To Seek The Light Of Truth; While Truth The While Doth Falsely Blind The Eyesight Of His Look.

Memory and speculation happen now. Pain and separation happen now. Bliss and the quiet mind is happening now. The paradox, hated by the mind, that we are both all one yet seemingly alone, happens now. You are what you are now. Not in some nonexistent future; the future never is; all is now. There is much habitual delving back into the story, taken seriously by the mind which only sees itself. There is much lauding of practice, of readiness, in the mind for "enlightenment" to happen. It can certainly seem to be a practice, a practice that can be realised in many ways. All practice has the goal of stripping the ego of its importance, allowing what is to be more readily apprehended. Yet no matter what the apparent state of mind now, no matter what is perceived and how that perception is interpreted, you are what you are now.

What is - the wall, the keyboard, the faint hum of traffic, the feeling of the body on the chair, the thoughts that note these things - is often dismissed. The story that the mind tells itself about what is happening is similarly discredited. The feelings that arise as a part of it all cry out to the mind to be explained; the"why" of it is craved, the sense of it all being purposeful and orderly is demanded by an ego frightened of its own demise. All these thoughts and judgements and feelings are said to be nothing, meaningless, unworthy. Yet the paradox that the mind dislikes perhaps most of all is that those thoughts, sensations, and feelings are boundless, timeless existence, despite their seeming solidity and logic and narrowly defined importance. You are what takes note.

The practice of peeling away at the ego is laudable. It unfolds choicelessly. Whether it be at the foot of a guru, with the nose buried in a book or two or twenty, face to face with a sympathetic therapist, or in self-help groups, empathy and tolerance can convince the mind of the possibility of oneness and the unimportance (and beauty) of the ego. However, it must be said (by who?) that whatever you are, you are now, "before" the ego is "ready". The message that there is no teacher and no one to teach may paradoxically be the teaching that forces the ego to realise that there is nowhere to go, no blissful state to seek, nothing other than what is, now, because now is all there is, and whatever it is that is noted, it is the noting that never changes.

And now, for all you frustrated seekers. From The Wizard of Oz, the clearest parable of seeking, its lesson being that we always have the power to go home, and, in fact, are always home since the journey is but a dream. Here is the best reaction when the guru says you were always home in the first place.