Passers-By

There are two worlds to speak of now. This one, which looks solid and behaves as if it will last, and the one behind the veil, which does not end. I have written enough about the second. This entry is about what to do with the first.

Because here is the truth that crossing leaves you with, and it does not soften with time: nothing in this world is real the way it claims to be. Everything here is built out of thought, ours or someone else's, the way children build castles out of sand. The more thought poured into a thing, the more real it looks. It is still sand.

I know how that sounds, and I know the two wrong turns it invites. The first is to give up on this world, to fold your hands and wait to leave. No. The second is subtler: loving this world so much you come to hate the truth, or loving the truth so much you come to hate this world for being false. I have stood in both ditches.

Here is the figure that pulled me out of them. There is the tree, and there is the fruit. The world beyond the veil is the tree. This world is its fruit. Can you hate the tree and love its fruit? Can you love the tree and despise what it bears? The two are in harmony. And the stranger thing, the thing worth sitting with a long while, is that you are both.

Try this. If you woke tomorrow with no memory at all, you would not know what to fear, who to hate, or in what ways you are limited. You would become whatever your surroundings told you to be. Understand: that has already happened. Your past has become you, and most of it was other people's thought. This world holds its people with a kind of mesmerism, and it took hold of you before you were old enough to object.

So what is the work? Not fighting. Hear that plainly, because I lost every fight I ever picked with thought. Argue with it head on and you will lose, to logic, to reasoning, to the whole weight of your past; it will wear you down. The work is to resist rather than wrestle: cross the veil, cross often, and let what is on the other side take over. Truth is stronger than any apparent thing in this world, and nothing here can stand against it.

You master this world not by fighting it, but by refusing to bow to it.

Be passers-by. Be in this world, not of it. Enjoy the fruit, and rule over it; it has no power of its own. And keep crossing until the limits stop coming back. I will be honest about how uneven that is: you may find you can always have a good parking place and still not be able to find love. That is not a riddle. It is a measure of where doubt still lives. Keep crossing.

In the end the reasons thin out to nothing anyway. You stop crossing to fix things. You cross for communion: no words, no asking, no needs, just going home, and being loved past all measure for no reason other than to spend time with it. The joys are overwhelming. And when you come back, the impossible has a way of being already handled. Not by anything you did here. Something else fixed it, while you were not fighting.

That is my work, and our work, if you want it. Crossing the veil. Going home. Being the true self instead of the assembled one.