By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Sedona, AZ –I don’t know how many times I’ve written about this question. Guess whatever it is that is trying to reveal itself hasn’t escaped the confines of my mental emotional physical process to make itself known or the need to write about it wouldn’t keep presenting itself.
Maybe there is no answer, no solution, just the continuous experiencing of the question. That feels accurate and happily the continuous experiencing often has a way of pointing my feet, soothing my heart, bringing clarity to the moment. I love how that works. Most call it progress or evolution. I call it life.
Is my focus on the horror unfolding before me the best use of my life, the truest way I can assist in humanity’s awakening? I am absolutely aware that life is a storybook, a dream of lives and living, of earth in a cosmic play, of all the ways we deny the reality of the unreality, in short, that life is a substantial simulation. Does playing the game focused on the ever-changing contents of the game, rather than remaining consciously aware of the sim-nature of life, benefit me or anyone?
Play, it seems I must, as long as I appear to be embodied, but all aspects of that statement remain questionable. Must I play? It seems so. Even being aware of the game isn’t a free pass to get out of the game. Is there an I who chooses to play, or for that matter, plays? Seems to be. Feels real. She seems to have choices but damn, I am aware of her. She is the known. Is she the awareness in which she appears as well? Is it even possible to remain consciously aware. How could it not be? How can I be other than as I am? So many questions. No solid answers.
If you’ve read my musings before, you know this isn’t the first time I’ve asked this question. The game has a strong pull, and yet, I resurface and ask the question. That seems to be part of the game, too.
We get pulled in, and swim to the surface only to get pulled in again.
Before I asked the question, life was behaving as it was. I did what I did because I couldn’t have done differently. Now that the question is asked, there are openings for a different kind of different. Whether this will change my course, is yet to be seen. Perhaps this is my 100th monkey. Perhaps it is only number 10. Does it matter? It seems to matter at times. Who knows whether it really does. Is there a really?
It appears to matter to those around me who see me as engaged, caring, compassionate, as human, just like them, who want me to be angry, like them, who want me to shout and carry on, like them. But I am not simply human, nor is anyone. While I am in the play, while this avatar I call me is a character in the play, awareness of the play and the avatar(s) is present as well.
That seems to be why I can hold up a sign in protest and seem serious while not taking it seriously, why I can read about the atrocities and deeply feel for those who are suffering, can actually feel their suffering, and not suffer.
Honestly, I don’t know if it matters whether the country falls into authoritarianism. Yeah, I know, blasphemy. Yes, different people will hurt, more people will suffer but hurt has always been with us. We’ve let the suffering be, left it to fester, to ache, unable to fix the hurt, to heal it, to change the system that perpetuates it. It should be no surprise that the festering wounds, the infection, has spread and now leeches into the entire body of life.
Perhaps matters is the wrong word. No word is purely accurate. It matters. Everything matters, and yet again, nothing matters. That’s the balance beam that runs through life. It matters on the appearance level, on the down and dirty, in the trenches level. Compassion and caring, horror and suffering are experienced and on the appearance level, with the snap of the fingers, the entire display is washed away in the flood of time as if it never was.
At the level of a deeper more profound understanding, something that is not a thing at all, is not washed away. From this view, nothing ever happened. This I Am, this awareness we are, this which never changes, remains.
This avatar cares about people’s suffering. She professes to truly love others, and yet, her caring, her loving, is limited. Maybe that is the way of avatars. She didn’t protest all the horrors that came before, genocides and starvation, the slow takeover of people’s minds, the quiet absorption of all that was good in our world. She didn’t stand in front of city hall, day after day, demanding that poverty be addressed until something was actually done. She didn’t write letters imploring those in power to address the issues that mattered. She didn’t sit down and refuse to move. She didn’t do any of those things until it directly impacted her, until her status quo was impacted, until her way of life was threatened. Unlike the rare ones who put their lives on the bleeding red line, she let it unfold.
She is a character in a play, a character who believes, or at least believed, she is real, that she was different from the others, that she loved while most didn’t. She didn’t understand what true love is.
Love is our lesson, learning how to stand for love: honestly, calmly, non-threateningly, non-shamingly, non-coercively, unabashedly, unapologetically, risking it all for love. For what is the real risk? Not loving has brought us to this point, has unleashed the demons within, has pushed love into a shameful corner, has brought us dishonor.
Yes. These times are a gift. We are being taught to put down childish things and be true (hu)mans.
When Kenny was weeks from his transition I was massaging his neck and shoulders, and our consciousness sprang out of time and space into seamless eternity. When it slammed back in it left a message and it was clear as could be. “This cancer is my gift to you.” At the time I got it, but I didn’t truly grok it all the way in. I do now. It is the same gift that we are being given now, that life is always giving us.
It is going to be alright. It is already alright. Life is unfolding in perfection even though it may not seem that way to you. Be open. Love. Love the best you know how and you will be shown how to open wider, to love more purely, to be fully in the world, and not of it, both at the same time.
Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY