There Are No Deals.

So many seekers of "enlightenment" (or whatever we call it on an early Friday morning) want to make a deal with oneness. The mind has some very specific ideas about what "awakening" is like. For a start, "everything" is "better". Life is easier, we're happier. The mind thinks this is going to be great. We'll see that nothing matters, that we have no choice, that everything unfolds as it must, so there will be no discontentment, no despair, no misery. What's wrong with discontentment, despair and misery? And who is it that's going to have this easy, blissful life? The appearance of these feelings are just oneness, as is all appearance. They are the source, unconditional love, which is all-encompassing and allows everything as it is everything. These ideas are about the separate individual in some "better" state. Liberation, enlightenment, awakening, whatever it is you want to label it, is about the death of the individual. It is the scariest thing of all. There are no deals with oneness, dealing is necessarily dualistic. If you have to string it along in a story of cause and effect, for "me" anyway, it seems I'm the same mind/body organism, with the same apparent conditioning, who has the same worries and concerns. What is missing is the veil of me, the box of separation. Misery is miserable, joy is joyful, "times" of transition are uncomfortable. It all seems to carry on much the same, but extraordinarily, inconceivably differently; in an endless moment, where the leaf on the tree and the banister under the hand is subtly changed, where I seem to drive a car through myself, where I look at apparent others and know they are me, and I am them. There is beauty in it all.