Sunday, August 21, 2011

Where Night Never Falls

Krishna said:


—You are the Field and the Knower of the Field. The Field is the body and the mind. These are ephemeral, transient. They give rise to the illusion of "I am." Like clouds they form and change and pass in time. The Knower is the inviolable Self. No fire burns it; no water wets it; no wind makes it dry. It blazes like the sun where night never falls.

My creation gives rise to the illusion that the Field is the same as the Knower, but these are not the same. The one who confuses these is lost. You are only the eternal Self, not body, not mind. And I am the Knower of all the fields of My creation.

I'd been working over these words, which I've paraphrased liberally. At first, I was perplexed. I thought, "What am I, if not the mind?" But the mind is like a pane of glass. Fouled with smoke of selfishness, or self-absorption what can you see through it? But washed clean of pride and anger, or broken, the light of the inviolable Self shines through, "blazing like the sun, where night never falls."

Even still, I thought, "I've not seen this Self. Where is the proof of it?" And then, again in front of me, I discovered where it shines and I realized why who I think I am (this mind) and who I truly am (these words) are not the same, and bear no resemblance to one another.

In The Temple of Hanuman, you will find my true Self. In The End of Reason, you will find my Self again. And every day I struggle to become what I am, and to reveal that light through glass as black as pitch. A few days ago, I discovered not only a way out of the false choices of rage or resignation, of defiance or defeat, and, for the first time in my life, understood the contradiction of who I think I am, and who others think I am, and who I am and will always be, even after this world is a cinder, my mind in oblivion, my body dust. I'd read the words a thousand times and did not understand them, even when I thought I did. And then suddenly, I did understand what my Self has spent my life trying to explain to me. There all along. Hiding in plain sight. I wish you could see it with me; I wish I could share the wonder of this with you.