Notes To My Self – Yellow
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“ We are not part of something; we are all that is –the whole of Being.”
I found the above and all the following quotes and notes in my back pack this morning. They’re from my Yellow Period which lasted about 3 months– a time when I was jotting down randomly encountered and seemingly relevant thoughts on yellow Post –it notes! My trail to Here is littered with these undated yellow notes to my Self like this: “ All spiritual paths are strewn with the bloody white and black carcasses of sainted and sacred cows laid bare under the unrelenting and piercing Sun of Truth.”
And this: “ I see a dog lying in a window on a pillow. He has no idea what he’s looking at; he has no idea he’s looking, or that what he is, is looking.”
And this last example: “ The end of our suffering happens when we unlace and take off our boxing gloves; the fighting finishes, no one loses, no one wins. We step out of the Ring and into Reality. And then we see, looking back over our shoulder, that the ring, the constant conflict, the referees, opponents and spectators are all just the same as us – illusions!”
Now these three notes, taken together, seem to lack a common thread. Where is the central concept that might hold them together? On the surface of things, their only common feature seems like “yellow Post-It’s” right? Well, yes and no. They’re what I call “Grace Notes!”
I’ve stumbled upon Grace all my life, and on some handy occasions, noted it. There’s stacks of note-books and scads of pink, green, red, yellow and yes, blue, notes! They reflect the emotional weather of the day, and range as widely. The Grace that I see in them is simply this: They are roadside markers of occasions both in time and in a timeless space, where one was variously tickled, tricked and apparently moved along the path to nowhere!
What I see now, in hindsight, is that all words, all thoughts, all feelings, all the experiences of me seeing, touching, hearing, smelling and tasting “life” are “my” interpretations of what is actually happening; they’re all smoke and mirrors that, taken together, I believe to actually be true.
That is not to say that these Grace notes are not useful – truth is implied in all our experience of it. Where we get tricked with our noble, sacred or otherwise profound experience is mis-taking thought for Self. Our thinking/feeling selves are indeed, a miracle and a mystery, one which we all can perceive in a still moment, but one which escapes our comprehension the very instant we conceive that we “know” anything. Truth is, nothing we conceive as true is actually true; no separate “thing” exists; all is One. One wonder!
Let’s end here with yet another Grace Note, this
one from Jean Klein:
“ One cannot teach you to sit on a chair when you are already seated. A teaching that tries to teach you how to come to what you are, takes you away from what you are…the body/mind exists in time, but what is, is timeless.”
