Seeing Is Not Believing

I am the nameless continuum of experience, the seamless flow of wholeness. The waves of the world that dance in the sea of my silent awareness are not other than the "I" who perceives them. No separation between the universe and my awareness of it when no thoughts divide them: this is the pristine innocence of my original Edenic wildness before the Fall into thinking.

But the serpent of mind slithers into this garden and plays a trick that sabotages the wholeness. I  super-impose labels onto the spontaneous flow of incomprehensible perfection: thus my mind imagines itself a do-er, an agent of free-will, standing over against the world that it others. 

Mind imposes beliefs onto the world like "mistaken," "imperfect," "not enough," "better," "worse," "right," "wrong," "more," "less" - eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the duality of opposites. And after I impose these thoughts onto the world of pure experience, I choose to believe in my thoughts more than I believe in the world.

My salvation lies in letting go of thoughts. What happens when this mind quits grasping beliefs? Awareness returns to the heart, where it rests as clear seeing: the diamond embrace of whatever arises without labeling it. 

In this sparkling effortless acceptance, awareness is the only discipline that remains. There is no possibility that anything could be other than whole and perfect, for it is the ineluctable arising of things just as they are in this moment, and they could not be any other way.  The universe unfolding in the present moment is absolutely perfect in every minute detail, because it cannot be other than what it is.
 
Now there is true response to the flow of creation as it arises. For there is no "I" external to the flow. Response emerges from within the flow itself. This is response-ability: the ability to respond as an integral part of the moment, instead of reacting against it in favor of a future imposed by thought.

My response does not arise as a reaction, labeling the world "imperfect," "unjust" or "wrong," then trying to fix it or reform it, according to an ideal created by thought. The ideal is a form of violence, a rejection of the world that actually is. This angry impatient reaction is really not a response to the world at all, but only a response to my thoughts about it.

We are like crazy people walking down the street, having conversations with voices in our own heads. Few of us actually respond to the exquisite living presence of the earth, because we are too busy responding to our thoughts and labels. 

Therefor, the solution to 99.9% of the world's problems is to see the world through the clarity of silence, rather than the dark window of thinking. Living the world as it is, is more responsible than believing our thoughts about it.