Vigilance comes from
the word vigil, meaning to keep vigil.
Keeping vigil is a form of worship.
Vigilance is a sacred, quiet, peaceful vigil at the flame of truth.
Death is not the
enemy. Fear of death is the enemy. Fear of death is the result of the
misidentification of yourself as some particular entity.
Even in the most
wonderful lives, usually a burden is being carried. This burden is born out of identification
with the so-called personal accumulations.
This life burden, or individual burden, is the story.
If there is still
aggression or victim-hood or hero-hood; anybody doing anything to you, for you,
or even with you; any scenario of escape, attainment, gain, loss, or position;
recognize it as a point of view, and tell
the truth about it. This story can be subtle, and in its subtlety, it has the
most power. The most subtle story is
called subconscious. In your willingness
to tell the truth, you see what story is being told over and over based on a
particular individual called me.
All threads of the
story are rooted in survival.
When [the
subconscious] is conscious, there is a choice to stop the obsessing, to stop
the addiction, to stop projecting the story, to stop rehashing the story, and
to trust that all the appropriate survival mechanisms are in place.
Right now you have
the capacity in your life to recognize that this life stream, through whatever
blessings and luck, has food and shelter, has leisure time, and has the support
to actually consider what is deeper and even more meaningful than survival, procreation,
and power.
The real challenge
is to be peaceful, to be who you are, to honor what has somehow been given you
in this lifetime.
I am not
recommending that you not feel emotions. I recommend experiencing them all the
way to the core. And when I say
experience, I do not mean acting them out.
There can be no
confusion unless you are trying to find yourself in your thoughts.
That mind can be a
peaceful, open, satvic, welcoming, investigating mind, or it can be a closed,
dissociated, blaming, strategizing mind.
The opportunity in
this lifetime is to tell the truth about what is going on in the mind.
With any teaching
you must be aware of the tendency for the mind to take that teaching and make
it into another strategy, another excuse, or another attempt to escape.
Thought is just
consciousness at play with itself.
The truth is that
the ego doesn't do anything anyway. The
ego is a thought, like a garment. It's
not the garment that does anything. The ego
is inanimate.
The biggest obstacle
to awakening I've seen so far is that awakening is actually wanted for
something else. Awakening is wanted for
feeling better, or so that you don't have to be the same person you think you
are now, or to get some recognition, or to forget all the bad things that you
have done or that have been done to you.
