“My home shall be by God’s own side—the dying, rising Lord.”
— I Know That My Redeemer Lives, Catholic Hymn
“You are under no obligation to be the person you were five seconds ago.”
— Alan Watts
The ‘dying, rising Lord’ is THIS-HERE-NOW.
God is THIS-HERE-NOW.
Christ is THIS-HERE-NOW.
Literally this very instant is made entirely of God’s Love.
And in each instant, a new configuration of this Love is born and simultaneously dies.
Notice the simultaneous appearing/vanishing of all phenomena.
How can you know what anything is, if it’s gone in the moment it appears?
How could you possibly say what anything is?
Before you can put words to it, it’s already something else.
We generally overlook this fact of total instability.
Total impermanence.
Of *all* phenomena.
Our mind-created stories hoodwink us into an illusion of object-permanence.
Yet look closely and notice: Everything vanishes in the moment it appears.
Everything is continuously changing, morphing, flickering.
Each instant is a completely new and fresh FLASH of infinite detail.
Never seen before, never to be seen again.
And thus…
We are resurrected in each moment.
All phenomena die and are reborn in each instant.
All phenomena disappear and reappear in each moment.
A continuous resurrection.
Now, do notice that what phenomena are made of does not die.
It was never born.
It is Uncreated Love.
The Finality of Weightless God-ness.
As Peter Brown would say, it can look like anything yet it never fundamentally departs from itself.
A liberating resurrection.
Peter was always remarkably clear about this point of the simultaneous appearing/vanishing of all phenomena.
It’s wild to look closely at this quality of experience.
Peter would note that in Dzogchen, this fact of simultaneous appearing/vanishing is seen as one of the ultimate liberators.
Because if all conditions vanish in the instant they appear, nothing can possibly entrap you.
Before anything could ever become anything like a ‘cage,’ it is already gone.
Pragmatics: Addressing Conventional Reality
Now, I know how this can sound.
You might be thinking, “Yeah, that’s all well and good until you find yourself in an actual jail cell or war zone or torture chamber. Then how far will your non-dual gobbledygook get you?”
This is a good point, but it also misses the point.
It’s an easy way of dismissing what I’m saying.
It’s an easy way of continuing to live within stories, rather than directly investigating the nature of immediate experience.
The point is to directly study the nature of your own experience.
Observe it, check it out, engage it non-conceptually, and see what you discover about its nature.
Can you truly find *anything whatsoever* within experience that can actually be separated out from everything else?
Can you find anything in your experience that *truly* does not subtly flicker and fluctuate and morph in each instant, if you look very closely?
I strongly suspect you cannot.
The point is to look very, very closely at this.
Stay with it.
Drink it in.
Let go into it.
Melt into it.
“Wow, here I am,” as Peter says.
Once you’re outside of normalcy, just let yourself be there.
And keep doing this.
If only for a few seconds at a time, a few times per day.
Or whenever you remember, or get an inclination.
Just notice what is actually here.
Notice the now-ness as a spontaneous shining forth from nowhere.
Notice the weightless juiciness.
The floating-ness.
Experience is not resting on anything.
There’s nothing behind it.
Most fundamentally, you are not “a human being living on a planet in a universe.”
Nope.
What you are, is a transcendent energy event flashing forth from nowhere.
Don’t take my word for it.
Look and see for yourself.
Have you ever experienced anything other than this immediate naked flash of LIGHT that we call ‘now’?
Is there anything you have ever experienced that was not experienced in/as this immediate FLASH?
If all experience is and always has been NOW, how then can you be so sure of the existence of so many things that are supposedly ‘somewhere else’ other than ‘here now’?
Why do you not grant the now-ness total primacy, if it is the only thing you’ve ever known?
Why do you grant such significance to stories and rumors of far-off people and things and places that you have never experienced, or are not experiencing right now?
Stay with the undefined now-ness, my friend.
Stay there and see what happens.
If you do this consistently…
A lightening is likely to begin to occur.
A lightening of burdens.
A sense of coming home.
A sense of great simplicity.
An ordinary miracle that has been hidden in plain sight.
So close that you couldn’t see it.
Simply noticing is immensely powerful.
Once you start to notice the nameless, the nameless itself begins to teach you directly.
It shows you what it is.
It does all the ‘heavy lifting’ of its own accord.
It reformats your reality at the deepest levels.
It relieves you of great burdens.
Many forms of suffering are likely to dissipate.
And then you won’t insist on generating stories of war zones and jail cells and torture chambers…
You’ll rest as now-ness.
And if by some strange twist of fate you do find yourself in a war zone or jail cell or torture chamber…
You’ll be far better equipped to allow that experience to be.
Allow it to pass through.
Allow it to slip away.
To notice it as the undefined.
And even if it is painful, to surrender and let it flow.
I pray you never find yourself there.
I pray we birth a world rooted in love where such grim conditions no longer exist.
Yet I won’t count on this, or wait for it.
I will go to the root now.
I will practice to see the liberating truth of what I am.
With ever greater clarity.
I will look closely at experience to find out what it is.
I will notice God’s saving grace ever more clearly.
I will notice this grace in the simultaneous appearing/vanishing of all phenomena.
And I will notice this grace in the stainlessness untouched by all phenomena.
My Home shall be by God’s own side—the dying, rising Lord.
The dying, rising Love.
The dying, rising Christ.
Amen.
Happy Easter.
Auspicious Blessings,
J
Jordan Bates is a dad, husband, space holder, men’s coach, rapper, course creator, blogger, truth lover, entrepreneur, investor, co-creator of Apotheosis, and author of four books.
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