It is not really evident when everything started, even the “how” is more like a conceptual memory. At some point, I was born, and this “I” unfolded through what was reflected to me, through what was projected onto and into me, by those who became my projection. I am the result of a long, sometimes painful but also fascinatingly miraculous history. I am the manifested subconscious of family and ancestors. I am all the unfulfilled dreams, visions, and desires whose seeds are planted deep in my cells. I am the darkness of not knowing, of the collective unconscious and subconscious that reaches far back into the beginnings of humanity. I am the resulting trauma and karma of separation, of seeing and seen, of perpetrator and victim, of light and shadow, manifested here and now in body and mind, seeking and projecting outward in all its diversity the imaginary other. I am born to die into boundless space and time.
The journey seeming eons-long, yet taking place only here and now, is marked by presence. Presence is a gift, a gift that discovers aliveness in all that is. It is the only true and profound ground capable of sustaining everything, it permeates impermanence. Presence stands indifferent and equanimous to all that is alive, accepting all that is and as it is, looking with awake eyes at the manifold dynamics of life, of becoming, of passing away and dying.
“I am dying” – at first this may cause discomfort, fear of dissolution, dissolution of boundaries and loss of control. However, when the “I” is no longer identified with the body, dying takes on a different meaning, and it becomes a process of liberation. When the “I” dies, detached from the physical, fiction ends – a “real” story constructed by the brain about me from the perspective of separation, a story that was sometimes believed, sometimes faced by resistance. Constructed boundaries that separated me from the world of the imaginary other, kept me away from it. Worlds that seem to coexist in isolation from each other, sometimes having more, sometimes fewer connection points.
When the conditioned boundaries of the ego dissolve, space expands into the sheer limitless, and as long as the ego-mind still participates in this process it may sometimes show fierce resistance to its dissolution – the end of its familiar stories – to the point of fear of losing its mind. The mind is the source of language, out of it conceptual reality is born and formed. Some profound experiences exceed the limits of intellectual understanding in such a way that one literally lacks the words for such descriptions. The miracle is truly unfathomable.
What remains when the construction of the “I” dissolves?
Awake and present awareness that is, perceives and recognizes undivided aliveness in everything that is. Thousandfold expression and form, colors and shades, from inconceivably beautiful up to disturbingly bizarre, a creative masterpiece.
This existence has given me two births: once the unconscious beginning of life, to which no direct, cognitive memory exists, of which only my parents could give testimony. And another time the birth into the awakening of the life force that erased history. Memory, heavy-sweet, bizarre-beautiful, whimsical-wistful.
At this point, beginning and end touch one another, and become one in timelessness.