Shit Happens……And it is not Personal!!!!

Awoken in the middle of the night, I looked at the clock. It was 2am. I was thirsty. I had a drink and now wide awake, I could no longer sleep. I sat on my bed with pillows propped up to meditate, hoping it would lull me back to sleep. Suddenly, I encountered this light within the depths of my heart. It isn’t light, some kind of luminous space, center. What astounded me about it … was its innocence. Strange word, I thought. Innocence. That’s it!! But not the kind of innocence that a young child exhibits. That is born out of ignorance. This one felt like the innocence born out of an embodied wisdom. Its pristine purity was indescribable. I thought, like the pristine beauty of the Himalayas, the part hitherto untrekked by humans, or the crystal purity of a mountain spring from fresh snow. Just so pure. And what blew my mind away was that it was untouched by me, my personality, my life story, the everyday joys and sorrows of the world of ten thousand things like Dogen would say. How can this be? How can this space live within me and be untouched by all that baggage? I just couldn’t fathom this. And I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was so pure. That word again. And innocent. Untouched. And then I saw my so -called life unfolding in front of me so rapidly. Shit happened. Don’t get me wrong. The abuse, the betrayals, the abandonment, the joys, pleasures, romance, friendship, heartbreaks, frustrations. They were all still there. And yet, it wasn’t as if “Life was doing it to me”. It just happened. Life wasn’t out to get me, there was no one to blame, hold accountable or make into a perpetrator. Life unfolded, shit happened, beauty happened. People were who they were, they did what they did, each acting out of their own ignorance, cravings, aversions, conditionings. The whole thing looked so benign. There was no one to blame. It felt like a whole garbage truck of baggage melted. I felt so light. So free. The stories dropped away, identities melted, the ego’s thick crust seemed to break a little, soften a little, melt away a little. I realized that it wasn’t personal. No one was out to get me. Life wasn’t out to get me. It just was. It just is. Nothing is good or bad. Thinking it makes it so. Yes! there is the pain of reality and there is the pleasure of reality. As Eckhart says, “in every happiness lies the seed of sorrow and in every suffering, the seed of grace”. Rumi says “surname every grief as grace”. So yes Shit happens!! Miracles happen!! And it is all impersonal. Human suffering is impersonal. Dukka has no personal agenda. So if this is true, then I would have to drop my personal story. Who am I without my story? Without my identity, my drama, my ten thousand joys and sorrows? Because guess what? That luminous center didn’t seem to give a crap about my personal drama unfolding. Untouched by both the suffering and the joys. Untouched by even enlightenment. Then Who am I? This center? The one seeing it? Or the one living out my stories? Am I all of it? None of it? …….

My head hurts. Time to drift off to sleep. Who is sleeping anyways?