Extract 11 From What Changes

This change is the only thing that I had no control over What I discover now is that I never had nor ever will have any control over it That the stillness was always there That there was nothing to achieve That it was always way beyond me And totally was me, every atom No, it was never something outside of myself, but was something that I had to be still enough to see was always there As I am aware of doing now, curious about what is going on Curious about who I am, who I really am About all these layers and levels that form a human life that I am privileged to be able to view and feel and experience from the inside As we are all able to do, equally Each of us given this gift Consciousness happening now Without effort or specialness Without conditions, no ‘buts’ No one has more consciousness, nor less It’s just a case of knowing that that is the bottom line, nothing else Of trying everything else, of going round the houses Of climbing into the misty mountains and returning to the market place Of doing everything special and coming back to the normal Knowing that we are who we are Which is what we sought and what we saw in those glimpses that they say are difficult to sustain That created more division than we’d ever known before Thinking that we now had a higher and lower nature An ego and an authentic self, battling it out endlessly More divided than ever and further from the real Though even in that we never moved away Just that it distracted us Delaying knowing and feeling that it’s simply this, simply this Which is everything Including the battle between the ego and the authentic self and all other internal warfare Knowing that it is not who we are Noble and interesting though it may sound A worthy life project, do we dare to abandon it? That would surely be nihilism or defeatism? That would be worse than all the struggles and battles Like giving up Like dying We are the event horizon in which everything is happening Are we going to quibble about what arrives on that horizon? Accepting this and throwing away that? Nit picking for the authentic bits and chucking out the ego bits? Making the best of a bad job An endless wheel Distraction from the real Come down from the mountain, there is nothing missing here The real awaits us, for when we are ready