Hello Rupert,
I am deeply appreciative of the care you took in responding to my email. I first ‘met myself as consciousness’ ten years ago, and I responded to that meeting with devotion and surrender. Even so, I still seem to spend much of my time enmeshed in mind structure and identification. Although I am blessed with frequent daily tastes of the nectar of consciousness, the thread of suffering persists in my life, to the extent that I sense there is some final cut or release that hasn’t yet been made.
My devotion is to turn back to that silence again and again, whenever it occurs to me to do so, but I wonder if there is some way that I am standing in my own way and preventing the complete dissolution of the self-contraction. I am wondering if the complete dissolution of the self-contraction is even an actual possibility, or is it just another thought?
In this love,
Murray
Dear Murray,
Your expectation for an event in the future is preventing you from sinking down deeply into your own presence in every moment.
What is wrong with this and every moment that it needs to be replaced with something better in the future? It is only a little thought, made out of almost nothing and lasting just a moment, that deems this current experience unacceptable and needing to be replaced with ‘enlightenment’.
It is this sense of lack that compels the search for a new experience in the future. Whether that future experience is imagined as a bar of chocolate or ‘the final cut’ is of little importance. That just depends on how sophisticated our mind is. You, like myself, have a sophisticated mind. It is more interested in enlightenment than chocolate!
Explore this sense of lack completely. Without the ‘I’ story that is attached to it, it is just an innocuous bodily sensation. This bodily sensation appears in and is made out of the very presence that is being sought in the future.
Everything anyone ever truly wants, that is, love, peace, happiness, beauty, resides in the knowing of our own being, in this presence. It is here shining at the heart of every experience.
The sense of lack veils this knowingness and projects it into the future. Until this is seen clearly, the search will go on. But the search will never find what it wants precisely because it veils the very thing it is looking for. This is not a suppression of the search – that doesn’t work. It is a dissolution of the search through understanding or clear seeing.
Forget all the colourful enlightenment stories you have heard. In most cases, especially in cases where the body-mind has been well prepared over a number of years, the impact of this non-objective recognition on the body-mind maybe almost negligible. It may even go unnoticed to begin with.
One of the subtler ways the self-contraction perpetuates itself is by trying to get rid of itself. Any kind of agenda for or against the ego is just more ego. Who wants the ego to go? Only the one that imagines that presence is not present. In other words, the ego is only a problem for the ego.
Completely welcome the self-contraction. It has no more power to rob you of yourself than does a dark cloud or the sound of traffic. Sit with it until you see that it is completely neutral. Welcome it, allow it, love it. Let it be and it will let you be. It thrives on resistance. See that it cannot touch you.
Say to it, ‘If you want, you can stay around for ever. I don’t care. You have no power over me. I am simply going to remain with myself and you can do your thing in the back room.’
This is the only thing that self-contraction cannot bear: ‘benevolent indifference.’ This benevolent indifference is not something you can do. It is what you are. See that and be that.
With love,
Rupert
