Part Five: LIVING HERE
THE PHANTOM
Looking is not seeing; imagining is not being.
“I opened myself too wide. I forgot there’s more outside than things and animals at ease with themselves, whose eyes reflect the wholeness of their lives. I forgot my habit of grasping every look that fell my way: looks, opinions, scrutiny.” Rilke
The personal ego can only fake responses to life. It encounters only itself in the mirror every morning and it alternately delights and dreads in what it finds there. Indeed, ego overlays all that actually, factually, is, with a gossamer thin creation we’ll call…The Phantom!
The Phantom is a totally complete world unto itself; it produces, directs and stars in its own productions. From the time it rises in the morning until it sets at night, it is the Sun around which all others revolve and have their orbital existence. It’s a love story too – that is, it is in love with – quite enamored with – itself! And what’s more, it knows what’s happening too, and if by chance it doesn’t, it busies itself in figuring out an explanation it can live with.
The Phantom thinks of itself as a red-blooded Hero or, alternately, a black-hearted Villain. However it describes itself, it’s very hard to capture this critter! But when we strap it down on a gurney and dissect it under a searching light, we find the stuff of which The Phantom is made – ideas, beliefs, attitudes – are only, just…that …Vaporware!
Turns out, The Phantom doesn’t even have a body! It wanders in a muchu fog like a ghost, but only in our minds!
And what we are is the source of all life; that which experiences the Phantom.
We find that what is experienced on a phenomenal plane is not what we are, but an extension of what we are. So there’s no denial of our human nature including the ego, but there’s a sweet recognition of its nature and limitations.
When we dare to simply recognize and acknowledge our private Phantom; when thought is seen through to the bottom, we see that nothing but the clear truth of our being, remains. And as we look around with new eyes to see, we find that it’s not a great mystery that surrounds us – it IS us!
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