Sometimes life can become tiring or worrisome. Life can feel like you're waiting for your lottery to come in and it hasn't yet and you're wondering what it would be and if it ever will, and so on.
The thing to remember at such times is that you've already won the lottery, big time. Just to show up in human form in this consciousness is already to win the mega-lottery of all time.
We could have shown up as a frog or a rose or a pebble or a galaxy or a housecat or a blade of grass. Instead we showed up in this human form. And to realize that the infinite is everything and that you yourself don't actually exist is like you've already taken your seat at the party with the rest of creation.
The animals, the birds and so on are basically having a good time, because they're not involved in thinking. They don't feel that kind of separation that comes from hanging out with thoughts and beliefs and stories.
When my cat Nicky got an infection in his hip it was finally reversed but it left him with a limp for awhile. But he didn't have any story that he shouldn't have a limp, and he wasn't comparing the limp in his mind to how he walked the month before. It was simply what was to him. Not being caught in concepts, he doesn't feel the separation that they bring.
Because of no-thought, all of creation is basically at a party, even when things get hard, because they're not feeling the separation that we do.
Only humans and other conscious entities really suffer. Only conscious entities have the ability to conceive of themselves as a separate thing, to construct the idea that they're a personal somebody. And with that inevitably comes suffering.
Once we have a separate identity, then we're trying to keep that entity safe and secure and comfortable. We're concerned about how things turn out. Things need to be "right." And we can tell you in exhaustive detail what's wrong. What's wrong with the world, what's wrong with other people, and what's wrong about our life.
There is no fundamental healing from that except to see into the nature of mind itself. To see into the nature of these thoughts and beliefs and stories that we worship, that they're empty and meaningless. Or rather, that they're great stories, but only great stories; they're not reality.
Reality is what the world looks like without thought. Not that thoughts are gone. Ever try to stop your thoughts? A hopeless task. But when we don't take them seriously, when we let go of getting involved with them, then they become just this beautiful decoration. Ah, there's a yellow flower. How beautiful it is! Ah, there's a sad thought. What a beautiful flower that is.
Then we notice the thoughts and stories, and appreciate their beauty, but don't buy in any more. We don't identity with them.
Least of all do we identify with all the thoughts around the personal "me," this self-concept we've constructed through years of thinking about ourselves, this whole house-of-cards edifice that's built out of thought.
To truly see that it's all empty is liberation. The greatest freedom imaginable is to realize that you don't exist as a separate somebody. Suddenly you are set free. Life goes on as before, and it even looks as though you have intention and purpose, because things continue to happen.
But inside you know that nothing is happening of a personal nature, that's the mysterious vastness—which is you—is simply able to appreciate itself though this human form.
So if life turns out this way, good, you're meeting yourself. And if life turns out that way, good, you're meeting yourself. You're just meeting yourself everywhere, so how it all turns out ceases to matter. It already did turn out, here it is.
The deepest truth I know of is that everything just is what it is. It just is what it is. And isn't that beautiful...
—jim sloman, 01/28/01 for Jan 28
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