Good day beautiful people, it’s been ages, it feels, since I’ve really sat down quietly with my laptop to write to you all. Life has been on fast forward for me for quite a few months, and it has come to feel like a very long time that it’s been quite a roller coaster of a ride. There have been far out moments that have been really testing, intellectually challenging, bewildering, physically demanding, emotionally draining, exhausting, upsetting and even potentially traumatic as well as, of course, loving, tender, inspiring, creative, illuminating, intimate and all of the enjoyable experiences that so often come our way.

Rather than go into the details of these things, I have something very specific that I want to write to you about, as I sit here enjoying what has come to be quite a rare moment alone this evening, because there is something very precious that I feel moved to express about how life is experienced.

The precious thing I want to express, is that there is a profoundly deep and whole way of being with life that is very different post awakening if the awakening is let go. It is quite a contrast to how I remember I responded to life before, when I thought I knew what life was. I’d like to take some time to try to explain this, as I have come to realise that there is great value in it. More than that, I have come to realise that it is the fruit, if you like, of any and all awakening experiences.

Awakening is a dramatic affair, well, not always maybe but it was for me. It was an experience like no other I had ever had before, nor have I had since. It literally shattered everything I thought I knew about existence. It was something that I will never forget and for which I remain eternally grateful. However, the really, really important aspect of awakening isn’t so much the mind blowing experience with which I was graced five years ago, though it was itself essential for me I see, but rather how that experience affects life today. What has happened and continues to happen to the way in which this person experiences the world of experience?

There can be a mis-conception or projection, that is perpetuated by some teachers I must say, that life is only sweet post-awakening. That only what we might consider to be fortunate things happen. That there will be affluence, popularity, good fortune and health, and considered, measured, thoughtful, appropriate and peaceful, actions and emotions, all the time. This isn’t true, at least not in the way that is imagined. Life continues to express all the myriad of flavours of existence. It is sweet, yes, but it will also express it’s sour, salty, astringent and bitter elements. It is bound to, it is uncontrollable, uncontainable and vitally alive.

There is something very significant that changes post-awakening though, which is that, if we are blessed with the ware-with-all to let an awakening go, to let it evolve and mature, it will ripen in the human being a way that completely transforms the way that the human being experiences life.

I began this post by expressing how, over the past several months, life has been particularly huge in all ways. In this sense, it is an ordinary life with all of the ordinarily extraordinary challenges that I’m sure are common throughout all of humanity.

I would now like to take some time to at least begin to carefully explain how the experience of life is also so very different, not to glorify myself in any way, but because it is important, I feel, that awakening experiences and stages and states we might experience throughout our life, however they might present themselves, have a rightful place in the total evolution of a human being.

So, as awakening has developed in my experience, there are a myriad of different elements of life that have changed, and these are essentially all different aspects of the same thing. Not Knowing.

Not knowing enables a rootedness in the vast and unseen aspect of ourselves to establish, deep in the Ground of Being. With commitment, we become rooted not in the mind, not in the arrogance and ignorance of fear and confusion that thinks it knows it all, but in the vitally alive Silence that is the constant, in emptiness.

Throughout recent years, this commitment to the Truth of Being has developed and matured. It has matured into an unconditionl rootedness in the intelligence of whatever experiences happen in the world also, a fullness.

A very natural and unwavering commitment to the Truth of exactly what is happening has developed and this has lead to an intimacy with life that is so precious I must write to you about it.

While this is not something that has come about through any kind of formal practice, there is an important aspect to it – commitment.

In large part, the commitment aspect is no doubt thanks to the more challenging experiences I have gone through. In order to live through challenging experiences in our lives, it is essential to get real about life exactly as it really is. Any more than that is too much. Each experience has to be seen clearly. There has to be commitment to that.

Life is also constantly morphing, evolving and when we are truly present to life, nothing can be held, worried over, moaned about, exaggerated, or feared…. not for long at least.

This is not a doing. It is not something I have done or that takes mindfulness and effort. It is a maturing that happens naturally if we will let it; if we are committed to not knowing; if we are committed to not owning.

Letting go and living in the Unknown brings us into an impossible intimacy with our life. Our very human, fragile, tender, profoundly moving life.

Life, all of the unique flavours of it, are not accepted, welcomed or embraced, they are literally embodied. Life literally becomes so intimate that we become it, all of it, at once, exactly as it is in this eternal moment, without a thought about it. We become the direct experience of life, not the idea of it.

There is therefore the full myriad of experience without exaggeration, fear, ignorance and suffering. Not because we’re hanging out in a disassociated, dualistic idea of the transcendent that is divorced from life, but because we directly experience the fullness of life exactly as it is. We become the intelligence that all experiences are.

Life is free and in the experience of it’s liberation the human, free of delusion, lives in the clarity of readiness responding thoughtlessly as the intelligence inherent within this eternal moment.

So, there it is. I hope that these words resonate with you, that they have gone some way to touch the part of you that know this. Trust that.