I Am

The 4 a.m. anxiety wake-up call. Shit, not again. The mental engine sparks to life and like that the mind is a whirl of anxious thoughts and fears about this person or that, regrets about the past, apprehension about the future, money, kids, health. It’s as if they’ve been waiting there in the darker corners of the bedroom for me to stir. “He’s awake, let’s move!”

So weary of this dance. Ok, let’s revisit some of the spiritual lessons. No, weary of that too. Weary of it all. I shouldn’t have to resurrect all of this material like some kid on the eve of an exam. It’s just all thought stuff, the spiritual teachings drifting off into the ether as easily and insignificantly as memories of dinner or a weather forecast. There is no substance to any of it. None of it is real.

I want to be free of this damned dance. But that freedom is said to be locked within the truth. Ok, if the “the truth shall set me free” what, in an impermanent world, could possible be true?  Where are the keys to my jail cell?

4:15 a.m.

What do I know? What do I really, truly, experientially know? Not the stuff I’ve heard or read – that’s just here today, gone tomorrow. I want the real deal and will settle for nothing less.

God? Nope, zero experience of God. Lots of talk and blather and scriptural this and orthodox that but all of it manmade and handed down and so many notes in the margins by lots of flawed humans like me. Ok, God is out. Again, I only want to know what I truly know, not what someone else has fed me. Funny how fast the personal library thins out when we switch to the mode of personal knowing.

Myself? Do I know myself? We’ve been down this road before. Is the body me? It’s orbited the sun 47 times and is still doing pretty well, but I’ve searched high and low and there’s no “me” tucked away behind the spleen. Fabulously complicated, self-perpetuating machine, yes, but “me,” no.  The mind? It sure feels that way at times, but I can’t control the thoughts, certainly can’t stop them (or I’d be back asleep already), can’t predict which one is coming next. It’s pretty clear the brain/mind/thoughts aren’t me. The mind has conditioned itself to be a “me,” but it’s just conditioning in the same way the dog responds to “Riley” but hasn’t a clue what “Riley” means.

4:35 a.m.

Looking closer it’s pretty clear that EVERYTHING I imagine myself to “know” has been created by, and subsequently filtered through, the mind. Even the language in which I think those thoughts is borrowed from others. I no more created the English language than I did the tongue with which I speak it. Take away the thoughts and what is left of the world and that which exists within it? It is not an “oak tree.” It is not a “tree.” It is not an “it.”

It’s 4:50 a.m. What do I KNOW?

And there it is: awareness. It’s all that is “known.” Something is aware of its beingness.

The anxieties still buzz about like mosquitoes, but to whom do they come? Sleep returns.