Written in the midst of a spiritual experience
I’m in the middle of a realization. If I don’t write it down, no trace of it will remain.
I suddenly felt the onset of a wave of love directed from me to myself. For a moment, I fell in love with myself.
I felt the same divine love for myself that I feel for my sacred partner.
I was delighted with myself. And it didn’t depend on what I did or did not do.
I was aware of myself as a being. And I loved myself. Why have I been holding back?
When I saw that love didn’t depend on what I did or did not do, I had yet another realization.
I saw that nothing depended on what I did or did not do, that everything I did was made up anyways. This whole world is illusion compounded and I’m acting as if anything I do truly matters, when it really doesn’t. Not absolutely.
It probably sounds as if I’m demeaning myself. I’m not. At the absolute level, every trace of an individual “I” dies. At that level, none of this that has gone on will retain its meaning.
It’s a very refined form of play acting we do, with some very real consequences on the level on which events transpire. But at the level where we re-unite with the One? No meaning at all.
In my moment of realization, I saw that my life was a series of actions that I’m carefully making up as I go along, moment by moment. I observed myself making it up.
And then I persuade people to believe about events whatever I want them to. I sell my story to them. But it’s all made up.
It’s all my interpretation, my version of whatever actually happened. It isn’t the truth.
And invariably I construct my version to favor myself, to give myself the benefit of the (read: every) doubt, etc. It’s very refined but nonetheless it’s all there, just spread out over a little more time.
In this second “Aha!” I saw that the matter goes much deeper than just this one instance in which I observed myself “making it up.”
The self-serving bias is one of the hardest viruses to clean out of ourselves, one of the last to go, I believe. I saw how deep it goes in me. And how subtle it is.
I’ve talked about this for years under the term “the constructed self.” May I digress? I think it’s important. This is me the sociologist.
Almost all of what we say, in my estimation, comes from our constructed self, the character or persona we project and try to sell to the world, our self-image, with its self-serving interpretations. In lightwork, we call it our “service-to-self” persona. I just happened to find myself staring at mine.
This whole thing I call “my life” is simply something I’m making up, self-servingly, as we go along and have made up throughout time. (1) And none of it matters a damn. Not one damn. Not really.
None of what I do or do not do ultimately matters. When I bend the knee before God and hand him back everything he gave me, including my separate identity, what I said to the car mechanic or stewardess won’t matter.
Ultimately we’re dreaming that we’re acting when the real us – the Self, the Christ, the Atman – is not acting. “I am not the doer.”
(Concluded in Part 2, below.)
Footnotes
(1) See “The Death of Narcissus; or, Everything I Do is Trying to Make the World Over in My Own Image,”