Waking up

 Waking up. To how this is. To the realities of this life, perhaps to the reality of reality itself. The stripping away of delusion and ignorance like layers upon layers of old paint chipping off of a wall. Things are often not as they appear to be, to us and to others. The truth that is merely because it is. When what we hold and have held crumbles into dust in our hands and blows away in the wind revealing thin air and naked perspective. The flesh covering our bodies as it is without the coloring of our many tailored thoughts fit for the interest of the perpetuation of the fantasy that we call ourself. This many sided image we cling to in our imagination. What remains is a body and a mind and someone we call me. A world we call a world filled with people we call people, you, them, us. This is what we see here. Plants, trees, roads, buildings. It is here. People are here. Things are here. These things just are. But what are they? What is this? What is this feeling I call myself. This feeling that leads me to name things. What is it? I name things because I find it meaningful to. I find meaning here.  ..I find meaning here. What do I find meaningful here? What do I wish to know? To become familiar with? What do I sense here? Why is it important to me? Where is my life heading? Where is life heading? And when will it get there? If I could get there, what would I find? What would I see? What would I know? What is at the bottom of all this feeling we have that moves us like a boat upon the sea? It seems to sing, to call, to beckon, to declare? What? What is there to be understood here? What is the riddle behind everything that occurs? What is the sleeping riddle hiding behind all we perceive? Who am I, and what is this? What is all of this? The answer is, this, I am. I am. Here I am. This, I am. I am this. This is my body and my being. This is who I am. I am. What else is there? Nothing else. This is it. I cannot look anywhere else because this is where I am. This is who I am. Forcing it isn't going to work. Trying to bend the universe to see. When you are occupied with bending, you lose sight of being. Being that cannot be altered by anything that you could do. Being that you won't find through doing, but through seeing what you are. Trying to create something that doesn't need to be created, it is present. It is here. What here is, is who we are and what we are looking for. How could we ever gain our true self? Who we are must be who we are now. Not with any change to our present condition, because our present condition is who we are. This is why this is it. What you read, how you read, what you understand is the answer. You are in pain, you are suffering. You are frustrated. You do not wish to be. Neither do I. Yet I am. In this world I am. In this life. With this body and this feeling. With these hopes and fears and wishes. As much as I may wish to be somewhere else I am here. Not away, but here. Not without what I dislike, but with it. With confusion. With misunderstanding, With degrees of darkness in my consciousness that apparently keeps me from being present. Not somewhere else, here. The dream we weave around ourselves keeps us from seeing how we are. It is afraid our our being because it believes we cannot handle it. It is afraid the truth will destroy it. We confuse who we are with the dream of who we are. This, I believe, is the greatest point of our suffering and perhaps the foundation of our misery. We keep ourselves in prison by not facing who we are. We imagine it is better to live in this prison than to face the truth. The truth we imagine is worse than this prison, so we settle for imprisonment. The thing is, we have never once looked to see if what we imagine is worse actually is. We guess and take our best guess. Until we look, this is all we have. The foundation of our lives are built off of this guessing, not on knowing and looking and seeing.  Who am I?