To Us

Before I say anything else, I want to express my gratitude to all of you for the existence of Maria...because it is absolutely true that I would not be here as I am (whatever that means) without you being there as you are. You are the other end of me.I used to make jokes about moving to a cave in Tibet and adopting a yak, all in the name of finding Peace. I recently said something about becoming a nomad--which sounds like leaving, moving on, abandoning the system. I really am all for creating systems that work, even if that means creating a "no system" system. Whatever. It's all a great story. But the more I run, the more I can't escape myself. This feels like a terrible kind of prison, until I realize that it isn't life that is imprisoning--it's the silly belief in a separate Maria, in a personality apart from the world--that brings on the feeling of somehow being behind bars.I see that the belief and the feeling arise together.So what happens when I stop believing in the fictional character? What happens if I don't buy into the story of my life (or anyone else)?For entertainment purposes only, I'll tell you how this works.Typically, I wake up before I think I'm ready, to an alarm from the clock or bladder or cat. I am blank for a few seconds. Then thought rushes in, and I immediately construct myself by "remembering" who, what and where I am. This is followed by instructional stuff like "make coffee", "bathroom", "throw cat out/let cat in". By the time I'm on my feet, I've added lots of things to the mental me, such as "Ouch, my back! Oh, yeah, appointments today...ugh, feels like another hot one...global warming?...can we afford to put in air conditioning? Probably not...damn economy anyway..." and so forth.A while ago, this way of being continued on through the day, usually accompanied by escalating tension and dread, with brief bouts of humor or philosophical resignation or relief-by-fantasy of some kind. At night, I would generally collapse with the incessant chattering of my own brain to keep me company, and sometimes the idea that there just HAD to be a better way to live.But now, sometimes just after I wake up, more often an hour or two into my day, I catch myself making up my life--and there is a halt, a stop, a silence.The fictional "I" dealing with fictional problems dissolves like smoke. For a while, there is pure, untouched and unadulterated life. I am that. Thoughts appear, but they are only thoughts, only trees, sky, dishes, people. breathing. Then I will follow one of those thoughts and believe things like, "I need to...I should...I might...he/she/we/they..."...until the next reminder-from-nowhere, whereupon I vanish, again, as if I never was.This vanishing somehow creates a really big space--edgeless, actually, and timeless, in which life just happens ceaselessly as itself. There is no need of "me". "I" do not have to keep things running. There is no reason to attempt to prop up reality according to "my" terms and concepts. Reality does very well on its own, by itself, unmarked by any attempted ownership on my part!I may as well be dead...woohoo, I may as well be dead! Yay! What a REAL relief!! By some miracle, I am still here, even when I go nomadic and the wind erases the footprints I think I should leave. There is a very clean world under the mental one. There is a world that is so unconditional that even terrorists are allowed to exist, as well as our perfectly flawed selves and our crazy ideas about morality and all that.What happens is a non-conceptual reality, with no lines or divisions, perfect freedom and zero actual problems. Vast space, in which the thinking mind knows it's own limitation, and allows what really IS to function limitlessly. Ha! That makes no sense, does it? But that is what results when I try to communicate something non-linguistic using language. More silliness on my part, I guess. :)I can no longer take credit for anything I've ever done. Another way to put that is, I can now take credit for absolutely everything anyone has ever done. All the same, all the same. "Finding Peace"? What the hell is that? Kind of like trying to see sight.I really don't miss me, not one bit.Love you.