Now is the time to know That all that you do is sacred… Now is the time for the world to know That every thought and action is sacred. This is the time For you to deeply compute the impossibility That there is anything But Grace. ~ Hafiz

A perfume drifts through the garden. Invisible yet all-pervasive, it traces to a shy coven of jasmine. Astonishing beauty. Through the actual olfactory scent, a perfume of silence prevails that is a moment of complete peace. The scent lasts. The moment of complete presence does not. What, seemingly, eclipses it?

What I know to be true experientially: When there is the experiencing of beauty (love, understanding), just as is, I am as intimate and close to life as one can be: I am that. The experience, the experiencing, the intimacy, the knowing. There is nothing else. It's a void. It's everything. It has no name. It's without a center. Life is one with itself, seeing itself only. There is no sense of a separate "me."

But the mind wants to label, name, compare, plan for what’s next, think about what it regrets, determine the center. The truth of intimacy, the background of pure experiencing what is, remains, but we re-enter our habitual and conditioned game of the relative, subjects and objects, future-and-past-oriented thinking. Individuation in time and space is necessary for survival. There are subjects and objects in a relative world. This body can bump into a flower or a wall. We use time as a useful concept. But identification, believing that what we are is a separate "me," dependent on a body, a mind, a world: This is optional. It's the cause of suffering. It is the seeming eclipse of the presence that, in fact, ever is.

Thoughts are not a problem either. We rely on them for practical purposes. They allow us to celebrate, communicate, create, invent. We invent entire worlds with thoughts, such as the world we collectively take to be real. What can become a problem is that we believe that thoughts and concepts (objects) can tell us something real about our reality. The pull is strong. Conditioning seduces. We love reality! We want to know it. And so we chase after the thoughts, taking the easier habitual route to believe ourselves separate from reality, to believe we can find a certainty and center to hold onto. The chase eclipses the perfume.

Question everything. Be brutally honest with what you truly know about you, about life. Dare to live the implications of your experiential discoveries of your truth. Nothing is more important. But it takes courage. Heart.

Check it out: All thoughts, perceptions, and sensations appear in awareness. No exception. Awareness is our reality. Really, it is the only thing we know for sure. No thing appears outside of it. It has to be at least as real if not more real than anything appearing in it. It has to encompass all appearances within it. Thus only awareness can tell us anything about reality. And it can only show us reality in being reality. It ever knows itself alone. All of us are that.

We know this, intuitively. But we are conditioned to skip over the intuition of reality. We find a seeming comfort in me, you, and world. It's in the inevitable and repetitive disillusionment of what was supposed to make us happy that our longing patiently points to our intuitive inner truth. We really love reality: Because we are it. We long to make love of ourselves perfect, as Nisargadatta has said.

Awareness as being-knowing-experiencing itself alone is the experiencing of deep peace. We can function fully as organisms, with the effervescence of individuation and diversity, with thoughts sourced in understanding, but ever there is presence in the background. We are this presence. The eclipse does not need to happen, or in shorter periods, less often. "Me" dissolves. No separate object obscures, not for long, no thing is in the way.

Our one reality expresses itself in the ten thousand things. The ten thousand appearances dance within awareness and are equally known as itself alone. What would it be like to simply be the actual innocence of an open reality just seeing and sensing itself? It happens. Already. Right here and now. Life finds us, over and over and over. Presence. Now. A steadfast perfume no matter what.

Nothing needs to be done. Just this, aware-ing, the tenderness of being and knowing. Listening. It all comes and goes. It all happens by itself. Effortless. There is pain, yes, there is joy, yes, and it is what it is and I am That. It's wild! We can give up the effort to divide that what ever is and is indivisible and whole. We can be, literally, at ease. It’s wondrous to be in and as pure perceiving. Awareness aware of itself. It is far easier than holding on to the easy habit of the conditioned.

The perfume finds you: causeless joy. Explosions of sheer beauty free themselves from the most ordinary objects. You fall in love with gutters, a stranger on the bus, remote green valleys, shadows on a wall, a flowering weed, a smile. The perfume finds you. It loves its own beauty. It IS you.

It’s said: “Everywhere you turn there is the face of God.” Everything is sacred. Everything tells us we are home."

this love for reality

how we love this being!