In the Middle of the Night...

 

I don’t know if it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know if it’s night or if anything has a middle. But in the imagined middle of the night this character awakens and walks in the darkness with a lantern. It could be some medieval wilderness, no streetlights or power poles or houses anywhere to be seen. Just the symphony of the nocturnal denizens of the forest, an echo of thoughts and trails of dream stuff. Who is walking? 

 

People write to ask me about awakening/liberation/whatever every day now it seems. Messages fill my inbox. How do they get in on it? What is it like? Who really has it and who does not? And I can't answer any of their questions. 

 

For all that can be said here is that this is about unfathomable awe and wonderment, about indefinable beauty and an ineffable edgelessness that really has no description and cannot be reduced to concepts and beliefs. Yet words seem only capable of expressing concepts and beliefs, even non-concepts about non-beliefs.

 

But you are not nothing, and you are not something. This is it and there is neither this nor it. No one comes or goes away, certainly not "no one." It is only some one that can deny that they are anyone. You are not an autonomous separate self in a world of separate things and beings. But there is some perception there nonetheless, even if only a sunlight sparkled reflection in the lake of dreams in which your face shimmers and shifts in the wind. You are not some kind of energy speaking from the great no thing beyond. None of us knows any more than any other appearance. We are all dancers on an empty stage that is nonetheless filled with movement.

 

Perhaps some simply talk of the final no-one and nothing conclusion over and over the same way preachers endlessly repeat "Jesus is salvation," as that is the core of what they call this message. But I always want to hear more. What is your lived experience? How does it feel to perceive with "no one" there? What is seen when you walk in the market or in the forest? How do you interact with your children when they laugh and smile? What is this aliveness you speak of? 

 

There was an interview where Tony Parsons was explaining his perception. And at one point he says, “there is only the beloved, the beloved is speaking to you right now.” I don’t remember the rest of the interview, but it didn’t seem to matter. That is the heart of this message. For this is not about being in some emotionless sterile void. This is love, this is the volcano, this is the miracle that any appearance seems to be dreamed out of the misty swirling soup of all that is and is not, this is aliveness that drowns you like a tsunami, this is so far beyond simply the loss of personal identity that if you ever felt it, you would die a million deaths in heart stopping astonishment at the miracle of whatever seems to be appearing like a supernova exploding in every apparent instant in what you used to see as the most everyday experience of your indescribably extraordinary ordinary life. 💓