Thank you Ralph!
Be What You Are
The cage of self centeredness, which I have built around myself, a cage of words, is a phantom. It does not exist! The cage door is open right now. As a matter of fact, the whole cage can be seen to be what it is and will fall away right now.
The cage of limitations. Words: good/bad, pleasant/painful, positive/negative, possible/impossible. All words!
And the word is not the real. You can say ‘water, water’ for the rest of your life. Try and drink the word! The word is a symbol for something else. It is not the real. And yet when I say, ‘I’m no good’ or ‘I have low self esteem’ what reality has it got? Or look at it the other way, ‘I’m superior’, ‘I am better’. Is that what you are? What does that symbolize? Can it be there at all if there is no livingness?
Instead of trying to come up with an answer in the mind, wouldn’t it be wise to just be with this livingness, to be with this being ness, to settle down with this presence? Watch how it is expressing: feeling it shining through your eyes, lighting up your face, feeling the breath, seeing it as it is. Marveling at the very fact of seeing, of all the variety and diversity that it can express; marveling at all the different feelings that can come up in this way, instead of attaching to them and allowing them to build up until they get out of all proportion, until they have taken over exclusively the whole of that awareness and functioning, like a cloud covering the sun. We do this to the exclusion of everything else. We are seemingly lost in it.
When you stop stirring the water in the bucket, it becomes still. It doesn’t matter what your story is. ‘I should not have said that’ or ‘I should not have done such and such’. You’re stirring the water! Full stop! Right here, right now!
Even while the thinking is going on, I can be seemingly deeply absorbed in it all. Realize that there is still the sensation of sitting. There is still the hearing of the cars going by and whatever else is being heard. There is still the tasting and the smelling.
Bring it back into its proper proportion. What room is there for any problems? Problems are seen as they arise. The activity takes place as necessary. Then what is the problem? I can ask any one of you right now: what is wrong with right now unless you think about it? There is an instant pause while you try and look to see what is wrong. Realize that before anything can be wrong, there has to be thought. So you see, come back to that constantly. Right here, right now, presently, there is nothing wrong. Just the same as, what past is there unless I think about it? What future is there unless I think about it?
I hear some say that they can’t stand to stay in the right now, ‘I can’t stand it!’ When do you ever leave right now? When is it ever not present? The mind creates an image of yesterday or imagines and anticipates a tomorrow. Time is a mental concept. Now we are back where we started. Right here, right now, there is no one that is not present and aware of that presence. Is that so.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
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