“I am not world, body or mind. I am timeless aware presence, the substance of all things.”
Doesn’t really matter if we arrived here via the progressive dissolution of beliefs, or direct realisation. Doesn’t really matter if we feel the need to declare there is no “I”, though it makes talking about reality slightly more convoluted than strictly necessary.
Regardless. Here we are.
The End.
Well, not quite. Even though we no longer think we believe in a separate self, there are pockets of the felt sense of separation.
Which sounds way cuter than it is. Consider it more like discovering that what you thought was your skin is, in fact, a very tight and dirty coat.
In my case, I write. And most of what I write goes into a folder and is never seen again. But occasionally something reminds me, I dig the piece out, and it turns out to be nothing like memory suggested. And I read it as though for the first time. It’s like the skin speaking from under the too-tight old coat. You might think I write for you, but truth is I only ever write for me. And the writing reveals the exploration and the conditioning to me.
Here’s an example: I’ve lived a yang life. Strong, competent, quick, decisive, active, efficient. I’ve fooled myself that this was simply the way my character shows up. Maybe I also fooled others. But it’s not true. It’s a too-tight coat.
More and more in my work, I’ve found the yin. The welcoming, the softening, the surrendering. Which is beautiful, ordinary, natural.
This yielding comes at a cost. And the cost is that without the yang too-tight coat, I no longer have a life time of defences built up. When someone attacks, mocks or rejects, I feel it, no filter.
It’s like standing naked in the rain. Barbs sting, though they’d once have bounced off harmlessly. No, not harmlessly. The harm was the reinforcing of this too-tight coat.
Then my files throw up a poem (I’ll share it below). I see, undisguised, that I’ve been telling myself this for a while—there’s no hiding place. And though I might wish for a safe harbour to rest in and have someone bathe my wounds, that’s not going to happen. It’s for me to find my true yang, under the too-tight coat. It’s for me to find out what it is to be whole, in an arena built around that coat.
There is no comfort or platitude here. No choice but to feel it all. To see everything as the necessary dance of my own essential Self.
“I am not world, body or mind. I am timeless aware presence, the substance of all things.”
The Beginning.
With Love,
Sara
