here and now

Those who sell special states, progressive paths of becoming - they are like flashlight salesmen in the middle of a sunny day. They are trying to sell you something of which you have an abundance.

If you think you are not there yet, you have been misled or are missing the point.

You ARE there, you ARE THAT - you are already what you are seeking. You don’t need to gain anything or become anything or go anywhere to be or get that. What-you-are IS THAT, right now.

So what changes? Only the idea you have about yourself changes.

You once took yourself to be something which comes and goes, like the clay pot. The pot was shaped - then we gave it a name - “John” or “Mary”. It went along just fine for a while, then it broke. The pot was ground down and reused to make another pot. “John” is gone but the clay from which it came is just fine. Nothing happened to the clay. The pot comes and goes - it’s just a form - a form OF CLAY, yes? So the essence is clay - the form is pot. Pot is transient - appearance - form - when pot is formed no new existence is born. It is merely an expression of something which already IS. That IS-ness, that CLAY - simply expresses as pot or cup or plate. The essence - clay - remains no matter what the shape - when the shape changes clay remains.

Yet we take the pot as a new existence - a thing of itself - we overlook it’s essence - we ignore clay and refer to pot. We give pot absolute existence, as if existence is something which can come and go. Can existence turn into non-existence? Where would it go?

So we are stuck on the appearance -we give absolute reality - which means “independent existence” - separation - to the thing, to the pattern, to the appearance, to that which was formed and dissolves, to that which was born and dies. The body is a pattern. It is formed from something - that something was formed from something. We can break it down but eventually it leads to nothingness - we get to a point where we can break it down no further. Yet we can never deny the existence - that IS-ness.

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There is a slight buzzing of the computer, a gentle sensation of hunger, a faint sound of a bird calling in the distance, the feeling of the butt in the chair.

All these, without exception, are pointers to enlightenment. It is in overlooking these, in pushing them aside to make room for some special state yet to come, that we miss the immediacy and immanence of reality, WHOLE reality, right here and now - just THIS and nothing else.

So-called enlightenment isn’t yet to be found - it is every “where” and every “thing” when we know that appearance AS appearance isn’t reality. When we take appearance as absolute, we are fooled by our own ignorance. When we truly understand the relativity YET underlying reality of appearance, we are on the cliff-edge, so to speak.

When we know that anything which appears must be of one essence, then we cease trying to make the world do our spiritual bidding and the world is allowed to be just as it is.

After all, the world of appearance (the pot) is nothing but what it IS (clay) - what it IS is undefinable - ungraspable - it expresses as everything yet the graspable, expressed appearance we don’t want - we reject it - we place conditions upon it - we overlook the mundane in preference for the extraordinary. We desperately seek clay but continue to throw out all the pots in search of that one special pot. We miss the clay with every pot.

All the while, the mundane and the extraordinary, the absolute and the relative, the essence and the expression, the form and the formlessness - the clay and the pot - are the SAME THING.

It is THAT which you miss, over and over and over.