The Breaking of Illusion

The pieces are becoming one again. The past is rushing in to greet me. I feel like I am back at the beginning, before I knew it was the beginning.

I thought the first time it happened, it was like the breath of God. But it wasn’t. It was beauty, and easily accessible to my senses.

The first time it happened, the first time I felt a crash in my psyche and my view of the world was challenged, I was screaming and hating the world. I was violent, full of my self importance. I was in pain. I was inconsolable. I was five years old. I was throwing a tantrum.

A piece of me detached, and I can see myself in the room, screaming, my eyes puffy from tears, and I see myself looking at me with a certain disbelief. Is your will, so important? Is your insistence on the way life should be, worth that kind of energy?

I did it again, in a violent fight with my brother. Perhaps I was ten. The same madness, the same will, the same anger and frustration at ME, ME, ME. And the breaking away, and the split – so I could see through it all, even in the middle of it.

The break in my beliefs took a battering when I was 14. My parents left me with my grandmother without a second glance. The night I realised what had happened (in my view – that I was unwanted), I felt my adulation of my father dash to the ground. It broke my first and foremost ideal of relationships. I can not say I regained my balance with dignity. I fell down into the shadows and comforted myself with hate and judgement and curses.

And today, eating my own tail, looking back at the past – I am that I am. Without the breaking of the framework that we hold dear to us – we can not see what is. Our expectations stop us from seeing what is. Our ideals stop us from noticing what is really there. Our memories cloud the present. Our plans direct our vision away from the now into some distant future.

It hurts. Especially when you don’t know what is going on. Its painful to face the dreams we held dear become stamped on underfoot.

Perhaps we take it personally, and when someone disregards our dreams, our views, we can become offended and hurt and angry and vengeful. Its painful to live in such a manner.

But what is it we are searching for? More illusion? More images? There’s plenty where that came from.

I’m sitting with what is. The aliveness that exists in the present moment – without my petty frames and thoughtless systems – is the wonder moment.

Sutra I.12 reads,

Abhyasa-vairagyabhyam tan-nirodhah meaning:

HERE we abide in an sustained openness. When the mind is very clear, lucid, and empty, and open, then the innate brilliance, peace, and transpersonal wisdom can shine forth naturally. The sacred sound is heard -- the ambrosial nectar sipped.