Hold the Knowing

This morning I awoke to the sound of birdsong and it sounded exactly the same the birdsong that I would hear outside my window as a child. And in that moment, time dissolved. I realised that nothing had changed -- nothing. That which is “I” is precisely the same, and it has been along along.

I could almost experientially see how time and space are just illusions of mind, whereas “I” am unchanging, eternal. It doesn’t matter what experiences are perceived and witnessed in consciousness, or how time appears to be so tangibly real, stripping away people and places, ageing my body and the bodies of those around me...I am unchanged by any of it.

There’s something deeper and more Real, and it’s always there, the space in which experience and thoughts and forms and perceptions appear and then disappear. And that space is alive and far more Real than anything in the phenomenal world.

This Realness is in everything, is animating everything and yet these manifestations are not ‘it’, they are merely the effects of this underlying, all-pervading cause. In the same way that consciousness is the fabric out of which dreams are created and experienced, the phenomenal world is a world of flickering dream-forms, created by the underlying Realness. This Realness is always there, in everyone and everything, yet we’re so accustomed to relating only to the surface level that the true Reality is almost always forgotten. This forgetting was the true ‘Fall’ of humankind and it can be reversed at any moment.

How do we stop falling? By ceasing to get stuck on the surface level of life with all its never-ending dramas, conflicts, turbulence and strife and seeking the deeper, underlying Reality, the space in which all the forms of life arise and subside - the sky in which the clouds appear and disperse.

Know yourself as the vast open sky and don’t get lost in the delusion that you are the ever-transient, insubstantial clouds that pass over it. That’s all. That’s enough. Watch the clouds, but BE the sky...and hold onto that knowing.

“If you knew how important you were, you’d explode into a million pieces and just be light.” Byron Katie

Of course, the momentum of mind is great. You’ll keep ‘losing’ the knowing. We didn’t just ‘fall’ once, we fall repeatedly, each and every day. But in each moment, we can pick ourselves up again, until maybe someday something within us will decide that it’s tired of continually slipping into forgetfulness. But, I’ve come to see the importance of being motiveless. There’s no goal and nothing to seek and nowhere to be but here, now.

Just BE. And hold the knowing.