Sedona, AZ — I judged, and not surprisingly, felt judged. I looked out and saw another’s good fortune and felt a wealth of poverty. I equated being smart with being lovable, forgiving with offering myself as a sacrifice to the gods of repeat abuse, honoring my needs with being selfishly self-focused, standing for another, and cheering them on, with deflating my own rise. I confused strength with independence, and quite naturally found myself self-sufficient and alone. I didn’t trust, even though I pretended to. If I trusted, it was for life to let me down. I didn’t feel loved, even when I was loved absolutely, because to be honest, I didn’t know how to love.
Fear of being let down, something I’d experienced so many times, was in control. I didn’t know I was sabotaging myself, and my world, that I was the one letting myself down, until I did.
I believed so many lies and paid a high price for their protection racket. They were not my champions; they were the epitome of hell.
It doesn’t take a big leap to go from seeing what we messy silly precious humans do, what we think and feel, how we instinctually try to protect ourselves, to recognizing the source of our pain. It’s not what’s happening. It’s the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our world, about what’s happening and what should and shouldn’t be a part of our world.
It’s easy to see how we slip into the groove of self-limitation, accepting this but not that, how we don beliefs that rather than offering safety, choke the life out of us. It is an organic flow of unintended consequences, a flood of resistance and rejection that piles up until it is too high to see over. When we are sufficiently invested, so far in that we take it as a given in life, it stealthily deepens, widening, leaving nothing but itself in its wake.
You know this. You feel this.
We believe the lies that we’ve acquired. They are battlefronts, reinforced with the powerfully painful experiences of life, unbreachable until something happens to blast the choke points to smithereens.
But … life always has a surprise up its sleeve, a trick card, a sneak attack, the experience you won’t see coming until you are staring down its throat, it’s breath hot and sticky on your face. You make a choice, shifting direction, or so it seems, for it is no longer possible to camouflage the lie.
Life’s a grand tactician. It won’t let us erect houses of barbed wire forever. It is always offering us an out, the opportunity to remember, to open our eyes to what’s really going on. Every single experience is the opportunity. In that sense, we live in a state of constant resurrection. We’ve only to see what is, rather than what we think it is, and the lies of life lie down like a well-trained pup.
If you can think it, it’s a thought … thoughts about thoughts about thoughts … the thought of you, the thought of something interacting with you. Thoughts don’t think. They are simply energetic blips on the radar screen on call your life, not a lot different than sensations and feelings.
If you can express it, it is thoughts put into words, words based in duality, words that will always fail to express the truth. Truth needs no thoughts or pretty words, not even the words of the masters. Their words were dead language the moment they were spoken, and misunderstood every time they’ve been referred to since. Falsities come wrapped in pretty clothes. They require a covering, a false front, for beneath the words, there is nothing at all. Truth requires nothing, and even that is saying too much.
Every single thing we’ve learned takes us further from our true inheritance, the inheritance of our simple beauty, our innate goodness, the love that is not just our birthright but our brilliant harmonic being. And … every single thing, even the hellish experiences of life, brings us closer to that moment when life’s trick card appears.
Paradoxical? Indeed.
Hell is another idea, a thought about what is. It is the idea that something is wrong. What if nothing is wrong? What if nothing has ever been wrong?
Want to read more from Amaya? Her new book, Actuality: infinity at play, explores what actually is and the reasons we look right past the staggering reality. At Amazon in paperback and e-book. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY