All Is Well and All Shall Be Well

Pic by HKD Hartwig.  Free to use with attribution;  please no derivatives.

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

~ Jack Kerouac

The jury's still out for me on the self thing not lasting, Jack.  And the whole emptiness thing can be misinterpreted if you don't iterate that it's the most full and abundant and creative emptiness you've ever saw in your life.  As far as the self not lasting thing goes, I guess I'm probably a little too in love with the idea of That Which Passes Through Everything going on a mad cosmic creative-fest, making Herself bigger by birthing people who birth her in turn only to die but live to let that go just yet.

But for all of that, that idea, like my self, might just be one more beautiful idea I am privileged to swim in for a while :)  She may well be just as happy to let it all wash away, like some beautiful beach mandala.  Or maybe it never ends.

Recent days have been anxiety-fuelled, and I haven't very easily been able to find the end of the thread that runs out past the anxiety.  Or if I do, and I follow it out past the inflammation and other symptoms going on in my body which are creating the anxiety, and I find the lotus space in which to sit even in the midst of shit, then it only lasts for 10 minutes and then I'm freaking out, man, over nothing and everything. 

It is hard in those days.  It is hard and it is fucking shit and yet I am learning in those days how to care for myself better, and I can't begin to tell you how awesome it feels to continue to befriending the things inside me that I hate and project.  It feels like I can't talk about it because I will ruin it by it sounding mushy.  But it's wonderful.. 

And so everything passes, even those days, and I am learning just a little more to ride them all.

Well, sometimes :)

Pic by Danny Howard under a attribution-share-alike licence