Most of us who are intersted in awakening have been seeking a long time. Yet although there may be many glimpses, true permanent awakening has not come. Instead there may be confusion and even despair…
> ‘WHAT IF IT DOESN’T COME!!’
Confusion means that we no longer think we know what the answer is - we no longer have the hubris to think we know where to turn. Good. In confusion and despair there is at last a real opportunity to let the heart open wide to what really is.
You know already that there is no one in there calling the shots. When you look inside yourself, you see that there is no one in there, right? What you see is a bunch of thoughts, which you call your ‘mind’. No real existence. Just ephemeral things which appear and disappear, like a bird across the sky. Thoughts are not really needed for anything are they? There one moment, gone the next. We watch the bird as it soars across the wide sky, and scarcely notice the sky at all. Long after the bird is gone however, the sky remains. Untouched, pure, without end.
Similarly with the thing you call ‘you’. Thoughts about ‘you’ come and go. Confusion or desperation comes and goes. Happiness comes and goes. But the central core in which these events occur remains. Nothing sticks to it. At night in deep dreamless sleep all the joys and sorrows go. In the morning such thoughts return, along with the idea of ‘you’. But the core, the boundless space within which the world, ideas, concepts, happiness, fear, awaking, appear… that alone remains. Pure, untouched, constant.
The trouble is that when we think of awakening we think that it is the ego which awakens. Impossible of course, since the ego is just an idea. And how can an idea awaken? It cannot. Awakening means simply that the eternal core in which all occurs, is permanently noticed. In a sense it becomes more interesting than anything else. Or said more simply, when a bird crosses the sky we notice the sky in which it appears.
How? Just realise that amongst confusion, desperation, fear, longing, joy, horrible job, or whatever appears, there is something that it appears in. With a little practice this will become so easy that effort is no longer required. You begin to see things as they really are - love without boundary. The very concept of an ‘I’ will fall away then, because it will no longer be needed. And you will clearly see, and permanently be, the boundless freedom you have always been but in confusion, have temporarily forgotten.
Freedom does not mean freedom from thoughts or problems. It simply means freedom from being bound by them. It means permanently noticing that you never were.