There is ever only one choice, one action, one experience in life. The struggle to connect with and respond to that one springs from my imagining many. Discipline imagines many choices, ambition imagines many actions, desire imagines many experiences… But there is ever only the one, occurring presently, overlooked in the cacophony of stories and images animating the mind.
When the universe wanted its tale told, it gave birth to us humans, its great storytellers and artificers. And we have no greater artifices than these: time and multiplicity. So well do we channel these fictions that we inhabit them, we actually perceive the world as existing in time and composed of a multiplicity of objects, events, parts, and wholes. And in this perception, which is really the mind’s own shadowy projection onto the wall of its cave, we remain hypnotized, intoxicated by our own images and stories. Unable to be present for that which actually confronts us: the one and only.
In fact, we make the totally backwards attempt of making sense of the one and only by relating it to our stories of time and multiplicity. We live on the assumption that the story (the discipline, the ambition, the desire, etc.) possesses fundamental reality while the here and now is accidental, negligible in “the grand scheme of things” projected in the mind.
Long before Silicon Valley dreamed up its “metaverse”, the mind had already built its own: that world of images and stories we carry as a blindfold, our exile from the reality beyond representations. This split between being and our thoughts about being is why Dostoevsky urges us to “love life more than the meaning of life”. That is to say, be present to what is first, and only second to your story about what is. Meet the universe here and now, the only universe there is.
Whatever choice, action, and experience you face, see what happens when you are present to it and it alone. See just how much of the anxiety, resistance, and struggle you face comes from the metaverse wrapped around your eyes. See what remains when you take that blindfold off. See if there is any other reality, place, or time than the one. And then watch the one dissolve into the great mystery.
May we love life,
Simeon
“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.”
— Alan Watts (attributed)
Suggested Reading
The Way of Liberation by Adyashanti
What happens when we stop seeking answers and simply meet life as it is? In The Way of Liberation, Adyashanti distills decades of insight into a clear path toward presence to the one and only reality here and now.
Order here and support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost.
This essay is an invitation to remember what has never been lost: the sheer wonder of being. Before the stories, before the striving, there is a presence, awake, and already whole. Not something to achieve, but something to notice.
Simeon, I usually file my emails in subfolders after reading them, to keep my inbox manageable. I have not been able to "file" this note away. I go back to it every day. You were well inspired. Group effort. It takes community work to stay grounded in mindfulness, so thank you for your selflessness in sharing these messages with us. They help so much.
A bientôt, Françoise