Fourth Form of Madness

I’m presently being struck by one reoccurring thought all the time. What is my experience of life? I’ll be at work typing emails and worrying about getting things done and then this question will ask itself in my consciousness. I could be doing yoga, having dinner with a friend, chatting with my husband and there it appears again. I don’t think it is being asked for me to list all the things I do in life. That is doing, not being. I think it is serving as a reminder to me that life is not felt through the senses, through the mind. These are the faculties that produce the stage that we paint up and prance around on and dearly love to call life. I think it is asking me to take a leap, truly trust in something deeper and uncreated and be in that, be in life.

I am only now starting to understand that life remains a constant. There is no good life or bad life, it is just life. Only a self can bring judgment of good or bad. A self trained by a society to think like the rest of the group, taught what is an acceptable experience of life and what is not. A self encaged by a desire for security in a world which is in no position to make good on that contract. This same self that constantly experiences sadness because things haven’t gone her way, happiness because she feels like she is controlling everything, stress because she feels like she isn’t in control and anger because all is not to her liking. But what are these feelings and where do they come from? They have the power to create the atmosphere of your world, and we often refer to them as “just part of life”. I think they are indicators of how we can get closer to life but they are not life. They are perhaps our greatest most powerful creation but they are just a creation, all smoke and mirrors. Every feeling or emotion shows us where we are “still on stage”. Still performing for the masses. Behind the emotion, when the mind is still, comes knowledge of the most valuable kind, self knowledge – the whole reason we get the gift of consciousness.

So in my constant mulling over of “What is my experience of life”, I am focusing on the vehicle of what I experience life through. I want to quieten my minds analysis of all the sensual material brought to it. I no longer want to think of myself as just a neural pathway, reacting to receptors. I am not that. I want to trust my instinct on another way of knowing that comes from the quiet and dwells in us all. I want to be in life, be of life and be life.