1:     Master, master! I get it! 

0:     Get it? Get what?

1:     What you said just moments ago.

0:    What did I say?

1:    You said that, at first, we suppose “choiceless awareness” means to refrain from choosing “this” or “that.” Eventually we come to understand it means to abstain from the idea that there is a “this” or “that”—that there even are two realities between which one could make a choice.

0:    And are you saying that you got that point?

1:    Before, based on what I’d heard, I assumed that it means the way we usually tend to make choices on the basis of the way we think things should be, or should not be.

0:     Which would be a practical meaning, on one level. We could say, from the standpoint of advaita.

1:     Yes, but I’m now looking at it from the standpoint of ajata; that there is no separate reality, from the start.

0:     Yes, go on.

1:     Where a relative world exists, there would be a “this” and “that” to choose between. But where the world is seen to be unreal, any of the things which we could choose between would be equally unreal. Even the “chooser” would be seen to be unreal. Isn’t this what you mean when you speak of “emptiness”?

0:     That’s right. Recall the Heart Sutra? “In emptiness, there is no form—no feelings, thoughts, conceptions, consciousness; no body, mind—no beginning or ending.”

And the Diamond Sutra—approved by Buddha—is saying, as ajata teaches, that all forms are completely and totally empty of “intrinsic existence.” Where even the body and the mind have no substantive reality, neither does the “world”—affirmed by them—sustain any reality either.

In regard to choiceless awareness: where even “consciousness” is recognized to be merely another of our separative distinctions, even the idea of “awareness” itself evaporates—let alone there no longer being anything to “choose.”

1:     So, as long as we take the world itself to be real, we haven’t really understood emptiness?

0:     Where we even take “existence” to be real, we haven’t completely absorbed the teaching of emptiness. In the Diamond Sutra, Buddha is said to have stated that not only is there “no self,” but “no life.” Total and complete emptiness would not be a form: such would not have a beginning nor an end. Thus we could not even designate it as “existent” or “nonexistent.”

1:     You’ve said that ajata means “no creation”; the implication is that not anything we take to be real ever had a beginning or an ending; that is, has ever “existed.”

0:     This is why it is practically necessary to comprehend the teachings of advaita before contemplating ajata. When it is clear that there “are not two things,” it can be understood that “the one thing” is in actuality no thing: formless, empty. Nothingness.

1:     I get that—comprehending that even the “I” is empty, as empty as any concept of nothingness!

0:     Then you do get the full meaning of choiceless awareness. Who is there, that could get what? There are no real “choices,” nor a real “awareness” of them.

1:     It seems to me that you could compare advaita to ajata, like atomic physics to quantum physics.

0:     As long as you bear in mind that all comparisons are empty of reality.