What to Do ?

But what do I DO !? I don’t know what to DO !

The year prior to the Gate crossing was pretty ordinary in most respects.
Good health.
Daily meditation.
Daily inquiry.
Still enjoyed reading lots of spiritual authors,
especially J. Krishnamurti, Adyashanti, Nirmala
and eventually, Elena Nezhinky.
Installed a new air conditioner right before the heat of summer.
Attended a cousin’s wedding in June.
Pretty ordinary.

Except for one thing.

Month after month, this thing gnawed away in the back of the mind
like a dog gnaws her favorite bone.

Sometimes I could put it out of the mind for a while,
by directing attention elsewhere.

Eventually, attention returned to the gnawing;
to a question born of exasperation,
met again and again
by the stony silence
of empty space.

“WHAT…..DO…..I…..DO…!?”

I read all these cool books.
These people are AWAKE, right ?
They KNOW something, right ?
(or at least, they un-know it)

So, in order to get to where they are,
it follows that they had to DO something.

To become like them, 
(obviously I was not like them) 
I had to figure out what to DO.

Well, what did THEY do ?

I loved reading J. Krishnamurti,
but I didn’t really get what he was talking about.

Reading more didn’t help.
I didn’t know what he did.

I also loved Nirmala’s writing.
Reading one of his books; Nothing Personal,
and contemplating a passage or two on a silent retreat, actually drifted
right in front of the Gate once, before getting slammed back;
nearly paralyzed with terror by a “me” that was fighting for its survival.

This experience led to a course of daily inquiry practice that lasted until the Gate,
16 months later.

But I didn’t know how effective inquiry was going to turn out.
I didn’t know that it was “working” at all.

Nirmala went to India.
That’s what he did.

I had heard this one before.
That was not what I needed to do.

Adyashanti meditated for 14 years, sometimes 4 hours or more a day.
His awakening story, which I listened to again and again, was not a doing.
It was something that happened to him.
This was certainly not something that he did.

I still didn’t know what to do.

Stumbled across the blog COMPLETE HUMANITY.
Faithfully, even voraciously consumed every post.

The blog consisted of dialogs of people who would chat
back and forth with this woman, Elena.

After a while, something happened – a big shift in tone –
suddenly everyone spoke very differently,
and everyone was happy and Elena would ask the guests:
“What does it feel like to be liberated?”

I didn’t get it.

What did they do ?

I heard Elena reference this other blogger,
Ciaran Healy, and went reading through his blog archives*. (*no longer existing)

He used a video metaphor; saying how we imagine
that we are separate from everything outside of us,
as if we were watching a video.

He noted that the things in the video “outside” seem to act upon us “inside”.

He then asked how could this be ?

What could possibly hold back
all the space outside from the space inside ?

This is only imagination.
We are not watching the video.
We are the video.

There is no one watching.
It’s all just the video.
With no watcher.

Watching happens.

The watcher here collapsed.

And I hadn’t done a thing.

Awakening happens when seeing beholds the self’s absence.

Can anyone DO anything to make it happen ?

It’s not about doing.

It’s about looking and seeing.

Look the right way.

The absence is never not here.
Even as you read this,
it’s here.

It can’t go anywhere.
It can’t be lost.
No one owns it.
No one can make it happen.

Yet it is see-able, 
many have seen it,
and lots of us live from there.

Is there a doer at all ?

Once seeing beholds the absence, will it matter ?

**********************************************************

Elena Nezhinsky’s blog COMPLETE HUMANITY still exists. The masthead comes from completehumanity.blogspot.com . Currently, people interested in guidance for crossing the Gate are directed to this site : http://liberationunleashed.com/

The symbolic gate in the circle pic comes from the same site.

The map of India came from here: http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/india.html