Host
Trip Overholt, Host. Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
Anyone can taste enlightenment anytime by asking the question, “who am I?” The truthful answer always is, for everyone, the same still silence that avails itself. So the truth is, we are nothing. Inside of that no-thing everything mysteriously appears. And we are also that. That contradiction of simultaneous something AND nothing cannot be grocked by the mind. It can only be experienced. The mind can point to it with lots of juicy words but it can never know or own it for itself because the mind is not external to it. It is within it. And something cannot know that which contains it. It can only BE it. It is all so maddingly simple and so profoundly ever present as to be beyond detection.
All of that sounds like a bunch of words and of course, it is. Word symbols cannot prove anything or transmit anything to anyone. If, upon their reading, an apparent spiritual transformation takes place in a reader, it is because the reader is ripe, with a mind that is empty enough to embrace a radical new “over standing”. Ironically, it has little to do with the “worthiness” of the one so blessed.
Unbeknownst to me, I was in such a state of ripeness when I walked through the Wizard’s bedroom in 2006 and caught a glimpse of an open picture book with large type lying on a table in his bedroom. It was quotes and pictures of the great Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi. I stopped and read a line or two. I flipped the page and read another. Three or four pages into it I had a full blown meltdown. Tears streamed down my face. The knot in my solar plexus (that had been there for so long without even being noticed) unclenched. I suddenly, irrevocably realized I was not a separate individual with a personal consciousness that “belonged” to me (residing between my ears) but rather, an underlying awareness that was now somehow perceivable. I had finally been blessed by grace with an awakening I was not even looking for. In that moment there was joy, grief and relief. I realized that heaven is here and now. We are already a deathless reality. What joy! But to experience that truth, I had died to myself as a “real” i.e. “separate” person that should be taken seriously. All of my prior striving for happiness – primarily through my relationships with women – I now realized had been completely unnecessary. And with that realization, a huge burden was lifted. There was nothing I needed to do, learn or gain. I had finally come home to myself. I now understood or perhaps better said – had the “felt sense” of the sanctuary that is nothingness.
Oh, I had arrived before, numerous times, on hallucinogenics – an ocean of love absent myself as the guy known as “Trip”. But whenever the hallucinogen had warn off, so too had my sense of myself as the non-container without limits. I inevitably returned time and again to total identification with myself as the active agent in a drama created either by myself or in tandem “with” a higher external power, I called “god”. I did not know myself to be the inseparable instrument through which an unutterable “I amness” expresses itself for no apparent reason other than the joy of coming to know its true Self over and over again.
Now that I grock who and what I truly am, there is a constant substratum to the dramas that continue to play out in my life. That inherent companion is a witnessing to the drama that is beyond the drama. That “empty sentience” if you will, takes the sting out of life’s difficulties. It reduces the amount of reaction that takes place. It creates some space. It allows for the possibility of causeless, spontaneous joy to happen for no particular reason at all other than the simple recognition of the state, not the statement,“That Thou Art”.
Once happening, one tends to want to share. Sharing back and forth “I” and “I” affirming for one another that which is too fantastic a reality to be “believed” by the mind becomes the joy and focus of one’s life. At this point “in time,” if one has to write up one’s bio for some purpose, one perceives one’s life as a kind of before and after story. There is the part of life that takes place while dreaming and the part that happens after one has woken up to the conscious dream as the dreamer itself. While one does not necessarily abide permanently as alert attention, paying attention to attention, profound benefits accrue from even momentary respites from the hell of separation in the mortal myth. Life takes on a sort of effortlessness. Synchronicity enjoins one. Everything begins to be experienced as the perfection that it already is. What were once the bummers in life come to be understood as adding even more richness to life than the good times. And as one brings an increased faith to that truth, the apparent “time” in which the difficulties are revealed as blessings is ever more compacted. The “proof” then of the “word symbols” that friends and others often endlessly debate, is on the ground, as writing on the wall and lessons on the turning pages of life. One realizes, OMFG, I have hit a freaking grand slam home run! I can’t miss! And how freaking’ egalitarian of that higher power, huh!? No matter what one’s station in life, no matter what objective “hell” might be playing out in one’s world, the opportunity is always there for anyone, even murderers included, to be that indescribable causeless joy that is their one true nature. Thank you geez-us and Amen!!!!!
Join me every Tuesday at noon for Conversations with Avant-garde Sages on WCOM. Email me any comments you would like to bring up in the conversation at zortacular@gmail.com and I will read them on air. Non of us is as wise as all of us.
