Let Katie Describe It

Double Nautilus
Originally uploaded by dbl nautilus

When you start to realize what Truth is, you recognize that Truth is not an abstraction, it is not out there at a distance from you… You discover that Truth is who you are without your story or script, right now… It’s not something you prepare for or earn or deserve. Awakening is a radical shift in identity. You think you’re you, but you’re not. You are eternal being.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing.

A “radical shift in identity” those are the operative words I’d like to point out just now. Adya says you don’t prepare for this, but I think that in some sense you must.
How else to describe the ego’s flight in terror?
How else to explain the grieving process?
Something in you can get a glimpse.

And the rest of this consists of excerpts from Byron Katie’s little book, Question Your Thinking Change The World, found in the chapter on Self Realization.

It’s common for me to speak from the position of a personality, from the position of mankind, from the position of the earth, from the position of God, from the position of a rock.
And I’ll call myself “it,” because I don’t have a reference point for separation.
I am all those things, and I don’t have any concept that I’m not.
I’ve simply learned to speak in a way that doesn’t alienate people.
It leaves me benign, unseen, unknown.
It leaves me in a comfortable place for people.

I would kiss the ground I walk on – it’s all me.
But to kiss the ground would draw attention to itself.
That’s what the first three years after I woke up looked like.
It’s subtler now, more invisible.
It has matured.

As closely as I can describe it in words, I am your heart.
I am what you look like inside yourself…
I am no one.
I am just a mirror.
I am the face in the mirror.

I am your heart.
I am the depth you don't listen to: in your face, from here.
It had to get louder, because your beliefs block it out from there...
I am the voice so covered up with beliefs that you can't hear it inside yourself.
So I appear out here, in your face –
which is really inside yourself.

I experience everything frame by frame.
It’s like looking at the comics…
each frame is a universe in itself, not connected with any other…
There is literally no time and space, no past future or present, even, no one coming, no one going…
There’s no meaning to it, no motive in it.
And finally you get to a place where nothing moves.
That is home, the place we all long for…

People ask how I can live if nothing has any meaning and I am no one.
It’s very simple.
We are being lived.
We’re not doing it…
Without a story, we move effortlessly, in perfect health, fluidity, freely, with a lot of love, and without war, without resistance…

The reason this speaks is because it does.
If I thought I was doing it, I wouldn’t be such a fool.
My only purpose is to do what I’m apparently doing…
if someone asks me a question, my purpose is to give my experience through my answer.
I’m an effect of their suffering…

It’s personal and it’s not personal.
It’s personal in that the whole world is me – a mirror image that I am and love.
Without it, I am bodiless…
On the other hand, it’s not personal, because I see nothing more than a mirror image.
Until God – reality- moves, I have no movement.
Every movement, every sound, every breath, every molecule, every atom is nothing more than a mirror image of God…

Whenever you speak, it’s God speaking.
When a flower blooms, it’s God.
When Hitler marches, it’s God.
I see only God.

Every word is the sound of God.
Every word is the word of God.
There is nothing personal here.
And everything is personal.
If the moon rises, it’s for you.
You’re the one watching it! (And that’s just a beginning.)

There is no this soul or that soul.
There’s only one.
And that’s the last story.
There’s only one. And not even that…

Even so-called truths eventually fall away.
Every truth is a distortion of what is.
The last truth – I call it the last judgment – is
“God is everything, God is good.”
Ultimately even this isn’t true.
But as long as it works for you, I say keep it and have a wonderful life.