Tag: reality

I’ve always found this time of year rather strange. I find myself surrounded by people both off and online looking back over the previous year and/ or looking ahead to the next.

I find myself doing neither. What’s done is done. Lessons will be learned or they won’t and what’s to come will come and the degree to which we have any conscious agency over any of it is (as I always boringly say) greatly overstated.

The only time that matters is now, the present moment – forever on the cusp of what’s gone and what’s unfolding. Neither memory nor imagination. An ever fluid liminal zone, ungraspable yet vitally and vividly apparent. Reality in the raw.

Nothings comes next, this is always it.

From radical nonduality, you get nothing. Or put differently, you get everything, just as it is. Radical nonduality is not about improvement or progress. It offers a description of reality, never a prescription for how to fix it. It suggests no path, no methodology, nowhere to go, nothing to do other than what is already happening effortlessly by itself.

— Joan Tollifson, Death The End Of Self Improvement

What if you did not separate yourself from the experience that is here now – whether that moment is a dark sky, a dark mood, or the joyful giggles of excited children? What if you allowed your heart to open to ALL of life, all experience – not just the things your mind imagines “should” be here? Why not awaken to the truth that what is here is an expression of a perfectly whole Reality, and invite it all back Home?

— Dorothy Hunt

Previously I posted here about my soft spot for Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. On further reflection it occurred to me that one of the reasons it resonates so strongly with me as an adult (having first fallen for it as a young child) is it embodies a romance of the (American) open road.

In my youth I was lucky enough to fulfil my adolescent dream of driving across North America (east to west) and travel back (west to east) via Greyhound.

Looking back on those memories I can barely detect the boundaries delineating the reality of it from the dream of it. Such is the unreliability of the mind when it comes to certainty about anything. Perhaps it is in this liminal zone, prone to suggestion, that our unconscious emerges unbidden presenting us with desires and aversions of which we were previously unaware or had forgotten.

Wasn’t it Jung (of course) who once said:

What you resist persists.

If you can’t integrate/ assimilate traditional ancient wisdom into the ordinary reality of your own lived experience then you’re completely missing the point.