Who am I? The ultimate question. I remember being 7 years old and contemplating that very question. I went through my entire body looking for that answer. Am I my hands because I can feel things through touch? Am I my eyes because I can see? Am I my ears because I can hear? I kept coming up with a ‘no’. I never had the answer to the questions I asked, but I did know who I wasn’t.
And so, many years later, in the midst of illness and cognitive dysfunction, I stopped everything. I stopped trying to figure out my illness and the answers to life, and I stopped resisting being ill. It was the moment I became still and present to what is. And there are no words that can describe what ‘it’ is or exactly how ‘it’ felt. Words come from our minds, and our minds simply cannot comprehend or imagine who we are. That would be like trying to picture infinity. It’s just not possible.
What I can share is this; it is simple, so simple your mind won’t want to believe it. The truth of who we are is that we are pure consciousness. It is our essence. It is formless and therefore nothing and everything. And the experience of it is a love so profound it has no beginning and no ending. It is manifest through us as a way of being and it alters our entire perception of life itself. And truly, our access to being present to who we are is to simply stop trying to figure it out and to stop doing what we think we should do to experience it. It requires no knowledge or thought. Quite the contrary. We realize our essence in stillness. We already are who we are.
The best analogy I can come up with is that who we are is like the never-ending blue of the sky. It is the context in which our life is simply the content. And the content that is our life is like the clouds that drift across that sky. No matter how many clouds form, the never-ending blue is forever there, unchanged and unaltered by their presence.
And so it is in life. Our minds are forever generating thoughts, followed by thoughts about our thoughts, adding meaning to our life and our experiences. This is our human nature. It is neither right nor wrong, it is simply how it is. Upon awakening to ‘the blue’, the perception we have of life and its experiences is forever altered. Being awake does not translate into a state of bliss, although initially it can certainly occur like a honeymoon. But honeymoons have a beginning, middle and end, after which there is a maturing and deepening of the knowing.
The joy of wakefulness is profound, but the joy is not what happiness is. To recognize and see in others our own Self is often staggering. To see humanity in a collective state of survival, as a projection of thoughts that create a holographic universe, is all at once awesome and heartbreaking. Living awake is divinely peaceful and at the same time brings the entire spectrum of human emotion front and center, to be fully experienced. It is a fulfillment that dissolves need, and yet doesn’t rest by itself. Its expansion is inevitable. And with each part of the whole that awakens, there is the illusion of healing to that which can never be broken, and the human has the full experience of this illusion.
And so on this night after a thousand tears have been wept with neither sadness or joy, I wrap my self around our collective humanity with love… We are what It is, the never-ending blue of the sky.
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