I have some experience with “okayness”, so maybe I can say a few useful things.
It’s hard to explain what it’s like to be okayness, which is I think a bit more accurate way of expressing the idea of “it’s okay” or “everything is okay”. I think it’s so hard because when we try we run up against all the way words create separation between this and not that, and separation, categories, and ontology fundamentally separate you from okayness because you have to make a judgement about what is this and what is that and making that judgement requires some fundamental mental motion of measuring how much something is something, but that’s antithetical to what okayness is like.
Okayness (I often use the word “perfection” as my pointer, although sometimes it appears to me as “enoughness”, and others have used “naturalness” or “Buddha nature” or some other term) exists prior to that measurement, prior to feedback, prior to our self-awareness.
You’re right that okayness is not a thing, and its thingness seems to be an after-the-fact attempt by our minds to label this non-dual experience. It’s not an emotional state, although there are often emotions felt while being it, nor is it really making any epistemology claims in itself because while being it the mechanisms of epistemology can’t function, yet strangely this doesn’t matter because you can only be what is when there is no map, so you have no need of epistemology because there is no map to be kept correlated with the territory, there is just territory.
Seems like a type error to me, like saying crying is an emotional state rather than a thing that happens in response to emotions or other things, or like saying finding out my friend lied to me is an emotion rather than a thing that causes emotions. Okayness is an understanding of just that which is, and emotions are an expression of that but are also not okayness itself.
I have some experience with “okayness”, so maybe I can say a few useful things.
It’s hard to explain what it’s like to be okayness, which is I think a bit more accurate way of expressing the idea of “it’s okay” or “everything is okay”. I think it’s so hard because when we try we run up against all the way words create separation between this and not that, and separation, categories, and ontology fundamentally separate you from okayness because you have to make a judgement about what is this and what is that and making that judgement requires some fundamental mental motion of measuring how much something is something, but that’s antithetical to what okayness is like.
Okayness (I often use the word “perfection” as my pointer, although sometimes it appears to me as “enoughness”, and others have used “naturalness” or “Buddha nature” or some other term) exists prior to that measurement, prior to feedback, prior to our self-awareness.
You’re right that okayness is not a thing, and its thingness seems to be an after-the-fact attempt by our minds to label this non-dual experience. It’s not an emotional state, although there are often emotions felt while being it, nor is it really making any epistemology claims in itself because while being it the mechanisms of epistemology can’t function, yet strangely this doesn’t matter because you can only be what is when there is no map, so you have no need of epistemology because there is no map to be kept correlated with the territory, there is just territory.
Why do you say it isn’t an emotional state?
Seems like a type error to me, like saying crying is an emotional state rather than a thing that happens in response to emotions or other things, or like saying finding out my friend lied to me is an emotion rather than a thing that causes emotions. Okayness is an understanding of just that which is, and emotions are an expression of that but are also not okayness itself.