The Unknown Is You
Lo Desconocido Eres Tú
A gentle invitation to trust that what you long for is not somewhere else but already here, hidden in the mystery of each moment.
The Unknown Is You
Settling into the body
Bring your attention to physical sensation.
Gently notice sensations of breath.
As you gently anchor your attention in your breath without effort,
just noticing,
with gentle attention, notice any holding or contraction
that might be unnecessary.
It's a very gentle body scan
if the awareness of breath takes you.
First include your face, your neck.
Notice how tension moves around.
Don't force it.
Just a gentle invitation to sink into body sensations,
riding the waves of breath.
Letting go of preference
Give no importance to distractions.
No importance to being distracted or not.
It's irrelevant.
If there is discomfort or challenging emotions or thoughts,
just notice, and invite a preference to the sensation of breath.
We say we are distracted.
We're paying attention to thoughts.
When present sensation or experience is here, we say we are present.
When we are without discomfort or frustration, we say we are well.
We prefer it to when we are not.
Something is common to all these experiences.
They are just states.
Seeking for better states is an infinite dead end.
What we long for
What we long for is a release from this addiction.
What we long for is always present.
Nothing we do can create it.
Nothing we do can destroy it.
I cannot earn it.
It is here right now.
We cannot see it.
You have sensed it all your life,
following all in you.
Everything you love,
every heartbreak,
every moment of joy
carries with it a taste, a recognition.
A leap of faith
The leap which is required is a leap of faith.
It's not a faith of religion and doctrine.
It's a trust in you and what you are.
We have heard it in many ways.
The kingdom of heaven is inside you,
or that it is the present moment.
But you are what you are looking for.
We don't really buy it.
To truly take that invitation is a leap of faith,
to drop into the unknown.
The known is not a thing out there.
God is not a thing out there.
You are not a thing in here.
The unknown is you.
The unknown is now, is everything.
Always.
The trickster salesman
The mind is but a trickster salesman,
and we love its tricks,
selling stories of knowledge and understanding.
We have infinite currency.
The salesman has infinite creativity.
Just notice this, if the metaphor resonates.
Notice the temptation of promise and hope.
The selling stories. It's always the same story:
you don't have what you're looking for, it's not here,
it's in another place, in another time,
and maybe you can earn it, maybe you can get there.
It is a bit like an addiction.
The good news is that we can explore something different
at any moment.
Seeking is a good thing.
It brings us to learn what to seek for.
And either through spirituality, science, religion,
all roads point to now.
You won't find what you're looking for a minute from now,
nor a year from now,
nor a second from now.
The mystery of raw experience
In that now we experience raw sensations,
what we call the body.
The body is mind, emotion, concept.
The understanding "body" exists in the mind.
Whatever it truly is, is mysterious. Absolutely.
As a moment of experience, raw perceptions of sound and sight.
The sound of a human voice carries a texture.
The understanding that it's a human voice, and the meaning of the words, exist only in the mind.
The sound itself, what it is, what it is made of, is absolutely mysterious.
Everything we see is absolute mystery, always.
The understanding of what we see as objects, their nature and their functions, only exists in the mind.
Interpretations.
Mind itself is just images and sounds, imagined.
The images can be of the raw perception, or imagined in the mind.
As well as the raw perceptions, the images in the mind are absolutely mysterious.
The sounds with which we experience inner dialogue, talking to ourselves, are made of this same mystery.
Carrying this forward
Take with you the notion that whenever something is missing,
whenever something is fundamentally not okay,
it is because you are believing in an interpretation
of something that is mysterious.
Just this. Just enough.
Not fully, not blindly.
Just enough to explore the possibility.