August 8, 2018
It is as it is. Let us imagine that there is an entity called “I”, and that this entity is everyone. This fact, that it is as it is, the I finds intolerable. The I has so many notions about how it should be different, or should have been different. The I has so many demands that thought constructs. As it should be, as the I wants it to be, as the I demands it to be, as the I tries to think or desire or project it into existence – is as it is not. As it should be is unreality, a construct or conditioned thought. It is an escape from reality. It is an attempt to be somewhere other than the here and now.
When the I is in the past, in the state of remembering, sorting, correcting, discussing, putting straight those things that went wrong, fondling those things that gave pleasure or comfort, weeping or raging over those things that hurt, when the I indulges in any of these states, it is in unreality. Most of the time spent in the past is invested in how it ought to have been, opposed to as it was. In all of this the I chooses illusion, refuses all that is, which is as-it-is at this moment.
When the I is in the future, there is no frame of reference other than the past. All that is imagined, all that is constructed, is put together out of the shards of memory. Whether the I puts together a shining golden vision of heaven or sees despair and destruction, it is an image projected out of and through the perceptual filter of the past. Memory is the only frame of reference. All that can be imagined springs out of whats already know. So when the I is in the future it is in the past, refusing all that is, which is as-it-is at this moment.
The past exists only as electrical traces in the brain, there is nothing real about it. The future exists only as electrical traces in the brain, it is an illusion generated out of the past. So there is no place to be in reality except here, no time to experience reality except now. There is no reality to experience except as-it-is.
The I is addicted to thought, it imagines that in thought there is reality, it imagines that thought holds some secret, some clue that will enable it to escape the pain and sorrow of the past, the imagined suffering of the future. Or it looks to find in thought a way to recapture and prolong the pleasures of the past, or to produce in the future a state of bliss. But thought, evolving out of the unreal past into the unreal future, is always of its nature a veil. All the ceaseless motion of thought, the constant restlessness, the endless cycling between past and future, all of this stands between the I and as-it-is. How then can reality be experienced clearly, truly?
Thought is not the way there. Reality is to be experienced directly only through the act of seeing. Seeing can happen only when the mind is silent, when thought has resigned. Seeing happens of itself in silence. when there is relaxed alert attention, and no effort is required. Seeing is a perceptual process, it has no thought in it. It is totally free of perceptual filters, it has no concepts attached, it does not look through the veil of the past toward the future. It is an act which is purely in the here and now. It has no notions of what ought to be, thus it is free to apprehend what is, there are no barriers. With no barriers there is no separateness, there is wholeness, which is as it is.
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