I was reading a passage from Adyshanti’s book, “The End of Your World.” This book about awakening is a valued part of my pre-sleep rotation library. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it, a few paragraphs at a time before sleep. But this particular night, three words jumped out at me and refused to let go.
These three words weren’t even particularly related to Adya’s instruction about how to deal with old conditioning. Suddenly, in the middle of his discourse, he drops the line…“You are life.” After which, he returns to his subject matter without further explanation.
What? For some reason, that one atomic bomb of a line grabbed hold of me and, as my friend, Marina, likes to say, “It stopped my world.”
“Could it be that basic?” I asked myself. “Is that all I am? Just life energy, moving, vibrating, doing its creative thing?”
As I considered it, I felt one more thread of attachment to an identity dissolve. I understand that I’m much more than a person—a separated being with a personal history, a family, and a body who will die someday. But could it be true that I’m nothing more than life energy, completely neutral and totally unbound? I was willing to investigate.
I could feel the life energy that animates my experience. I witnessed an ever-moving parade of phenomenon. Sensations, thoughts, feelings and desires…the movement of experience never stopped! I watched, I noticed, I marveled at the ever-changing flow both within and without. After a few days, a serious question arose, “What about Being?”
I also know myself as Being because I’ve hung out in that place of complete stillness. I absolutely love it there, where there’s no movement happening at all, where the only recognition is a sense of presence. This, too, is my Self.
I must be both. My individuated life seems to be two sides of the One Source. Sometimes that Source moves—breathing, beating, creating, growing, and expressing. Sometimes the Source is still. It’s the same Source of all, both doing and being, at the same time.
While I endlessly express, experience, think, and create, at the same time, I am also constant and unchanging, inextricably partnered with essential Being. Which part of my Self I’m aware of at any time depends on where I choose to put my focus. The life I’m creating Life is an expression of Being.
My experience supports this. Something within me stays the same, best described as a sense of being me. “Here I am; this is me.” My awareness of being alive, of being me, has never changed. It’s been there at every age and stage of my life. I call it, “my essential self.” I use it as a fast track to finding stillness during meditation and am able to drop right into it. When I rest in that sense of “Here I am,” my nervous system settles and mental chatter falls away.
At the same time, all I have to do is look to witness my constantly changing experience. Every moment brings me something new…a thought, a sensation, a feeling, some kind of movement or impulse to move. Constantly.
Apparently, my beliefs determine how things move. I’m the main character, the director, and the producer of my own movie. The plot manifests according to what I believe and what I expect.
When I believe I’m an outsider, separate and different from other people, my movie supports that belief, complete with evidence that my outsider status is true. Everybody in this creation is operating from within their own created world, seemingly separate, but completely and inextricable interconnected.
A Course of Love calls it an “interrelated whole.” (Chapter 6.4)
More than one client or student has asked me, “What’s the point? Why am I here?”
Why does anyone create? To extend, to express, to know itself better, to share its impressions and revelations. If I’m part of one “interrelated whole,” who am I sharing with?
That’s likely the point…each individuation of our one shared Being is like God looking in the mirror. Through creation, the One gets to see its own face, to love itself, to be in relationship with itself. One undivided Self can’t be in relationship, but one Self, expressing through myriad forms has the ability to be in relationship.
I have the ability to be in relationship with every expression and movement of my life. Instead of turning away from my sensations and experiences, I can turn toward them. Instead of seeing others as threats, I can see them as myself. Instead of trying to change what is happening, I can embrace it.
Life moves. Experience continuously changes, but Being can’t be threatened. Even what we think of as death is just changing experience. While I’m here, I can enjoy the process or resist it. Like a child with a set of paints, it’s the act of creating that’s fun, not the product. I can’t imagine that the One would individuate if it wasn’t actually fun or satisfying.
When I resist the flow of life and cling to the idea of a separated identity, I’m missing all the fun.
I appreciate Adyashanti’s reminder. I am Life itself, moving, creating, experiencing, and participating in a grand creation. “You are life.” I don’t know why those three words surprised me. It seems so obvious.
If you’re interested in experimenting with having fun while creating your life, consider joining me in a group program called, “Lighthearted Enlightenment, Part One.”
Get more information here: (Button with link to Group Programs.)
