One thing I've been able to recognize is the fact that I am the awareness in which thoughts appear, as if I'm a canvas and the thoughts are the paints. It's a fitting analogy, particularly when moods have so often colored my perceptions. They do so much less frequently now, though.
There is some distance now between what I realize myself to be and my thoughts and emotions. It's been some time now since I've gotten caught up in them, and that's a wonderful freedom. I still experience emotion, but I don't buy into it as often. I still have thoughts, of course, but they're more or less background noise now.
I know that there's really no way that "I" can become enlightened. I know that. Enlightenment, in fact, is really a faulty concept, because there is no one to become enlightened. But there is a recognition of my true identity that must, and is, happening. The more I find out about who and what I am, the less I identify with those things that cause suffering. So, there is less suffering from thoughts and emotions, but more from emptiness.
Non-dualists are telling me I'm hung up in a concept, and that there's "nothing to do." I know this, too. But there is still plenty for me to learn to recognize. While it's easy to still the mind for a second or two and realize that awareness hasn't ceased, this experience doesn't really change my daily life. It takes practice, it takes a constant letting go of that which I'm not.
The "Dark Night of the Soul" is often explained as the period during which the ego dies, yet there is no sign of God here where I exist. All of the labels I thought belonged to me are nothing. None of them exist in and of themselves -- counselor, therapist, magician, Buddhist, student, wife, friend, daughter, etc. All these are names given to groups of ideas and events in my life, and when these ideas and events are looked at individually, they're just ideas and events. There is nothing to "hang my hat on," nothing to call my "self." There truly is no one home.
Reading from St. John of the Cross:
This is the first and principal benefit caused by this arid and dark night of contemplation: the knowledge of oneself and of one's misery. For, besides the fact that all the favours which God grants to the soul are habitually granted to them enwrapped in this knowledge, these aridities and this emptiness of the faculties compared with the abundance which the soul experienced aforetime and the difficulty which it finds in good works, makes it recognize its own lowliness and misery, which in the time of its prosperity it was unable to see.
St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, 76-77
So, "I" go through my daily life, knowing there's not a thing to do but wait for grace. Why? Because even though I know who I'm not, I don't yet know who I am. I haven't yet been able to live 100% from the point of view of pure awareness, Rigpa, the "Ground of All Being," as I did after that first deeksha. I was given a taste of the Fruit from the Garden, and then was promptly kicked out on my ass. Here, there is no God, but I didn't realize that before.
Sometimes I wish I had never experienced deeksha. It showed me what mukti was -- complete freedom from the mind. There was a pervasive, loving peace at all times. Since then, I've only been able to be de-clutched from the mind for brief intervals, never enough to bring peace. Never enough to find God.
The pain is sometimes enough to wring prayers from me. I don't normally pray because I've never felt in touch with the One that hears prayers, but I live in constant earshot of It's call to me. I'm like a small planet orbiting the sun, unable to fly off into space because of the gravitational pull, and unable to get closer because of the heat. Around and around and around I go....
So I just continue, onward through the Valley of Death.
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