It's the same with all the thoughts and feelings and other experiences that arise in the ocean of ourselves. The ocean never resists them, it never creates a negative reference point saying "Damn , that seaweed is still there. There must be something terribly wrong with me". When they arise, the ocean just sees them for what they are and they pass away naturally.
These eyes see the incredible benevolence of the universe, which is completely trustworthy in all respects. There is nothing to fear. Everything in each moment is so well taken care of - and always has been.
Behind most spiritual practices is the belief that you have to get someplace you're not- a destination called realization or enlightenment. But realization isn't someplace else; it's the naturally occurring human state. It doesn't belong to anybody. It's who we all are. Spiritual practices also set up many pictures of what this state looks like. For example, when I described how much fear was present, people told me the fear meant that something must be wrong, because fear was an indication that I wasn't in the proper state. But fear is just what it is, and it's there too in the vastness of who we are.
There was a part of the mind - perhaps what we call the self-reflective or introspective function - that kept turning to look and, finding emptiness, kept sending the message that something was wrong. It was a reflex that had developed during the years of living in the illusion of individuality, a reflex we commonly consider necessary to our selves. We "look within" repeatedly to determine what we think and feels, to make a study of ourselves and track our states of mind and heart. Now that there was no longer an "in" to look "into", the self-reflective reflex was adrift, but persisted. It kept turning in and turning in, unable to come to terms with the fact that there was no in anymore, only emptiness.
Suffering occurs when something is taken for what it's not , rather than for what it is.
I moved down the street like a cloud of awareness following a body that seemed simultaneously familiar and foreign. There was an incomprehensible attachment to that body, although it no longer felt like "mine". It continued to send out signals of its sensory perception, yet how or where those signals wwere being received was beyond comprehension.
Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy at sea, cut loose from sensory solidity, separated from and witnessing the body from a vast distance.
I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called "me" was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. "I" was now behind my body, looking out at the world without using the body's eyes.
