Today's Column

Undivided

One of the things that became clear through working with Byron Katie was that I had turned away from myself at a very early age, and that it was me who did it. No one else did it to me. It was my decision to go along with the idea that the natural way my being was blossoming into the world was wrong and had to be changed. This went on to approximately the age of 57, and then it changed. What occurs to this mind now is the curious resemblance between this process, which is the root of all depression, and the reflexive and spontaneous way of the Undivided in becoming the world.
The indivisible from which all things issue is the template of all the dynamics of human life and the human soul, which, by the way, is no different than any “other kind” of soul. Soul, of course, like every other word, is inadequate to describe what we’re trying to talk about, but we have to use something, and soul is the word so many of use to try to point to whatever it is that exceeds the boundaries of our individual lives and concerns.

So let’s try. What I am, what you are, what everything is, is the light hiding from itself. We call that the dark, and run away from it, try to eradicate it, but it’s nothing other than the light, hiding from itself, because that’s what it does. I hid from myself for the first five decades of my life, and that is the light hiding from itself. Why? Because it does. That’s how the world gets made.

So how can we change that? Hmm. We can’t. We can’t stop hiding, because we didn’t, in the fullness of this metaphor, ever start. It starts by itself. It stops by itself. Awareness begins to see what’s been going on, and the hidden memory of what went before simply emerges again. What has been wrapped so tightly in itself begins to unravel, and it’s all spontaneous. There’s nothing we can do to hurry it, or to hold it back. It isn’t about effort or determination, or purity. The pretence finally drops. The burden exceeds the capacity to carry it. The scales fall from our eyes, and we see that the sun has been out all the time, and then – oh, my! I Am That!