A Spiral Path...

I'm such a typical Capricorn about so many things in my life, and often have had to remind myself and be reminded that nothing about life is actually so linear as my mind tries to make things. Everything in life is linked and interdependent. Every event or happening effected by every previous happening. And yet, nothing is happening whatsoever.

As I get cozier with, and actually digest, the notion that everything is connected to everything, I'm re-introduced with what I experience as a liberating perspective ~ it's 'how' I show up that's profoundly more important to my experience than 'what' I'm actually doing. And it's not like I just read about this on Twitter and am telling myself some cute new narrative to make life seem more bearable. I've heard about this for as long as I've been interested in knowing what the heck this life is really about. However, until recent years, it was just another 'idea'.

I don't even know how well I can explain it (in language) to myself, as I'm mid-stream with the living of it. It's playing itself out through and around me. I'm just becoming more cognizant of it through my experience.

All the paradigms I reach for to put words to this whole thing seem stuck in, rooted in, an 'either/or' perspective. The main one being 'interior/exterior', as in living life from the 'inside-out' or from the 'outside-in'. However, nothing about life is that simple, or that linear...

It seems to me that the only way through all of this without going crazy is to keep contacting direct experience of consciousness itSelf...without trying to make rules for future practice out of any of the experiences.

Consciousness/Awareness is the game itself. It's not becoming conscious, it's recognizing experientially Consciousness as it already is. And that happens through direct experience. Any of the books, scriptures, chants, cd's, classes, lectures, etc.....ultimately the biggest gift they can give me is nothing in contrast with direct experience.

The challenge I've begun to recognize more clearly with time is that on the heels of direct experience, my intellect, left to its own devices, will nearly always try to make some sort of meaning (usually in language, starting with trying to narrate my experience to me while it's actually happening, as if I really need a 'play-by-play' when I'm in the experience) out of the experience, and usually in Language...words.

Well, the thing about words, is that they're fun and all, but they're always talking 'about' something without being the thing itself. Those Taoist bad-asses were quite fond of telling their students that Words are like fingers pointing at the Moon, the word Moon is not the Moon...at some point, depth of Awareness emerges as the pointers (in whatever form; teachers, words, books, memories) are let go of in favor of Direct Experience of Reality.