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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4109, Sunday, December 19, 2010
Everything Under the Sun
Look around you; there is only one reality. The reason that you
are here, wherever here is for you, is because it is the only
place that you can be right now. But even though reality is right
here, and even though there is quite literally nothing but
reality, it is very possible for you to miss it altogether. By
miss it I mean to imagine that reality is something or somewhere
other than here. As strange as it may sound it is very possible,
even probable, that even though you have eyes to see, you do not
see. And even though you have ears to hear, you do not hear. What
you see and hear is not exactly what is actually here, but what
you imagine is here.
Our imagination is a very powerful force in determining what we
perceive. If we imagine that the world is teeming with evil
forces, we will surely perceive the world as evil. But if we
imagine the world to be essentially good, we will perceive it as
good. Either way it is the same world that we are looking at. But
the world is neither good nor bad in and of itself; it is simply
what it is. And if we see the world as either good or bad, we
will not be able to see it as it actually is. We will only be
able to see it as we imagine it to be.
Now take this idea and apply it to everything and everyone in
your life. Try it for a moment, or an hour, or a day. And if you
do, you may begin to notice that the world you imagine to exist
does not exist at all. This may cause you some fear, or possibly
the thrill of discovery, but either way the important thing is to
get some distance from the habitual way the mind contorts and
creates perception.
But even though our mind imagines the world and everything in it
to be other than the way it actually is, the reality of existence
remains eternally untouched by our misperception of it. This is
both relatively good and bad. It is good in that existence is
eternally what it is. We need not worry about reality becoming
something other than reality. But it is bad in the sense that the
world we imagine to exist is always colliding with the world as
it actually is. This collision is the cause of immense human
suffering and conflict.
So we are trapped within our illusions and misperceptions. And
the greatest illusion of all is to believe that we are not
trapped. But even when we realize that we are confined within a
prison of our own making, we are trapped because all the ways we
struggle to get out of our illusions are illusions themselves.
So, yes, we are trapped, and helpless to boot.
But there is a very strange thing that can occur at exactly the
point where you realize that there is no escaping the imaginary
world of your illusions. You bare your heart open to illusion,
surrender your eternal struggle against it, and admit to being
bound by its cunning imagination. I don't mean that you become
despondent or resigned to your fate. I mean that you truly let go
in the face of your utter defeat and stop struggling.
And when all the struggle ceases, we realize that the prison of
our mind cannot hold us in anymore, because the prison was all
along something we imagined into existence. And imagined things
aren't real, they don't exist. But we could never really see this
as long as we were fighting the phantoms of our minds. We needed
the one thing that our imaginary minds could not bring about,
could not fake or create: the genuine surrender of all struggle.
In the blink of an eye, we are no longer confined within illusion
nor our attempt to avoid illusion. When all struggle ceases,
there is nothing to bind us to a distorted perception of
existence and we can finally see. What we see is that we do not
simply exist within existence, but all of existence exists within
us as well. And although everywhere we look we see the endless
diversity of life, we also now see our own true face in
everything under the sun.
- Adyashanti