WHAT’S ESSENTIAL?
When I am content
What is there to do?
For doing is not Being,
As looking is not seeing.
Within days now of my 81st birthday, I’m moved to explore what it is that sits with me a lot more these days about a lifelong need for authenticity – not that which drives a religious man perhaps, but more about a deep, beneficent ache to not live in Storyville. To dwell fully in what is, as is, seems to be necessary and sufficient. I’m drawn constantly beyond the mind’s continuing fictions, believed consolations, invented dramas, and unceasing conflicts.
However, it occurs to me that I’ve spent decades and decades in the throes of all that, in the desperations and despairs of being, it seemed, a guy named Jim or James in hot pursuit of events and experiences that, for a merciful time, seemed to calm the inner storms. “Got a new life, got a new wife, and the kids are fine,” as the song goes.
But nothing calmed for long – fortunately. I say that, looking over my shoulder at sundry pains and partings of living in the imagination of actually being a person, an entity called ‘me’. That personhood with its dreams, schemes, and conceits, is seen clearly now as the source and substance of my – and in truth, all – human suffering. Most of that has fallen away in memory, largely because it’s not maintained these days. In “dying before one dies”, the stains and pains of yesteryears have died while yet one lives and breathes the freshness of this present nowness; this simply common, always sincerely real and aware beingness.
That said, while the story is ended, and all that IS, is now, I occasionally come across some old note or associative prompting that has ‘me’ posting some of them here, with an apology to myself and my reader accompanied by a cautionary note not to be too much distracted by any stories requiring belief; to move beyond mind-made conditioned conjuring’s to non-personal experiencing – to the direct, first-hand observation of one’s experience exactly as its occurring, whether it’s seemingly outside and/or apparently inside. And to note with wonder that in fact there is not a ‘person’ who is acting in their personal world.
In truth, there is no substitute for that actual, direct, totally life-changing insight. That essential knowing that I am and not knowing what I am, there being no knower. That awareness is necessary to real peace and beauty, harmony and joy. That’s basically what keeps being realized and said these days. Clearly – from self-knowing – looking, listening, and learning (including and beyond this mysteriously wonderful human hum) is only real, only substantial, now. That, and this: B Y O A. Be Your Own Authority. Let Love lead, and all is well.
