It is beyond wondrous to live inside a paradox. We all do, whether we realize it or not. We feel real, seemingly separated from each other by time and space, and yet we aren’t. We are both and neither simultaneously, maybe that’s why we don’t like uncertainty, why we fight for answers, need to find the right one.

We are the ultimate uncertainty.

When we are willing to stop and observe, something that most often occurs only when we have no choice but to, we can see the flimsiness of our solidity, the lack of impermanence in our permanence, the total inability in our ability to hang onto anything. at. all. When we are truly capable of looking without agenda, without being hampered by thoughts and beliefs, when we reach that magical point of futility, we notice the miracle we are.

Stopping — that’s the hard part for this perpetually moving show. It’s not just hard, it’s actually impossible. Yes, another paradox. The show cannot stop, and we are all a part of the show, the ‘we’ that believes in fairytales of individuality and someone who chooses, who is indeed, the character and chooser in the show.

Stopping is not the character finally finding enough gumption or garnering sufficient willpower to sit down and stop. On one hand that’s impossible, but on the other, characters do what characters do. Sometimes that looks like gumption and willpower 😉 sometimes like life’s 4 x 4 smacking them out of the park, sometimes like the Energizer bunny simply winding down. 

Stopping is a shift in focus from the character to awareness of the character, to awareness aware of itself. It is the recognition of awareness, the awareness that we always already are. It is the realization that the character’s now is infinite aliveness flowing through and as the lens of awareness, not the character’s awareness, but awareness itself, awareness that is not chopped up into 8 billion awarenesses but indivisible couldn’t-be-anything-other-than awareness. 

Iti s not something you the character do. It feels like stopping to the character, but it is not something new or achieved. It is ever-present actuality, what is never not here now, and totally obvious when the focus shifts off the character’s needs and wants, its ideas and concepts of choice and control.

The focus does not obviously undeniably irreversibly shift until the focus profoundly shifts off the character. It is always shifting; we just don’t recognize it. In the tiny fragment of lapse in self-involvement, it shifts, shifting back instantaneously for the lapse doesn’t generally last long.

Hanging onto ideas and concepts like choice and time, life and death, God and not God, keeps the focus on the character. That’s all. No harm. No foul. Just a different experience.   

What’s fun … and here goes the paradox again … whether you see through it or not, the character goes on having experiences in time and space, choosing, defining who God is to them, and all that jazz.

It’s both, hence the uncertainty factor. It is impossible to name it one or the other, because it is not one or the other. It feels like choice to the character because the character appears to have choice. No choice remains with the recognition of my character-ness.

What a hoot!