embraced in Asheyana. One participates in society with a sense of altruistic hospitality that seeks no attention and solicits no reward. Understanding that oneself and others may ensnared by the causes and results of joyless anxiety, one still allows oneself and others the opportunity to be unknown, fathomless, anonymous. For each appearance of a recognizable other, between appearances they inevitably change.

  • Although religions, spiritualities, and philosophies of the world may give rise in others to solid beliefs such as a Substantial Basis Underlying All, an External Cosmic Advocate Protecting One and Their Own, a Terrible Meaningless Nothingness, or any number of other life-orienting, cosmological assertions, these beliefs are known to be, at root, insubstantial.

  • Were the beliefs of another to produce a sense of ease and at home-being in their life, this would be a cause for sympathetic joy. Were the beliefs of another to produce a sense of joyless anxiety in their life, this would be the cause for extending altruistic hospitality--to rest in one's presence as feels natural, momentarily anonymous to drives of identity-clinging and gratification-craving.

May the words of this article help to clarify Threefold Secularness for the Asheyana practitioner. May it be illuminating and wondrous to the individual experiencing it.