blog without a name

So, there was a letting go, a giving up, a wandering through the wilderness for days on end. It happened because I could not bring myself to think about enlightenment, I became scared of it, worried about every little worry, obsessed about every little obsession. I did not know how to take the next step forward and I did not want to move from the space I occupied already because it was safe and secure. It was not where I wanted to be yet I could not move forward for fear of making a wrong move. I was mixed up and bound up in pretensions, smoke-screens, magic mirrors, thinking one thing, hoping it meant something else, believing it meant nothing and trying to understand that this nothing was beyond thought anyway, so what was the point? 

My writing had become painful, very painful; for every post there were three discarded attempts left behind, every word was pondered over, checked and verified against other ‘enlightened-speak’ I had read, each letter slowly tapped out, like I was bearing the heaviest cross up Calvary’s Hill whilst wondering, who am I fooling?

I was smelling a rat a mile off, a hundred miles off.

And I was forever in a grump about nothing, absolutely nothing, no reason; shitty with the kids, with my husband and with myself. I was even trying to gain some great insight into my grumpiness like, “Oh, it means I am nearer, that’s all,” and using it as a great excuse to stay like it.

Stupid idiot.

There was still something wrong here, something mightily wrong. In this petrified state, where I could not move an inch for fear, I had settled back into my own shell, like a snail curled up out of the dry heat of the midday sun. I had become happy with my own ignorance again, happy not to question the thing I thought was doing the questioning. Laziness had developed out of fear, because it became the easiest thing to do. I thought being happy ‘in my own skin’ was the order of the day, after all, I had been told to do ‘nothing else’ by the gurus out there.

So, the ‘I’ took over, set up shop and sat on its backside welding a reign of fear over itself. And there it sat and sat, waiting for – God knows what.

————

This morning I woke and picked up a book. A book I have read three times already, a friendly, happy book about nothing much. I read a random paragraph from this book and stood up to get on with the day. The paragraph told me to question who exactly was the person doing all this stuff and to ask where exactly it resided. It challenged me to find the root of the concept called ’suffering’ and find out exactly who it was experiencing this suffering.

Boy oh boy, it has certainly been labelled suffering by somebody, that’s for sure. 

And that was it: a couple of sentences, that’s all I read. Two sentences I have heard a thousand times before, wrapped up in a thousand different sugarcoatings; heard from old smiling men with beards, good looking guys walking in the rain, young women in clown’s makeup and bald men on the other side of the world, to name but a few. Nothing new, nothing new under this tired old sun, but this morning it was so fresh, so unbelievably obvious, I could not believe that I had been caught up for all this time in this painful charade called ‘one person trying to – piece by piece – work all this shit out’. How come I had read this book three times before now and not even seen what it was hinting at?

Yes! Who exactly is this very important person trying to work all this out? Who is this person wading through swamps of depression, fear, boredom, grumpiness, elation, doubt, rage, happiness? Who, me? I think it’s me, don’t I? I think all this shit is happening right here to this little old thing called ME? I am a concept, a dream of such huge proportions that I am able to push out even the most obvious thing from under my own nose.

No nose, no person, no concept, no worries, no fear, no rage, no suffering, nothing.

I got in the shower, yet, I was no longer the focus of all of this. There was a wide-open and full space all around, but there was no longer an I at the centre it. There was a body getting wet, there were feet on the tiles, there was heat coming from the shower-head, all as normal, nothing out of place, the same as every morning there has ever been, but, where was the person trying to get herself clean? Where had she gone and was she ever there at all?

My friend, thank you.