Simply Being Alive

This one bottomless moment (the timeless, eternal Now) is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the immediacy of right here, right now. No words or concepts can truly capture or explain this ungraspable, unpindownable, evanescent living reality.

Thought conceptually divides, labels, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes the seamless flow of experience, creating a kind of virtual reality made up of apparently solid, separate, persisting things. But all apparently formed things, including people, are like waves in the ocean—inseparable movements of an indivisible whole.

Our thoughts, desires, interests, preferences, abilities, choices and actions also arise choicelessly from an interdependent whole of infinite causes and conditions. Nothing could be other than how it is in this moment. Realizing this is the freedom to be just as we are, including our apparent abilities or inabilities to change, heal or correct things.

When we think of ourselves as small and separate from the rest of life, when we imagine that we can have light without dark, when we believe that we (and everyone else) could and should be doing better than we actually are, when everything is seen from partiality rather than from wholeness, feelings of deficiency, anxiety, guilt, blame, conflict and dissatisfaction inevitably follow. We try to control ourselves and the world, we search for certainty and something to grasp, and we are endlessly disappointed.

What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no method, no future goal, only this ever-fresh aliveness, just as it is. It may be discovered that in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom.