Tag: awakening

Every day when you wake up, it’s useful to believe that you’re going to get something done. Right? There’s an entire industry devoted to distributing planners, daily devotionals, tear-away calendars, thing of the day calendar reminders, and constant alerts to keep you on track, in focus, on the bandwagon. Not to mention a myriad of gurus, coaches, advisors, consultants, influencers, and other self-proclaimed experts to guide us as we toil. We seem to need a lot of constant prodding to keep us at our busyness, don’t we?

It’s a lot of work to be awake, isn’t it? Mindfulness is after all a full-time job. All that time paying attention (or as Krishnamurti put it, at tension). It’s supposed to be a way to reconnect, to rejuvenate, to synchronize our inner core with the parts of the universe from which it is made. And yet, when we “take time” to do anything that isn’t visibly productive, it always feels like theft. We’re absconding with those minutes and hours, pulling them away from their otherwise unfettered and absolutely useful purpose – to measure how much of our current manifestation remains available to us.

Add to that the idea that you are not this body, nor this mind. So who’s doing the minding? An aggregate of multiple sensations available for review only and exactly in this precise moment that has no permanent substance or form. You might as well be this body or mind, since they are equally as non-eternal. So nobody’s actually behind the counter; and in fact, the quickie mart that represents your 0 to 100 maximum acceleration in this lifetime isn’t really a thing at all. There’s nothing to mind, and nothing to mind it with.

OK. Take that a step further, and you walk straight into a series of contradictions or oxymorons. New and improved. If you’re new and fresh out of the crate each moment, the only thing you can possibly be is the best there is at that moment. Since time and space are merely convenient abstracts, there are no used to be’s or never was. There’s nothing to improve. If you’re improved, there was something that once existed that is now available in a fancy updated configuration – so it’s not New.

We take these paradoxes to be self-evident. There are roomfuls of mystical writings filled cover to cover with this kind of mumbo-jumbo. The more difficult a thing is to understand, we say, the more profound it is likely to be. Of course, we’re not completely sure. It’s like when you stand in front of a painting and nod knowingly, pretending that you get not only where the artist is coming from, but the language they used while visiting and what souvenirs were available at the duty-free gift shop on their way back. The truth is that we don’t actually know anything. But that can be a good thing. At least our religious traditions tell us so; after all, don’t they all have some reference to filling an empty cup but making a mess out of trying it on a full one?

When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, you will be ready to leave. But the secret is that there is no pebble and no hand. There’s no magic spell or esoteric ritual or hidden wisdom. There is just here and now. Again and again and again.

Enlightenment, salvation, epiphany, realization, awakening – there’s nothing to it. Really: there’s Nothing to it. You do it every day without even being conscious of doing anything.

Tag. You’re it.

03 APR 2025

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