Everything has the One Taste: personal share

I have slowly begun to teach during the past few of years (almost as if against my will!)

Loving it, by the way.

It’s not always ease and flow. Some deep conditioning needed to melt to liberate the voice. I’m in love with the magical power of words to evoke the Unspeakable. It’s rather compelling ... this soundless sound, pouring itself into speech.

These days there is spacious enjoyment of fully inhabiting and appreciating the configuration of this bodymind for what it is. It’s the same human experience, the same psyche, so to speak, but unbound in a natural condition of self-liberation. This freedom is so beautiful because it shows there was never anything wrong with our humanness to begin with. Its traceless movement points towards something endlessly mysterious, paradoxical, fundamental. I can’t really say what that is, but I call it the Unconditioned.

I could also call it Emptiness, but that can be misleading as the conditioned mind has all kind of ideas about emptiness and this is so beyond all conceptualization that words absolutely fail. All I can say is that if this hits you it is possible you burst in uninhibited laughter and tears, wonder around dancing and playing in oceanic samadhi-like stillness, dissolve with every step in unconditional beauty, feel the shock of universal interbeing, fall into ecstatic silence, cessation and awe from which nothing and no one is able to pull you out of, no matter what happens exterior wise.

Interestingly, the relative human experience becomes very pleasurable in this radical authenticity and unveiled honesty, in which the socially and culturally carved validation seeking is finally seen for what it is. Spiritual conditioning is often the last shackle to drop. The rudimentary beliefs about safety, knowability, control, security and continuity run deep, rooted in our physiology. When these are released, the body discovers its innate capacity for fearlessness, detached intimacy and genuine autonomy.

This Reality is grace, every point of contact is grace, no matter how painful or pleasant, rough or soothing, it’s so subtle and thoroughly immersive, there is no you in the experience and yet there is full presence, full absence. You die with each breath, keep softening, keep melting in diamond-like sharpness, discover yourself in this luminosity ever afresh. It's constant flux, incessant reconfiguration, ungraspable and perfectly unaltered. Also it’s super ordinary, not a big deal, and just plain normal!

This grace pulled me in, ate my sense of self, and spitted me out after what felt like a devastating destruction of whatever I had thought myself to be, whatever I had thought life is. Realization is a wondrously seismic unfolding, even though there is no actual transformation. The heart breaks so deeply it cannot be imagined, we go beyond all images, even the prime image I Am. And then it’s just opening, opening, opening … Unconditional openness that has no beginning. It’s not love in any human sense, but what else to call it? At one point the remnants of karmic heaviness disappear ... dissolve in crystal clear clarity.

This is the end of a certain kind of suffering: suffering based on ignorance. At least that is my experience, I can tap into some universal threads of suffering at times, but it does not feel personal, it’s not really suffering anymore, it’s just ... cessation. Feeling the world like this is inseparable from vast sky-like compassion.

During the process I had many years for myself to just be, take time for my own healing, have time and space for myself, not interacting with people too much, to be nobody and nothing, and that has its own allure. I did not really feel ready to teach when it started to happen, and I don’t think you can exactly feel ready for it.

It’s a bit like throwing a baby in the water and saying “Swim!” First it feels like drowning, but then quite quickly starts to be an enigmatic experience of flowing, diving, moving while your functioning is completely unknown.

Awakening does affect conceptual functioning and memory, and I have had to discover a new way of moving and interacting, based on spontaneity, intuition, and instinctual sync with energetic patterns and karmic configurations that I could never understand and I have no need to understand, taking refuge in the empty nature of all.

This kind of functioning was already occurring, underneath the surface layer of mind created reality. In the past I would sense into it randomly, as a shortly lived experience. Now undivided wholeness is ongoing experiential reality, radiant and boundless, delightful and weirdly ordinary, subtle and peaceful, all-encompassing and transparent, also amazingly intense at times.

I can’t find myself in that movement of the whole apart from it in any actual manner.

There is the whole spectrum of depths, textures and nuances of experiencing, and at the same time there are no highs or lows. There are no states, yet magnificent states can appear, not essentially different from the most mundane experience of having a cup of coffee.

Everything has the One Taste, ineffable ever fresh pleasure of the natural state.