This moment is enough. Life is enough. The way things are this moment (whatever the particulars) is plenty. The Latin root of “satisfied” is satis (in English, “enough”); the root of “grateful” is gratus (which means “for free”).
But these words of mine are not a lesson in language. Stick me with, love, while I get to the point.
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When a person is truly in the now — even when it’s something experienced as bad (so long as full acceptance attends awareness of what’s happening) — then there is a sinking into the real. Bizarrely, this radical being-with can actually feel good, even as the thing itself is not so welcome. Because to yield puts us in the moment, and anything that brings us fully here feels good. Oh, maybe not so much the specifics of the now. It’s allowing the truth of reality that is restful.
This radical being-with can actually feel good, even as the thing itself is not so welcome.
All-that-“shouldn’t”-be has no meaning. None of this can be fathomed with the ordinary mind. Visualize an animal picking over the fresh bones of another creature, sniffing for remnant flesh, hungry for sustenance. What I struggle to describe is like that: fundamental, elemental as that.
This is not an injunction to go out and try to become this way. It is saying: when liberation comes, this is how you will have turned out to be. A person cannot try to experience every moment as enough and expect to thereby become that way. But when the blessing comes, when the morning is awakened to that all torment has been lifted from you like a delicate cloth as you slept, what you are sure enough left with is the constant feeling of enough.
You have been relieved of wanting, of dissatisfaction. Of judgment. Actuality overwhelms the possible, the desirable, the how-it-once-was.
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Also — something Franklin Merrell-Wolff has written about in his books about awakening — the real is at something from a distance from you now (whoever “you” may be, a hazy thing for sure). Merrell-Wolff calls it the high indifference. You see the oh-so-real clear through, but you are no longer defined by whatever human life is delivering into your hands just now. You are not of it. You’re unflinching in the face of it, curiously unmoved in the way you’ve been accustomed to.
You see the world go on. Outer things work as they work, the way they always have. Meanwhile, delight surges through your bones in each delicate movement of your body. If you are sick, it’s okay. If money is in short supply, it’s all right. It’s just the way it is.
You are constantly in the middle of a miracle. You cannot go anywhere or do anything or have anything done to you that leads you to feel you’re anyplace but in a miracle. When someone lifts a metaphoric “gun” at you, the bullet goes through you and comes out the other side. (Yes, when Mahatma Gandhi had an actual gun aimed in his direction, it killed his beloved body. But those who witnessed the violence reported that he seemed to be, in the final moments, at his accustomed ease.)
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There are subatomic particles that regularly streak through apparently solid masses — people, walls, planets — and are never felt, never seem to disturb what they pass through. Life feels like those subatomic particles. It goes right through you, but you don’t register it. Not in the old way anyhow.
None of it changes you. You are just the same as you were.
It is about satis: enough. If enough is the rule of the day, of the moment, then all is well, constantly and profoundly well. Even when your heart is breaking because someone you dearly love has just died.
You cannot make yourself be this way, I don’t think. God knows people try; it doesn’t seem to work. But if you wake up one morning and feel lighter, if you have the feeling of something having changed when you slept, you will notice it is this way. When dissatisfaction picked itself up and left you, when it peeled itself off every inch of your sleeping body and slipped out the window, it left you light, buoyant, at peace.
When you get up, feel how light you are. How willing to dance. How at ease you have become! What a blessing life has turned out to be. Satis, satis, satis.
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It was thanks to Franklin Merrell-Wolff that I came to understand, now many years ago, what had happened to me when I stopped suffering. If you have not read anything by him, pick up one of his books. His language is somewhat formal and “stilted,” for he was writing in the long-ago era when that was the mode. But oh, my love, is it worth the effort! His insight into the marvels of clear-eyed consciousness is stunning.
I wish you well, each moment you live.