Beware spiritual materialism. The subtle, seductive tendency to turn the formless, not only into form, but to elevate and separate that form above and from other forms.
We deceive ourselves by thinking it can’t be this obvious, this simple, this effortless. It is our thoughts, not our raw awareness, that create confusion, complexity and fantasies of difficulty and expectation. The delusion that this can’t be it when in reality, it always is.
The eternal unfolding of the infinite everything includes the arising of the futile attempts to describe it. A ruler trying to measure itself.
We don’t experience things in the present. We are experience and presence simultaneously without separation.
When we truly and honestly inquire into the present moment with open awareness, without concepts or definitions, we paradoxically find the inseparability of emptiness and abundance inextricably interwoven, undeniably present yet undefinable.
Notice how we don’t experience time in the same way as we experience bodily sensations. When we really look for the experience of time, there’s nothing to be found in the same way as we come up empty handed when really look for the self we think is so central to our experience.
“True freedom is the end of separation, this moment of life without ‘I’. The presence revealed through the absence of yourself. What remains is this immaculate totality of appearances knowing itself from within just as it is. The obvious truth of every present moment.” Sam Harris
Life lives us without effort. We need do nothing to be fully alive. We can’t stop it, we can’t make more of it. The present unfolding of everything as this moment is always vivid and undeniable yet impossible to grasp, contain or define.
Can we take responsibility for the truth we find when we let go of wanting things to be other than they are?
When our minds are open and not constricted by the blinkers of small ego, we realise there is wisdom to be found everywhere from everything.
I love this insight from Amoda Maa: “…the willingness to surrender the argument with what is: to meet reality without resistance…”
“Falling into openness—a dissolution of the psychological knot of ego—is the doorway to freedom.”
Amoda Maa
If, sometimes, we must hold, hold lightly with gentle tenderness, full in the knowledge that that is what we are doing.
Whatever state of mind you find yourself in, rather than focussing on the content or the description of it and all the mental/ emotional associations you may have about it, just let yourself feel the sheer presence of the experience you’re describing, the energy and vitality of it. Let yourself swim in the open-ended indefinable aliveness that it is. Just ride the waves of that energy.
John Astin
The miraculous, impossible to fully describe energy of life that is always present, appearing as all the myriad phenomena we encounter.
What seekers are seeking is not ‘out there’ beyond but right here, right now before everything, even prior to the seeker and the sought.
Nothing is fixed or stable including us and our fantastical flights of fancy about identity and self.