Читать книгу Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings On Awakening - Jan Inc. Frazier - Страница 11

What is it to live in paradise, in human skin? It is to feel the moment-to-moment of existence as aliveness, awareness, as pure being. This is what is primary, always. Not what the moment holds. Not the content of life, but the container. The sensation of plain being. It is exquisitely pleasurable.

Whatever comes along in life is just there. Things don’t give rise to ideas about them. Opinions, preferences. It doesn’t happen that way anymore. The impulse to approve or disapprove has broken up. There is too much light for it to exist in. It is as if all the old ideas about who you are and what your life is about (or what you wanted it to be about) have lost interest in themselves.

Nothing “means” anything. Each thing is just itself. Then the moment passes. Then another one comes. When it’s over, it’s really over.

If you imagine setting aside all the accumulated sense of who you are, who you have been all your life until now; and imagine a quiet mind (day in and day out, quiet, unless you ask it to do something for you) — if you imagine these two things, a mind with no inner need to be in motion, and your sense of yourself and your whole history blowing away like milkweed fluff — and if you further imagine that you are still very much here, are alive and aware and physical (imagine, imagine) — well, there is no present you will ever miss. You have become the present. You are pure attention. No longer ensnared by idea or memory or hope. Just here, throttlingly awake. You resist nothing. Whatever comes is allowed. Is bowed to. You don’t hurt anymore. (When you don’t resist, you don’t hurt.)

You notice that aging is happening. People you love are in trouble. The world is a mess. You are quite aware of it all, maybe more than you were before, when fear ran you. You can take anything. All is tenderness. Your heart is big and cannot be damaged.

Every little thing you do or see — every little, ordinary thing — carries this tingly sense of being. It is hard not to cry sometimes at the most unspectacular things. The lines of the walls in relation to the flat of the floor. Its horizontality. The nap of the rug. The sound of the car going by. The smell of the skin on your arm. All is miraculous.

You have forgotten why it ever mattered so much to forgive or to be forgiven. To get your own way. You can’t remember why you wanted so much to be, finally, understood. To be on the receiving end of love. You have trouble remembering what it felt like to fear death, to mind getting pulled over by a cop.

When you lay your head down on your pillow in your dark room, there is no murmuring in there. No rehash of the day, of the life; no anticipation of the morrow (which you know will take very fine care of itself when it comes). All you know right then is the feel of the pillowcase against your cheek. All you know is the silence in the room, the peepers beyond the screen (or the traffic, if your bed is near a highway). Like a stone set down on the surface of a pond, you drop into sleep that is profound. If something wakes you in the middle of the night, you don’t curse being pulled up out of sleep. You don’t start thinking. All you know is beloved, beloved, beloved. It is all beloved.

The mind no longer runs on automatic. It is like an obedient dog. It responds when you ask it to. Without a request from you, it will not do anything on its own. Torment is gone from your days.

It is easier to describe what is absent from paradise (mental and emotional torment, resistance, effort) than it is to portray what is present. What it feels like. The sweet, plain, steady sensation of aliveness. Joy. Cherishing. There is such a feeling of cherishing: of self, of other, of life, of all that is. It is so restful. Everything is allowed to be as it is. Everything is enough. Every moment is the whole world.