FACT OR FANCY – WHO’S TO KNOW?
~ In aware living, we never know what’s going to happen, only what is happening now, and that’s always a mild delight, even if it isn’t. 😉 Indeed, true to life, strange things keep happening. Long after sunrise this morning, I opened the curtains, put on the fire, made a cuppa, and sat drinking in the quiet light. Surprisingly, after fifty years or so, the musing mind greeted the morning with an old song: ‘He made the night a little brighter, wherever he did go, the old lamplighter of long, long ago.’ Indeed.
How do we recognize fact from fiction in everyday living? That’s the question that’s presently arising, so let’s very briefly and summarily look into it together, here and now!
But first, this caveat: to paraphrase many sages: “Anyone who tells you they know the truth is dangerous.” Reality, like Truth, ain’t personal. B Y O A Be Your Own Authority. 🙂
Speaking from current ‘understanding’, one does not, and cannot, know a fact without first knowing the false, the untrue. So let’s explore what the light of one’s deep and deepening self-knowing reveals, if only perhaps unclearly, and start with the usual suspect – the mind.
Mind (apparently) claims to know and to be me, as separate from you. It’s a useful tool and the problem maker, so to speak. It is binary, dual in its functioning; it sorts, sifts, stacks, and stores; it compares and contrasts in a limited either/or (0-1) process not unlike AI (Artificial Intelligence) but much more sensatively – at least potentially, it can bring the ‘heart’ into its appreciations, etc. It is totally culturally, inherently, conditioned to conceive and believe. That is, it personalizes the body/mind experience to comfort its born insecurities. To that end, mind re-presents a ‘reality’ it knows, trusts or distrusts with words, believed. Words merely describe, measure, and define; in reality, of course, they at best, point; the word ‘glass’ does not hold water.
The brain organ (the last to fully develop after birth) functions variously well by using verbal symbols to label, to think about, to identify, to interpret, and thus, to know. It’s limited to words about words, yes, and useful as a tool. In fine, the mind makes a good servant but a poor master. So, let’s cut to the chase here for now and simply say that the only way to directly know the truth of one’s being-nature is to respectfully, lovingly, set thought aside, including the mind’s beliefs, and look into the whole of what’s left.
Here, the trail ends – there’s a constant, unfolding knowing of the false in time and space, and a timeless not-knowing begins, apparently. One can and may come to know one’s inner being gradually or suddenly – usually a combination of both. No matter, the knowing of one as timeless being only; as awareness itself, effortlessly – repeat effortlessly – happens. It presents itself to itself, usually in peace and quiet, always in an open not-knowing. There is no way to achieve that which one is already.
One is moved totally by love – often in the form of suffering – to recognize ones’s infinite being-nature. A beingness that I’ve lately been wording thusly: One knows that one IS, and does not know what one is. That not-knowing is the endless movement of being that’s beyond human conception. One is invited and moved by love and the infinite beauty, peace and joy of one’s spiritual nature to daily, moment by moment, discover, follow and flow with that which one is: life itself. There’s the wonder! 🙂
~ home photo: In Taoist traditions, the Mind is variously represented as a devouring monster; here, the aware Devotee or Guan Yin Bodhisattva figure sits firmly astride the monster, mastering the mind. Not by stopping it, but by simply, gently, without attachment or resistence, watching its movement. That inner awareness directly transforms living well and truly. Â
