You Knew This

You knew this. That time on vacation - up on the cliffs overlooking the sea. The sun was luminous. The waves crashed against the rocks below. The air was electric. And it was glorious. You felt utterly alive. Gone were the projections of the past. The future was nonexistent. And the construct of separation dissolved as the event of Life unfolded in real-time.

In this scenario the mind-made happen-ed self is absent. Only, what we might call, the happen-ing self (the functional self/body-mind) is operative - and this happen-ing self is simultaneous with everything in this present unfolding - right now. The happened self (the history self/future self of our stories and anticipations) has no actual existence in the bloom of the present.

We carry a virtual storehouse of memory, history, narrative around with us. It’s vast and burdensome and takes up a huge amount of resources. We spend much (most) of our time there - recollecting, ruminating or rearranging (in the form of future planning.)

In the instant that we let it go something else suddenly becomes apparent. Something real, immediate, alive, vital… This is the natural state.       

You knew this as a small child. It never left - it’s just obscured.

Life As It Happens

In our default, narrative oriented mind-streams and memory, we tend to think of ourselves in terms of horizontal time-lines which stretch back through the past and forwards towards the future. Each line drags its extended past-self around with it. Each line is separate.   

On inspection this can be seen to be a misapprehension - created by and sustained in the mind. Presently - in exactly THIS… NOW… this horizontal time-line version of you has no actual existence (though the mind may insist that it has*.) Instead, the semblance of a ‘you’ that can be found is simultaneous with everything (it’s in this sense that we can frame the concept of no-self), there is no separate, fragmentary, horizontally-extended ‘you’. There is THIS - yes, exactly THIS in which the ‘activity’ of a body-mind-personality (the ‘you’ of thought) is co-arising and is co-existent with the Totality.

When we give up pretending that anything but the present is real - when we stop investing in an imaginary past and future fantasies - we become consciously aligned with the ineffable intelligence of Life as it happens - and from here it may dawn that this (THIS) is all there is.  
             


* This is not to deny that forms have a history, a past-story.