Shine On You Crazy Diamond

 


It makes me giggle and also tear up when you hear them say this is it and you say, "yeah, I got it," and then you want "this" to be more than this, to be some thing called Oneness or Unconditional Love or whatever they can say to make you feel like there is more than this bittersweet ephemeral instant.

You hear them speak and you are so ready, you want to sacrifice what you thought of as your life the way they seem to have done so you can have the end of suffering and the freedom and liberation they describe. They say no one gets that, but it's fine if it's for no one at all, cause you imagine it must feel better when the umbilical cord to the imaginary self is cut and nothing is taken as personal ever again. So when they say you wouldn't want this, they sound like they live in some imaginary world no one else can ever comprehend, and that is both true and false, but you get enough of the message to know that, yes, you really do want the very end of "you." Cause as one speaker said, you don't really like yourself and your life very much, after all.
 
Back in the day you traveled to India and you used to feel you were Consciousness or Awareness or the Absolute, but that sense was always coming and going with all the practices like resting in awareness and trying to watch yourself and then watch yourself watching yourself. Then one day you heard someone say that was all a lot of bollocks, and there was nothing that you ever had to do, this was already all there is. It felt better, even if you still don't know if it's more true, but then again, they also say that there is no truth.
 
That Advaita stuff was way too hard and took too much time and energy. No more trips to Rishikesh to see speakers from England talk to an audience of Europeans, or pilgrimages to Tiru to visit Ramana-World. Now you just go to Amsterdam and London; it's so much closer to home, and no one expects anything or gives you methods for homework. It's not as dramatic, and maybe it doesn't feel quite as magical as the grand guru show, but it seems much more real. And sometimes when they speak you really do get that there never was and never will be and is not now any 'one' here, not any real person or thing at all.
 
Then you take the train back home to Manchester, and all the stories drift away until you almost fall asleep to the rhythm of the tracks rocking you gently into a quiet reverie. Thoughts seem to pop before you can grasp them, like drops of rain breaking apart on the soft summer grass. You notice a delicate stream of tears slowly sliding down your cheeks and feel filled with an emotion you will later call love that is not like any kind of love you ever felt before, and there is just this, not even this, and the world is both empty and filled to bursting.... 💓

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