Just One Look Forum Archives

Hi John,

Blessings and heartfelt gratitude! I just got a sudden urge to send you a note sharing this ongoing unfolding delight in how it's all been turning out for me. Truly, your words have never steered me wrong--nor has anything taken place in the past two years and two weeks (ever since the fateful morning, second-last day of a five-day online intensive, when I "looked at myself" and to my utter astonishment found myself beaming very precisely right back, hola!) which would contradict anything you've said about the way things go with the vichara, though it's nothing I could have expected or that anyone's words could have prepared me for before I finally buckled down and, as they say, "did my homework". And it's pretty much been beaming this way ever since, this living, shifting, curiously inexplicable yet charmingly wayward thing that existence turns out to be, as it continues to settle in, deepening and broadening, broadening and deepening... at least to the extent that any such qualities could be ascribed to "something" (usual difficulties here in trying to come up with a word that hasn't already been way overworked, and so robbed of its ability to "work", as it were, for the totality of everything there is) that possesses no top or bottom or sides to speak of, or for that matter a front in front of it, nor back in behind...

But there are some ascriptions I'd like to make. I'm inclined to ascribe the greater part of human unhappiness to this problem we've got with authority, which has us seeking truth and verification and approval outside ourselves, in other people's sayings-so. Conversely, I'm inclined to ascribe my growing sense of contentment and easiness with things to the new found *certainty* that I now enjoy with respect to how I'm feeling about things, my own knowledge of and hence certainty in what I feel, which includes my relationship to the things I know and things I don't know. My knowing of my own knowing, to say it so. A sense of "knowing my own mind" which seems to come from making direct, conscious contact with who I am in the first place, before the words and ideas of things start telling me what they are. This living awake "beingness" which inhabits the skin I'm in. Yeah I know I know, and I that know you know too, how any and every word only and necessarily fails here. Which is sort of precisely the point. Only by resting here in the very quick of the the unfolding sense I have of what's actually there, on my mind, in this skin and within this boundless ocean of sensation that the being aliveness that I am is swimming in, only by feeling the shapes that knowing and feeling makes in me, in this keen questing ever so sensitive and responsive curiosity about everything that exists, which knows absolutely nothing and yet, for no better reason than no reason at all, loves everything, exceedingly, am I able to find the words and images that while unavoidably falling far short of ever coming close to touching the shockingly intimate exquisite reality of my own self-knowing of me, at least are not wittingly or self-knowingly false to it. Not entirely.

And so thanks, thanks again, a thousand more thanks. We're JUST SO FANTASTICALLY GREAT, aren't we, us people? And isn't it just so wonderfully extraordinarily fantastically great, to be here and be us! Oh yes, yes indeed it is, yep...

D. R. (Canada)