Waking up can be
much more painful
than the agony
of your dream,
but waking up is real.

~ John de Ruiter

John de Ruiter, J Krishnamurti and UG Krishnamurti are alike in seeing clearly that the courage needed to turn to ‘look one’s self in the eye,’ to face the void or the faceless is far more than most of us possess.  This is why we invent esoteric worlds of power, magic, the paranormal, and fantasize about what we think ‘awakening’ might be – or endlessly read or listen to the versions put forth by those ‘in the know’ – rather than truly facing its shattering nature. UG’s words are uncompromising:

This state is not in your interest.
You are only interested in continuity,
probably on a different level,
and to function in a different dimension,
but you want to continue somehow.

You wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole.
This is going to liquidate what you call ‘you’,
all of you – higher self, lower self,
soul, Atman, conscious, subconscious – all of that.
You come to a point, and then you say “I need time.”

So Sadhana (inquiry and religious endeavor)
comes into the picture and you say to yourself
“Tomorrow I will understand.”
This structure is born of time and functions in time,
but does not come to an end through time.

If you don’t understand now,
you are not going to understand tomorrow.

What you are looking for does not exist.
You would rather tread an enchanted ground
with beatific visions of a radical transformation
of that non-existent self of yours
into a state of being which is conjured up
by some bewitching phrases.

That takes you away from your natural state
– it is a movement away from yourself.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence.

You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence;
nobody need give it to you,
nobody can take it away from you.

He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.

~~~

It’s almost a decade since she-who-scribbles tumbled into the free-fall that would bring to an end her notions of who she was and the nature of self, mind, and world. Re-reading UG’s words today, especially the line “You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence;” brought on an outpouring of gratitude. Who’d have thought that the estrangement and agony, the confusion and the sheer vertigo of dropping out of every version of a self would eventually be known as a blessing, a grace beyond words? But words are all she has, so the song goes like this:

the blessing

emelle says

homeless
I found the unassailable
rock of refuge

penniless
I found the treasure
that can’t be bought or sold

exhausted and ill
I found healing
in that which is ever whole

purposeless
I found delight
in every uninvited chore

outcast
I found my tribe:
the wild wideawake
wanderlings
whose only muse
is this nameless name
and whose only beacon
is this unlit light

 ~~~