By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Sedona, AZ — We live our lives balanced between human and divine. For some of us it is conscious; for others it hasn’t yet risen into the realm of faint possibility. As long as we have a body, as long as we are playing our role in the story of humanity, we will teeter on the brink, tottering back and forth between what appears to be two options.
Divine: my definition is not at all what it used to be—the glorious essence of God, an other-worldly being, a co-creator of life, God, Goddess, holy, sacred. They’re all great soundbites but not how I’d give meaning to the word divine today. I used to be able to define divine. I don’t seem to be able to anymore. I have no words for this we are, for infinite aliveness, that actually tell you anything, that can break through well-honed understandings, or ideas about what my words mean.
Suffice it to say that is part of the problem, part of the reason we seem to balance between an amorphous divinity and our humanity.
It’s the reason we thrash about unable to determine a course of action, unable to decide whether stepping off the sidelines of life is actually the right thing to do. The question hangs in the air: Am I of better service simply by being presence, regardless of what appears to be happening around me? It is, after all, an appearance. None of it is real in the way we have been conditioned. We are living an illusory life, as illusory beings, with illusory beliefs, so is my angst, my anger, of service, and if it’s not, why does it feel like it is so important to weigh in and why do so many get angry when I’m not angry too?
Even within the balancing act the idea of two, of choice, of heaven and earth, human and divine arise in the arms of separation. Separation is not the enemy. It is a necessity to experience human reality.
Now I’m laughing. It doesn’t take very much to tickle my funny bone. This is hilarious at times. It’s the curse and blessing of this human gig.
The thought pattern that is trying to figure out which behavior is of service is just that, a thought pattern. It contains ideas of being of service, of being less than useless, of right and wrong ways to be, of choicelessness and self-determinism, of causing harm and affecting good.
If this illusory appearance I call me is to weigh in, she will … and she does. The human compassionate being takes the lead. The weighing in or sitting on the sidelines, a monk in a worldly cave, happens if, when, and why it does. To ask the question assumes the ability to find a comprehensive answer, presumes a separate individual with a choice in the matter, of which there is none, no answer, no individual, other than it happens because it does.
It is not right or wrong to weigh in or to sit on the sidelines. Whatever I am doing is what life is doing as me, through me, through choices that arise, and I appear to make, along with all the other beings and choices here in this particular human sim. I am not superfluous to what’s happening. I am as much, and as little, a part of the story as the thoughts and beliefs, the choices and their consequences.
In the sim, I am a character with choices, and I make them even when it appears I make no choice. That’s where the confusion, the balancing act gets unbalanced. There is no choice that isn’t a perpetual narrowing of options leading to the choice I’m going to make, but it’s still a choice. If I am sitting here thinking there is no actual choice, and no me to make the choice, so there’s no need to choose, and I’ll just sit on the sidelines, I am still making a choice. I am an actor in the sim, choosing, being. experiencing. I can’t get out of the sim. As long as I have a body, I am in the sim. Maybe afterwards too. How would I know. Regardless of my reality or unreality, I am appearing as a character making choices, living a life. For me, whether that life is lived in the sim or physical reality (as the material world thinks), is no longer up for debate.
That basic paradox is the sensation of walking a balancing beam, the frustration with not being able to find a definitive answer, life lived in unhinged indecisiveness. The more aware I am of what this actually is, what I am, the more pronounced the sensation is, that is until this simply lets go into what is without trying to figure it out, and I, the character in the sim, don’t control that letting go although it happens through me. Talk about bleeping paradoxes.
There is no answer. There isn’t a right way, only the way I am currently living. There is no way out of the sim other than death and I’m not sure that will do it. There is merely me acting out my role. I have no idea what I’ll do next or if there’ll be a next. Does the sim know? Does it matter? What happens, happens. I’m along for the ride and sometimes it feels like I’m in the saddle. Sometimes it feels like I’m the horse and sometimes it seems that there is no horse, no rider, no saddle. Which is true? Well, all of them, of course.