You're Not There
Where are you right now? Are you sat down in the office? On the bus? Are you lying in bed reading this? Are you standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil?
Are you in your pyjamas? In your work suit? Maybe you’re wearing cricket whites waiting for your turn at the crease. Are you in your lab coat and protective goggles? Are you in your hard hat? Your priest’s Mitre?
Are you in your head right now? Behind your eyes? In your body? Somewhere within the flesh and bones of your ever-changing, gradually shape shifting form?
Are you the house you live in? The clothes you wear? The body you inhabit? Or are you separate to all of these things? Perhaps you’re something else altogether. A form of energy that isn’t physical, but is merely experiencing all of these other environments. Maybe you’re somewhere else altogether, experiencing this realm of reality from elsewhere. A space that isn’t physical. A cloud of consciousness that exists outside of space altogether, outside of time, outside of everything we are able to measure and label and move and touch and quantify and price.
Like a moviegoer who exists in a different reality to the actors in the film they’re watching, where are we really? What dark cinema are we really sitting in while the action unfolds in front of us? Some place beyond the words and descriptions that we create to describe this plane of reality?
In this place, we call a tree a tree, but it isn’t. That’s just the word we use to describe it. The truth is that it’s so much more. We call a cloud a cloud, but it isn’t. A forest isn’t a forest. A rainstorm isn’t a rainstorm. A simple step along the road is not a step along the road. A kiss is not a kiss. These are signifiers that make us lazy. Small devices that allow us to quickly deal with the issue of communicating an experience that is so much more than the words we give it. A word that allows us to tackle and move on quickly from vast complexity.
These labels make us lazy. They make us dishonour the magical experience of the thing we call a tree. They make us quick to dismiss the miracle of rain. To shy away from who we really are. More than our names and our bodies. More than the clothes we wear, the space we inhabit and the years in our lives. We are much more. Transdimensional. Beyond true comprehension. Formless. Godlike. Infinite. Everything and nothing.
Just as the Tao that can be named is not the Tao, and the true name of god cannot be spoken, we are beyond the limitations that we have imposed upon ourselves with this concept of reality. And the sooner we free ourselves from the trap and the constraints of our interpretation of where “we” end and where “not we” begins, the sooner we can explore our true limitlessness.