Pristine Awareness and the Endless Grief
Losing touch with that which always/already is
After days alone on the side of a mountain, laying under a canopy of ponderosa pines, I reached a state that I can only explain as full illumination.
I have been clinging onto that thread of awakening since I’ve been home.
Heartbroken as I watch it slowly unravel while I reintegrate into the civilian world.
I feel my grasping to return to that peak state of pristine awareness — a profound somatic realization of life’s perfection that coursed through my body for days.
My heart yearns to return to those wild landscapes and drop into that state for eternity.
My soul knows that is just another tactic to avoid being with life exactly how it is.
And this is the conflict of integration.
How do I bring what happened out there into the mundane?
How do I consistently touch that illuminated state to serve others in their own spontaneous awakening?
There has always been a part of me that rejects the world and what I see in it.
After being out there, that pain has only grown.
The part of me that feels no-one will ever get it.
The part of me that judges their unconscious and shallow flailing through life.
It keeps me safe, one-up, and better-than.
It keeps my heart closed.
It keeps the nature of my essence withheld.
And as I continue to grasp tighter, fearing the loss of that felt-sense experience, the despair grows.
I am struck with endless grief.
Brought to tears many times a day from what I feel is slipping away.
But the truth is I can’t ever lose that feeling.
And though I may have had to put myself in extreme places to touch it, it has always be here.
There is no distinction between “here” and “there”, front country or back, awakened or asleep.
Pristine awareness, as I experienced I under those trees weeks ago, is always/already available in any given moment.
Though my soul knows this is true, it is so hard to reconcile in my mind.
To touch that place with all the sights, sounds, and stimulations of this world seems impossible.
To viscerally feel the perfection through the busy-ness and endless list of things to complete, insurmountable.
Yet, this is my dharma.
This is the path I must walk in order to evolve into the person I feel I am destined to be.
Not to grasp, seek, or selfishly protect the sacred.
Not to cast a shadow on the mundane.
But to live as the sacred.
To let every step be informed by that illumination that is right here, right now.
To let every breath, word, utterance be in devotion to living an awakened life.
So that others may wake up from their stupor and the feel the ancient and radiant wisdom of their heart.