And it is this: no matter how profoundly it is seen that there is
nothing happening, no matter how completely it is known that existence
is spontaneous smoke and mirrors, the exact opposite is always just as
profoundly and completely present as well. Life, with all its joy and
misery will keep on coming and there is nothing that can change
that. Absolutely nothing.
This means that enlightenment, like life itself, is but a dream. What
a crusher that can be! First we realize that life is a play, a movie, a
projection, and we are simply its puppets. Then we realize that the
nothingness of everything is present, then that it is just as unreal.
And finally, if anger, resentment, confusion, fascination and
enchantment are released we see that there is a very narrow path, the
razor’s edge indeed, that traverses them both.
This is a tough road. The temptation to fall to either side is
constantly present. The lure of the nothingness can be a true siren-call
and despite the strangeness of it, I often long to return to
experiencing the world as simply not real. While I lived in that land
suffering was a joke and only the poor alien humans around me were
experiencing it. The burden of life’s pains and cares was gone and I
couldn’t even begin to imagine it back into action. Being there was a
huge relief and absolutely an incomplete picture.
What tore me out of it was falling to the other side, i.e., life
itself. It presented to me on a silver platter the most intense of
experiences ever to come my way, each of them utterly challenging,
utterly beyond my limited abilities to cope. I fell to the other side of
that narrow edge and began a solid year of simply trying to get through
each day. What a shock! I’d thought that I would never again have to
live with the usual suspects eating me alive, but there it was.
Welcome
back into the world, Lisa…
There is no such animal as enlightenment, just like there is no such
one called physical reality. Yet put the two together and call it “what
is” and it’s close. Not a bullseye, as that’s unreal too, but close.
Life just shows up, and the awakened part does too. For me it was first
total ignorance of all but physicality and my own inner world, then it
expanded into seeing the invisible as being awesomely present in each
nano-moment. My confusion was in imagining that those two are separate
and discreet and that one was better, more spiritual and hence more
valuable than the other. Not true. And in seeking one and denigrating
the other I lost sight of their unity. They cannot be separated and it’s
self-deception to imagine them unequal or even different.
Everything is equal, in the beginning and the end. Meanwhile, we do
what we do, are as we are, and with what is called luck (but is really
just life showing up as it will) we believe in life, then we believe in
nothingness, and then we just walk that sharp edge called “both”.
Here’s to narrow paths…
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