If we would ever be free…this is what we must come to see: our troubled thinking is a “racket” in both meanings of the word: (it is) a noise seeking to silence itself, in a “rigged” search that has no end.
Though largely unseen, the following fact can be verified by anyone who wishes to see the truth of it…and be set free, accordingly: the ongoing unwanted experience of any given moment is inseparable from the unseen activity of an unconscious mind that – as it reacts to, and then explains to itself the meaning of the moment it doesn’t want – is actually creating its own unwanted experience of that same moment.
We act every moment in our life from one thing and one thing only: that which (in us) is the knower of that moment. We act from what we know. As we are now, our actions – based on what we know – are predicated on a certain knowledge that appears with the reaction that tells us the meaning of the moment. And no more do we receive and are told the meaning of the moment, than we act towards that meaning from the understanding we have of it. And when we act from an understanding that is not understanding at all – from a nature that belongs to a reaction born of the past – all we can do is continue our experience of the moment.
We are created to contain the moment as it is unfolding within us. But the experience we have of the moment only includes what we receive through our senses, and is therefore only a small part of all the moment holds. Our experience of the moment is limited to what a part of us is telling us the moment is.
Imagine you are with someone, and you see that wherever they go, they’re talking to themselves – which is a pretty good sign that something’s wrong. Not a moment goes by that they aren’t telling themselves what just happened. He’s telling himself, “Oh, my God. Look at that!” – and you look, but you don’t see anything. She’s telling herself, “What are we going to do now? Look!” – and you look, but you don’t see anything. This is what we are doing – always telling ourselves what’s happened.
Why do I have to tell myself what’s happened? Am I not there? Why do I have to ask, “What does it mean”? I’m there! When we ask the meaning of something, it’s the same as saying, “Let me stretch this out in time, so that once I understand the meaning, then I can be someone who will deal with it” – instead of recognizing that the meaning of the moment carries with it everything that can exist in that moment. And where is all that moment unfolding? Within us.
You’re bigger than any moment you fear. You’re bigger than any enemy you carry around with you. You’re bigger than any unwanted moment. Not because you’re good. You’re bigger because you were there before that moment took place. You were there; it’s unfolding in you. What if we actually understood that?
Look, is the reaction to a moment you don’t want outside of you? Where is the reaction? Where are all the choices made based on that reaction? Where does that take place? Out there? Or does it take place in you? You’re sitting there and you’re afraid of something. Something’s going to come, something happened, someone might do this, someone did that. What if, in every one of those moments, as you’re sitting there reliving your painful past, all the stuff that happened to you that made you this, or someone else got that – what if, at the onset of some challenge – you actually understood, “You know what? Without me engaged in resisting this thing, it doesn’t exist! You’re nothing without me and I’m not going to be a part of you anymore. You are in me.”
Going deeper, what is the nature of the reaction to the moment? Is it because the moment came dressed in a monster costume that assumed a face? Or is it because the reaction itself, which is in you, gave some rules and regulations to a condition that’s passing so it can stay there and make a tempest out of a teapot, and you can be the master brewer? Because, when you start to understand that, and spiritually dare not to be carried away in the moment someone knocks at the door and says, “This is my house,” you can say, “No! You’re nothing without me!” And it’s not because you’re suddenly feeling brave and courageous, but because for the first time, you understand that the pain of your life has been because you have been complicit in creating a prison-like state. And as your consciousness of the condition begins to allow you to understand that all that time you were making what was essentially nothing – thought, the self it produces – into something, then out of that comes the power of being able to bring that nothingness into the fullness of who and what you are that understands that. Then it turns into what it always was – nothing.
And what do you think happens on the day you discover that your whole life of regretting your past is because there is a part of you that can’t wait to relive it? That every fear you have over someone or something is there because there is a part of you that first imagines what that moment might mean and what it might take from you?
When you know that everything you see and experience – meaning everything that gives your life the meaning it does (and the experience that’s subsequent to that meaning) is all taking place within you, seeing that is to be free from all the ways you’ve been complicit in creating the conditions you don’t want. And then there’s no more condition you don’t want, because every condition proves to you what it is you were put on this planet to discover, which is: Before this world, you were; and after this world, you will be. What can frighten that? That’s your job to find out.
Photo by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash
