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For whatever you are going through, others have also experienced it – perhaps not in the exact same circumstances, but certainly in the same pain. Loss, break-ups, disappointments, illness, death – these are not ‘yours’ but ancient rites of passage, cosmic rituals that all humans, if they are honest, have been through and must go through if they are to be human at all.
had returned to guide us through our own trials, reminding us, ‘however intense it becomes, know that you are not alone, and this is meant to happen, and many others have been here before.’
“Do not fear, child, this is only an ancient rite of passage, a natural part of the journey, to be expected and to be embraced, and all is well”? Through the eyes of this ancient universe, nothing in your life story is a small event, nothing is insignificant and unworthy of loving attention. There are zero ‘ordinary’ moments when seeing through these ancient eyes. Everything is ‘religious’, everything is sacred, everything has more significance than you could ever hope to imagine. And this way of seeing beyond the ‘I’ can help take us out of our self-pity and obsession with our own problems, and into a place of universal connection and deep compassion for all those brothers and sisters who, in their own unique ways, are on exactly the same journey as we are. We may live apart, but we do not go through life alone.
WIDE OPEN SPACE I would never say that I am ‘awakened’. I would never say that I am not. Why? Because I cannot find any solid, independent entity here that could ever be one or the other. No story about myself can stand here in the vastness. No story can take root, no conclusion can settle. All I find here, when I take a fresh look without prior assumptions, is a wide open space in which the dynamic scenery of life plays itself out – an alive space inseparable from that very scenery, a vast and unlimited ocean inseparable from its myriad waves, from thoughts, sensations, feelings as they arise and fall. And so any claim of enlightenment or awakening or their absence is wonderfully irrelevant here, in the already-awake vastness that belongs to nobody at all.
JUNE You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. Become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Franz Kafka
A UNIQUE FLOWER You are a unique flower, with your own irreplaceable scent, your own way of moving in the world, your own uncopyable creative dance in the breeze. A rose does not say to a lily, “I wish I was you, I wish I had your scent, your curves, your colours, the way you attract the light…”, for it knows that in essence they are one and the same being, consciousness itself, one flowering as two, and that the unity of consciousness manifests as diversity and difference and astonishing variety, a variety which is itself a call to the remembrance of unity. A rose sees its own essence in the lily, and the lily in the rose, but they also know to honour their own uniqueness and irreplaceability, their temporary flowering in time and space. Be the essence, and love your flowering, love the taste of yourself, your unique flavour, your special dance that cannot be replicated, never feeling superior or inferior to another flowering, never longing to delete your own flowering, never blaming other flowerings for the way you flower or do not flower, for other flowerings are wildly uncontrollable too, forging their own path towards the light.
Sinking deeper into the grief, you may discover that you haven’t actually lost something or someone ‘outside’ of yourself at all. You’ve actually lost a part of yourself, a part of you that made you feel fully yourself, and that’s why it hurts so much right now. You don’t feel fully yourself anymore. You feel broken, incomplete, like a fragment of ‘you’ is missing, like a piece is missing from the jigsaw of your heart. How can you be fully you, without them? How can son be son without father? How can wife be wife without husband? How can brother be brother without brother? You begin to wonder if, in fact, the part of yourself that you ‘lost’ was really ‘you’ at all. How can you truly lose a part of yourself? If you can lose a part of you, was it actually ‘you’ in the first place? You begin to wonder who you really are – or who you really were – beyond your dream of yourself.
The ghost of loss no longer frightens us – it is a friendly ghost after all. We have only been given the experience of knowing our loved one, feeling them, touching them, smelling them, feeding them, holding them, even witnessing their passing. What a privilege. Life cannot take that away – it has only given, and it continues to give, if we have eyes to see it. Perhaps their life and death unfolded in the only way it could have done. Perhaps they lived the path that was right for them, even at the end. Perhaps they died exactly on cue.
The device of our torture becomes our salvation. Remember Jesus on the cross. When faced, and not turned away from, our raw grief can serve as an ancient and timeless nondual spiritual teaching, a dynamic and alive teaching, a wake-up call to that heart-breaking compassion for all of humanity the likes of which we once could have only dreamed. The impermanence of things is natural and neutral, and everything passes, and that in itself is not wrong or bad – it is the way, and has always been the way, and will always be the way. Loss is only a rite of passage. It is when we forget or deny the impermanence of things, and dream of permanence and try to fix our future, and then our dreams are shattered by impermanence, that we suffer and fight the way of things.
INSTANT FORGIVENESS Everybody is doing their absolute best, from their own relative perspective. Because of what they believe, their worldview, their perceived limitations, their fears, their wounds, the extent to which they’ve forgotten their true nature, the unique way in which they are healing or trying to heal, or not healing at all, they have no choice but to be the way they are right now. Great forgiveness can arise from seeing that everybody is a slave to their own opinions until they wake from them. And you cannot wake someone until they are ready, and perhaps not even then. They know not what they do.
AI Summary
Falling in Love With Where You Are by Jeff Foster and Matt Licata presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.