There Is Nothing You Can Do.

There is nothing to be done. There is nothing you can do, or that anybody, any apparent individual, can do. Our thoughts are not ours. They arise, and we say, I thought that. But there is no one, and thoughts only arise in this. Each thought is a gift, though there is no one to receive the gift. Thinking happens. Perhaps the thought "I must meditate, and achieve the state of ideal bliss and emptiness" arises. But awakening, liberation, has nothing to do with any kind of practice. Liberation is the falling away of me, or you. Then there is just thinking, feeling, sitting, driving, hurting, laughing - just happening, to no one.

Despite this, there are no cobwebs in the corners of my humanity. There is such stupendous grief and bereavement that my breath stops from the heaviness of it. So many tears, so much sadness. Misery feels especially miserable when there are no filtres to ameliorate it, no anaesthesia to deaden it. In the story of my life that seems to unfold, there has been given to me the gift of a broken heart. " 'Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all." -Tennyson. I don't think it's better to have loved and lost, I know it's best. "Through love we feel we are greater than we know." -Wordsworth. Love is a little awakening; it offers a taste of it; we sense, we feel the boundlessness that we are. "Please help me mend my broken heart, and let me live again." -the Bee Gees. I don't want my broken heart to mend, not ever, because there is such profound sweetness and in the sorrow; empathy flowers in the gash. The absolute vulnerability, the poignancy of the human condition, the inevitability of endings and death are all a vibrant, living, breathing thing to me. No hiding from it - no running from it - just being it. Anything might happen at anytime, it is a swirling void, but there is no one who needs to be safe, and nothing to be threatened by.


Yet all this thrilling living, this sometimes sensible and often irrational thinking, this deep and all-encompassing emoting just happens, to no one. I use the personal pronoun, but I am bound by the prison of words. If I dropped all the pedantic semantics, I'd never say anything.


Maybe that's best.