Sometimes the sweet synchronicity of life is enough to render one speechless.  I’ve commented several times about how Awareness – aka Freedom, Beloved, Reality, Truth, or whatever your pet word for IT might be – excludes nothing, and I mean nothing.  Surprisingly, perhaps, an opening, a softening towards this unknowable essence seems to relax one’s default defenses and allow some pretty challenging stuff to surface.  Not that it must be ‘dealt with’ or analyzed or healed or anything – that doesn’t occur to one. The stuff comes up, it’s allowed – without a story unfolding – tears flow or not, and it all vaporizes.  It can be heavy, but Awareness remains unmoved.

What changes, in terms of one’s experience, is this: the relationship with what arises from within, or what is dealt from without, is radically different.  Suffering simply doesn’t occur, because there are no preferences being trotted out.  And it seems that the more one’s default position is that of quietly resting as pure undivided Awareing, the sweeter, easier and calmer life becomes.  (Well, it always was thus, but one’s been too busy organizing it to notice.)

So I’ve always been slightly mystified by those who claim that this utterly natural state somehow obliterates the undesirable bits of human experience.  They write or speak of attributes like love and compassion and bliss – which they often prescribe practices to develop.  Is it even logical to consider developing that which is already utterly natural? I’m not sure which part of the goose isn’t cooked for such folk, but they haven’t got to the stuffing yet.  So when this little gem arrived from Jax I took out my cheering pompoms and did a little dance.  No, I wasn’t photographed – unseemly for a woman of a certain age … chuckles …

But the biggest mistake that almost all practitioners and teachers make is to think that when one is in Awareness, that one will have a pleasurable, peaceful, spacious state free of uncomfortable emotions, ego and confused thoughts.

Actually Awareness has no content of its “own”.  It is not bliss. It is not clarity.  It is not love.  It is not peace.  It is not compassion.  But it is present in all of those as well as every other possible experience equally.
~ Jackson Peterson

Speaking of women of a certain age, I can’t resist sharing a tit-bit from my favorite stand-up comic of the nonduality circus – wideawake Viki Woodyard. Vicki is someone who knows a great deal about the kind of tough cards life can deal. But she grabs the chocolates and scribbles on:

Today I have eaten sugar again and again. Why? Because it is there; heaped on the kitchen counter are a marzipan Yule Pig, a Mozart Piano Bar, a chocolate Santa, a coconut wreath, Godiva Peppermint Truffles and Gems, Lindt Truffles, Dove Chocolates, A Smore wrapped in cellophane and a little box of Jelly Belly Bean Boozles. These feature jelly beans with the auspicious titles of Skunk Spray, Pencil Shavings, Canned Dog Food, Barf and yes, my favorite, Baby Wipes.

I look in the mirror and see a pasty face with a terrible haircut. See a woman who has recently been crying and not becomingly. Is this the girl that started out on her spiritual quest determined to find the meaning of life. That slender sylph that had dark hair and naturally arched eyebrows. Look again. She is now squarely in her sixties, a writer coming into her own at an alarmingly advanced age. She is usually frank, truthful and edgy. Couple that with graceful, simple and tender and you have a fraction of what it was to be married to said writer. Nothing I would wish on anybody. Nevertheless, someone is looking down on me with love and hoping I will find my way to being a real writer one day soon. What does he know, sitting up there on his fluffy white cloud? The guy needs a Bean Boozle if you ask me. I still have a Rotten Egg and a Booger left. If that won’t entice him to come back down here on earth, I don’t know what will.
~Vicki Woodyard

It’s gotta be the ultimate Reality check, you know:  can you recognize the Truth in a barf or a booger?