That's It, Folks

Just as a person may dream that they grow up, go to school, make friends, get educated, fall in love, get married, find a job, have children, enjoy the pleasures and pains of family life, have grandchildren, get sick, grow old, find themselves surrounded by their family on their deathbed and, as they die, wake up to find that they were peacefully sleeping all along in their bed, so our Self – pure Awareness – experiences the life of the apparently separate self, eternally at rest in its own Being, without ever going anywhere or doing anything.

Rupert Spira

Forgetfulness

Oh faithful friend,
Come, come closer
Let get of “you” and “I”
Come, quickly.

You and I
have to live
As if you and I
have never heard
of a you
and
an I.

Rumi

Alan Watts Asks, What Does 'Loving Myself' Mean?

I try to go deeper, sinking thought and feeling down and down to their ultimate beginnings. What do I mean by loving myself? In what form do I know myself? Always, it seems, in the form of something other, something strange; The landscape I am watching is also a state of myself, of the neurons in my head. I feel the rock in my hand in terms of my own fingers. And nothing is stranger than my own body—the sensation of the pulse, the eye seen through a magnifying glass in the mirror, the shock of realizing that oneself is something in the external world.

At root, there is simply no way of separating self from other, self-love from other-love. All knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and all knowledge of other knowledge of self. I begin to see that self and other, the familiar and the strange, the internal and the external, the predictable and the unpredictable imply each other. One is seek and the other is hide, and the more I become aware of their implying each other, the more I feel them to be one with each other. I become curiously affectionate and intimate with all that seemed alien. In the features of everything foreign, threatening, terrifying, incomprehensible, and remote I begin to recognize myself. Yet this is a "myself" which I seem to be remembering from long, long ago—not at all my empirical ego of yesterday, not my specious personality.

The "myself" which I am beginning to recognize, which I had forgotten but actually know better than anything else, goes far back beyond my childhood, beyond the time when adults confused me and tried to tell me that I was someone else; when, because they were bigger and stronger, they could terrify me with their imaginary fears and bewilder and outface me in the complicated game that I had not yet learned. (The sadism of the teacher explaining the game and yet having to prove his superiority in it.) Long before all that, long before I was an embryo in my mother's womb, there looms the ever-so-familiar stranger, the everything not me, which I recognize, with a joy immeasurably more intense than a meeting of lovers separated by centuries, to be my original self. The good old sonofabitch who got me involved in this whole game,

At the same time everyone and everything around me takes on the feeling of having been there always, and then forgotten, and then remembered again. We are sitting in a garden surrounded in every direction by uncultivated hills, a garden of fuchsias and hummingbirds in a valley that leads down to the westernmost ocean, and where the gulls take refuge in storms. At some time in the middle of the twentieth century, upon an afternoon in the summer, we are sitting around a table on the terrace, eating dark homemade bread and drinking white wine.

And yet we seem to have been there forever, for the people with me are no longer the humdrum and harassed little personalities with names, addresses, and social security numbers, the specifically dated mortals we are all pretending to be. They appear rather as immortal archetypes of themselves without, however, losing their humanity. It is just that their differing characters seem to contain all history; they are at once unique and eternal, men and women but also gods and goddesses. For now that we have time to look at each other we become timeless. The human form becomes immeasurably precious and, as if to symbolize this, the eyes become intelligent jewels, the hair spun gold, and the flesh translucent ivory. Between those who enter this world together there is also a love which is distinctly eucharistic, an acceptance of each other's natures from the heights to the depths.

Alan Watts in The Joyous Cosmology

In The Beginning We Were Ageless

We had no age.

We were neither young nor old, adolescent nor decrepit.

Without age. Ageless.

And great fun was had by all forever.

A little later, somebody noticed that it was even more fun to be ageless when we were also pretending to have age.

We pretended all the fun parts of infancy and youth, maturity and old age. We especially liked to pretend the fun parts of being grown up. Because to pretend to be grown up we had to pretend that we weren’t pretending. And that is the hardest and most fun of all.

So we devoted year after decade to it until we got so good at pretending to be grown up that only drugs and enthusiastic charismatics could get us to pretend to be children again.

…In the meantime almost completely forgetting that we are all each ageless in the first place.

Bernie de Koven