A beautiful conversation about our core distraction, the belief in being ‘someone’.
Q: When I am seeing a pattern and I don't want to give power to it and remain in Knowing, I am noticing a level of distraction. When I 'want' to stay in Knowing there is a distraction that doesn't let me abide in what you have called 'Absence'.
B: You are saying that the distraction doesn't make you absent?
Q: Yes, I am not remaining in the Absence.
B: Absence is ‘all there is’. You cannot remain in Absence. It is impossible because Absence is all there is! How can you remain in it? You don't 'go' there. You shed, you unveil, you surrender. You cannot 'go' to Absence. You recognise that it is all there is. There is actually no one here. It is the end of colouring experience.
It's a good enquiry...
What distraction is, is the belief that you are ‘someone’. What distraction is, is the belief that there are others that are causing your distraction. What distraction is, is the belief that there are others who can stop you from 'having Absence', which basically is pure peace. So you want others to stop distracting you so that you can have some peace. And you believe that peace is for yourself but it is not for yourself because your self is also made of Absence. Whilst you keep thinking about yourself you believe that you are not Absence.
Awareness creates the distraction to maintain the division between the sense of self and the deeper knowing. It believes that it must find what it is in the manner that it likes, which creates an opposite of dislike. So it is continually seeking. It seeks Absence in things and it is the things that you lose. What you actually lose is the idea that there are things and that there are others and that things and others fulfil you in the absence of your primary state of openness. So the distraction is the belief that love or peace belongs to ‘someone’ called Mark. It is Mark who is the problem, the belief that he actually exists.
Everyone will be hearing this in myriads of different ways, in what appears to be personal circumstances. What is actually happening is that Nothing is meditating all forms back into itself. All forms are resolved only within Awareness being what It deeply Is, not contracted, open. The contraction will eventually disappear but essentially What You Are has no need for it to disappear in your openness. Within your openness you get to know yourself and the structures you have invented and created to keep yourself separate from being Nothing or Absence. You get to experience those structures.
What I am saying here is that you are not someone who is 'doing’ this. This IS what is happening - it is the return of form to its source and the return of Awareness to realise the first Light that is the 'I'.
When we first awaken there is an 'undoing' taking place within the cells of our body, the brain, the nervous system, the heart and our relationships. We untangle our awareness from association with objective formed experience: "I like you. I don't like you. I want you. I don't want you. You're good. You're bad." All that’s ever happening is Nothing is meditating all forms back into itself.
Right now, it looks like we are having a conversation but really we are opening to return the forms that are spent. We are returning those forms within our spaciousness and we get to know ourselves as these forms return back through the 'I’. There is openness, Awareness expands and Knowing becomes the Light, which is Love and everything shifts into a new place.
First off distraction is the belief that you are a ‘someone. All the forms of experience that within your reflective consciousness mirror to you through like and dislike, that you are a ‘someone’. Within this body-mind matrix you could say you are building a dam on the river of the Light that You essentially Are. In awakening everything will come to you to unblock that flow. No one is doing it. It is Awareness realising what It deeply Is.
Most of us won't go this far because it unveils so much and there is seeming great loss in this. It is not the loss of ‘someone’. It is the loss of our mind. That’s what we are frightened of but Love is all that is here. Love is functioning for Love is Love and Love clearly is loving.
Q: What I am really receiving is that the question, which I thought was a personal question is actually a question of Consciousness. It now feels very detached from the person who can ask a question.
B: Detached from the person or detached from the belief there is a person? It's all a bit back to front because you have this mind-set that says that you must transform. But there is no one here who can transform.
It is in the staying with ‘What Is’, in utter openness, that all begins to collapse back into emptiness and what is obscured is revealed. In seeing through the obscuration, the blocks, the dams, with no need to get rid of them, you discover what You deeply are. As those blocks, all the structured patterns of a 'me' collapse, there is loss. You will go through the belief there is loss.
It is precisely the collapse of these structures that makes the revealing of the boundlessness You Are absolute. It is the collapse of the belief of a ‘someone’ that reveals the Light unto Itself - I Am that I Am.
Crete Retreat 2018 D8S5