A seeker’s aching desire to awaken is not apart from, not different from, what comes to many a regretful human being on their death bed. Oh that I had truly lived! That I hadn’t squandered each precious moment, as if I had forever.
This is what it comes down to, dear heart. To have not missed the sweet feel of really being here, moment to moment. To know this now for the jewel it is.
It isn’t the end of pain we really want. It’s to know what it is to feel alive. It’s love we want to know.
It is not only the earnest spiritual seeker who comes to that terrible reckoning on their death bed. This is the human condition. Spirituality is a sham. Life is not about finding a way to end pain. That is what drives nearly every person who wants to wake up.
Whether or not we know it, seeker or otherwise, it’s the most deeply longed-for thing: to know the thrilling sensation of aliveness, in this very moment. If you think being awake is different from this, think again. If you think waking up ends the experience of the breaking heart, you are deluded.
Don’t make waking up into something it isn’t: something grand, beyond the physical, beyond the deliciously human, the embodied.
Stop the infernal seeking after something you hold in your head. Whatever it is, that isn’t it.
When they say You already ARE it, you just don’t realize it, maybe they know what they’re talking about. Stop looking. Stop wishing for a different future, in which you will have found it. The “it” you ache for is the now: it’s to feel yourself being in this exact moment of life, pain or emptiness or whatever else it might hold. Stop running from yourself, for God’s sake. Cease wanting reality to be different from what it is, in this moment: this felt moment.
It isn’t the end of pain we really want. It’s to know what it is to feel alive. This very moment. It’s love we want to know — the purity of love that is “for” nothing and no one in particular. Love itself, undirected. Needing no object.
Just hold still. Breathe. Feel yourself breathe. Feel your beating heart. If it wants to break, let it break.
That is all.
[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]