Experience is the path to the Holy Grail, the finger pointing to the moon, a Zen koan, the sweet sound of a dharma bell. Experience, just as it is in this moment is the perfect prefect, the sacred enforcer, the blackboard on which life with its pieces of chalk writes, “Look carefully and see what’s real.”
Experience, whether entered into fully, with righteous hesitancy, or as many are wont to do, kicking and screaming; engaged in its slippery slidey messy entirety or scrubbed and polished to within an inch of life itself; lived with authentic aplomb or mule-ish resistance, teaches and informs, shedding light on that which attempts to pass for darkness.
We cannot help but receive the message and learn its lesson as we experience the reflection of our inner state cast back in all we see and feel. Painstakingly slow or a quick rip, it’s easier to hold off giving the sense pot another stir and let experience be. It’s less painful but not necessarily easy to do and with that said, resistance too, is a valid experience. You might although, want to notice if you resist the resistance. Double the trouble can be informative but ups the pain quotient exponentially. Sometimes it takes difficult lessons to teach great difficulties so give yourself and your experience a break. All lessons can’t be painless and easy, or can they? Perhaps, who knows?
The lessons are built right in. Whatever we are going to experience will find us. We cannot hide from it. Life is a moving picture show of experience with no ending and no beginning, just movement and change. Anything visible, sense-able, is experience appearing via the screen of awareness and what shows up in awareness is ours to experience.
Experience without awareness is as silly as awareness without experience although the latter happens during deep sleep. We are aware beings. We aren’t always aware we are aware and aware of how beautiful awareness is but we are this regardless, cannot avoid this we are even when we avoid the recognition. It is what we are, recognized or not. We tend to get lost in experience instead of abiding as awareness and miss the peace and happiness part of the show.
We wonder why life sucks, why we feel lethargic so often, why we want something anything to just stand still and cooperate. It won’t. Nothing does. Everything is naturally, effortlessly blipping in and out of awareness. That’s the nature of things. Nothing, except one non-thing, is permanent or at least it shows promise 😉
What has never changed? What’s the same today as it was when you were six years old and will still be the same if you make it to 100? Now that’s the question. Has awareness ever exited stage left or right for that matter? Does it play its role, take a bow and skedaddle? Does it age? Is your awareness separate from mine? Can you find the place where yours ends and mine begins? Does it exclude or does it simply receive whatever appears?
Even in deep sleep, awareness is faithful, never leaving, always present. Deep sleep, pure primordial thing-less sleep, appears minus you, sans things, but not without awareness. That’s the reason you can answer when someone asks how you slept. Awareness remains. Without the clutter of the senses, the emptiness of your being refreshes body and mind, freeing it to experience more experiencing. Deep sleep is a mini-death, a practice run, a test balloon to show you death is not real. Even the experience of sleep teaches.
Awareness transforms itself into experience. Experience is the action element of the Non-Moving, of the silent stillness. Experience is the way shower, awareness of experience a step along the sacred path, awareness of awareness the true Grail. Awareness, pure and empty, receptive and creative permeates all experiencing, is experience. One cannot be without the other. There is not two. There is not even one.
There is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Engage with Amaya at your own risk. www.amayagayle.com
