Shakti speaks
You want everyone’s truth. You want the truth of life, the universe, God. To get it, you love. You read books and people. You sit without moving, pray without religion, try to be your best self, then to surrender your self, merging into Oneness.
It takes all time and no time at all. Even then, revelation doesn’t break over you, stream into you, or suddenly spring into bloom within and around you in cascades of light and peace and perfection.
Slowly, you understand that what you want is the wanting, the loving, and somehow, the trying and not trying, best self and worst self and no self.
You burn through all the limiting stories until there’s nothing: the Nothing that is Everything.
It is not even hidden; known for thousands of years, it lies written in some of the very books you read. But no one reads themselves into realization. The paradox of the highest, deepest truth — present in paper, screen, voice — must be lived into.
So much intricacy has arisen from the impulse to understand. Religions, philosophies, sciences, ways of thinking and ordering the world…
And yet again and again, what is simple interrupts: earth and sky, eyelight, the trust-filled touch of the smallest beings.
Delight comes with the recognition that what you sought all your life is being given each moment in everything you can perceive or imagine (or can’t perceive or imagine).
You worship the sacred in everything and feel it as reciprocal.
How lovely with a swallowtail butterfly that allows you close enough to see the powder on its wings, with the hug of any child, with the merging of radiant rivers into River, and the coursing of your own shining blood in tune.
Painful, however, with a starving dog, a beaten child, an earth that holds humanity even as they tear her apart and suffocate her without remorse.
Unbearable even to try with those who starve, beat, tear, and suffocate.
But the dance of light and dark is God.
People spread their delusions like viruses, touching what they know and what they do not.
People also plant seeds in dirt, send song across the universe, heal the broken.
There is what is, and no further layer.
There is what is, and no other story.
There is what is, and nowhere to stand outside the Way.