Alert

Walking from the bus stop this morning to the coffee shop next to work, felt awareness came to the forefront...effortlessly.. with a largeness/vastness that was breath-taking. This is the thing....I spend a lot of my waking time thinking about awakening...longing for abiding awakeness. That longing manifests as reading books and watching videos....passing the time in the presence of (what seem to be) fortuitous influences. Remembering to stop and fall back into the feeling of awareness.

As I sit here and write, I know how silly I am, continuing to play the role of seeker!!! [Cliche alert] I am what I am seeking....this vast felt awareness is what I am. It is dizzying, and the most natural state there is, though I seem to play the game of forgetting. You ask, how can one forget something so monumental? Forget might be the wrong word. It is not a total I am asleep forgetting....just a moving to the background where it has always dwelt. Hence the move to the foreground this morning.

Might it be easier to give up the seeking, and maintain the facade of person hood? Dive into the gamut of what the human being is capable of.... deep love and deep [overused spiritual word alert] suffering and everything in between?  Teachers point out that most people come to the spiritual search looking for the end of suffering, and not from an overdose of love or pleasure. We want the good stuff and don't want to hurt. If one lives a life of relative ease, chances are they are not knocking on the forehead of the Buddha. [Gratuitous Buddha reference] Truly, it is all about the suffering.....So it goes.

Being a person is what we know how to do. All of life is filtered for how it affects us. There is a comfortable reference point.... [Overused Psych word alert] named Madame Ego. With awakening, the seeing becomes available that allows a different perspective on living.....one that is non-personal. The ego becomes a cab driver, relinquishing its role as the Grand Poobah [Gratuitous Flintstones reference].

Teachers speak of this shift in perceiving, but most don't mention that awakening is mostly not abiding...at least not at first for most people. It is like tuning in an AM station on your radio...it doesn't always stay tuned. And [lame metaphor alert] if you are on a road trip and the terrain is changing, you can be sure you will lose it.

And what about the existential angst of awakening-- seeing yourself and all of everything to be ultimately nothing, and (as Anita says), not even that. With awakening comes a death; death of the framework of you, special special human. It is not all bliss and light....it is very much a recognition of the empty (yet somehow awake) darkness... the ground of being...the non-ground from/in which existence arises. Tough stuff!

These days there seems to be a hollowing going on....the [overacting alert] slow (sometimes) painful death of my special special self. Everything is questioned...like when a perceived annoyance or hurt arises....I unravel it like a ball of tangled yarn, which it totally is. Seldom is it a simple seeing. This is the process of emptying--of chipping away at what still identifies as Mary--separate from you and special, too.

The practical silliness of continued seeking seems to remain. Adyashanti speaks to the journey from non-abiding to abiding awakening in his book The End of Your World. His walkabout took 7 years...from his first awakening experience to when it became a permanent house-guest. This is not the lived reality here, far from it. So what else to do but play hide and go seek, while the Water Buffalo hat still fits. ;-}