THE BOOK OF AWARE LIVING, AS IT HAPPENS.
[ finding your Being-nature without further delay, dept. ]
Aware living is kinda like opening up a new book every day – it’s about life’s constant turning to new, mostly blank pages in every moment. It’s a book that somehow functions as a necessarily vague but serviceable map. This book does not provide an opined overview of life – an established and accrued knowledge-based story. Indeed, in aware living, you never know; it offers neither a past nor a future. Not even much of a story. In reality, the book of life has little to no time for stories. Its only content is a nowness that’s keen to reveal facts rather than fantasies.
Aware living is a candid, intimate, loving engagement Self-to-self that’s as breezy as any summer day, as brisk as any windy Fall evening; as penetrating as any cold winter wind and as delightful as any newborn spring. It’s about living life in season, in harmony, rain or shine, as it happens.
It’s a wholly lived book about everyday happenings, about love, beauty, and destruction aka creation…moment-to-moment, so to speak; there’s a freshly emerging new rhythm, a harmonic, richly toned pattern, but (usually) not a plan. There’s some apparent ‘future’ details written in as ‘planned’ here and there, but always and only they’re sketched proposals about the territory and subject to constant revisions according to the situations on the ground, the real terrain.
In fine, a living book writes itself. I’m thinking of titling it to catch a seeking eye, say:
FINDING YOUR FIRST NATURE
Nothing to know, Everything to be.’
~Part One: Discovering what we’re not.
~Part Two: Uncovering what we are.
Part One: Discovering what we’re not.
All ‘knowledge’ is theoretical; it’s necessarily limited and limiting with its conditioned descriptions about what we really are. All mind’s knowing is a labelling that belongs only to the mind, to thoughts that are believed to be actually real and factually ‘true’. That “Book Of Knowledge” has its place of course, in functional, technical aspects of living; it’s a useful servant but a poor master; it tells us nothing about the reality, the juice of life as it is, as it happens.
Thoughts are conceptual, mind-made and memory-stored representations about one’s actual direct experiencing, merely noted with worded, conditioned and fractional symbols about reality.
Awareness, here and now, is the unchanging alertness that’s ‘behind’ the reading of these words. It’s the direct, unfiltered recognition prior to body sensations and brain vibrations – the combined perceptions we’ve learned to think and believe are ‘me’ and not merely mental conjurings believed to be in fact, true. The subtle knowing of one’s aware being-nature is not a body/brain experience. It’s a knower-less knowing of one’s aware beingness.
In sum, all that’s finite and passing is beheld by the infinite awareness that one IS.
Well, what are we then?
That’s Part Two: ‘Uncovering what we are.’ That gets written only by a new ‘you.’ A whole being that’s no longer personal. That’s no longer conflicted with former personal desires and fears. That’s ‘you’ in name only. That’s open, fearless and free to simply be, to let all things pass before its loving gaze.
The writing of Part Two happens only here and now; it might be – it will be – whatever is happening, like sipping tea, or getting up to go to the kitchen, or maybe for a walk, – indeed, in aware living, you never know what you’re apparently going to ‘do’; you find out as you go, so to speak. Aware living is spontaneous, without motive. As Papaji used to say as he walked around with friends, turning and returning, now left, now right: “I don’t have a reason for anything I do.”
Indeed, in the natural flow of aware living, there’s not much call for motives and ambitions; not much interest in pre-determining. There’s just a simple abiding, a living-in this abundant here/now. A watching and acting in an appropriate accordance with the demands of the moment. An in-dwelling that’s always unknown, always fresh, always beginning. There’s a gentle curiosity mixed with wonder and delight. In fact, this Book of Living writes itself. The author is love. You are that love, loving. And where there is love in action, there is passion, a deep peace and joy in compassion.
That’s the beauty of it all; aware living is not so much like DIY ‘Do It Yourself’..it’s more accurately described as a LIBD – a relaxed ‘Let It Be Done’ There’s no doer and, what’s more, the doing is a passionately engaged following of a perfume that’s fragrantly full of the Unknown, of timeless subtle surprises way beyond imagining..there’s no Secret, no requirements, rituals and preconditions; drop all knowing, all beliefs that separate, and this whole universe instantly or perhaps gradually, will reveal its Self to its Self, its Being to Being. To be what you are, is to simply see that you are already aware of awareness. And there’s no telling of the wordless wonders of that endless mystery – only the living of it.
Love and Enjoy your Being-nature. 🙂
~ photo: Carlos Grasso.
