Day 554: It's Nothing Personal, Just Your Self

Day 554: 4 January 2023, Wednesday

There are no mistakes at this level of the game. No errors. Bob Ross says, ‘No mistakes, just happy accidents.’ The absurdity of our situation demands everything from us. Everything—every moment since the beginning and until the end—has brought us here and here only, now. 

The path is wide open and that is the frightening way. Freedom, true freedom, is terrifying. It is beyond comprehension, beyond conception and all graspability. If it could be grasped, here and now, it would not be free. 

Only three things fog and muddy and stir this way of absolute freedom: delusion (or ignorance), hatred (or aversion), and grasping (or attachment).

Without ceasing these three activities (delusion, hatred, and grasping), it is impossible to attain true freedom. 

Where there is anger, there is fear. Where there is doubt, there too is fear. Where there is hope, fear lives. Where there is clinging, grasping, and separateness, there is fear. Fear in wanting, fear in receiving, fear in lust and lies. Where there is life that pursues anything but itself, there is fear. 

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. It is becoming-toward-death.

What would it take to give up anger? Passionate love—rich, carnal, flowing love—is cathartic: blissful, powerful, destructive. A form of rage, almost. 

Passion is a trip. In all forms, beautiful and explosive, it has its work to do. Let it go. Who’s passion? It’s just passion. It will run its course. We do not need to chase it. Like our own shadow, the more desperately we pursue it, the more it flees from  our grasp.

Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. 

Only I will remain.

‘Talk as much philosophy as you please, worship as many gods as you like, observe all ceremonies, sing devoted praises to any number of divine beings—liberation never comes, even at the end of a hundred aeons, without the realization of the Oneness of Self.’ 

Shankara, quoted by Aldous Huxley in the Perennial Philosophy, p. 208

They who give up the search in the dark may remain in the dark for a very long time—much too long—before realizing the light is within themselves, or nowhere at all. When do you learn to give up? As a child? Here? Or later? When is it considered “too late” to give up? How could it be possible? Perhaps it is too late already. Perhaps our time has passed. Perhaps our chance has come. How would we know? Is now enough? When will it be enough?

Now has to be it. It’s all I have left. Would I rather be right or free?

There really is no thing to get out of all this. Life is hardly a bank to be robbed; it’s something to be experienced. Rather, it’s no thing at all, just pure experience. 

Where are we going? What’s on the menu? Is there a point to all this? What does it mean?

Interesting, useless questions. These spin us in circles for eternity. A better, more important question might be: What does it do? What are we doing right now?

If we can answer that, perhaps things will really start to change around here. 

True love is like fire. It burns away every impurity until only the gold in the center is left. If it gets too hot, only what is impure and clinging to form is harmed and burned away. It all burns in the end. 

All suffering is the desire for love, union with the beloved. Come to accept that place in the heart where it hurts, where even pain and sorrow and grief are means of loving. 

‘All externals must yield to love; for they are for the sake of love, and not love for them.’

Hans Denk

One always reaps what one sows. But do not mistake the idea of ‘one’ for the individual person nor the small sense of self. Do not for a single moment think—or worse, believe—that you are one, and only you, or me, or anyone other than the absolute and singularly multiple is one. 

How might one live? 

It’s nothing personal, just life and death. Form and formlessness. From nothing into nothing and returned to nothing. Just be here now.

The pile under the rug grows very big. Beware the waiting room.

‘All that is necessary is to look into one’s own heart; for what God asks of us is not found at a great distance.’ 

St. Jerome

Life is short and running out quickly. Yet now is eternity—until it isn’t. Do what you can with the time you have. Do what only you can do.

Do what only you can do.

Do what only you can do.