Thursday 2 December 2010
"Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father's) kingdom is within you and it is outside you."
-Gospel of Thomas

One of the most truthful moments of my life involved standing outside, on the observation deck of a Ferry between the Irish and Scottish coasts. The Sun was low behind me in the sky and in front only sea in every direction. It looked a little something like this:


However imagine it without the boat front in the way and a wider shot of the horizon, with only sea visible in every direction. I couldn't find a single image of that on Google images, which is interesting becuase it's surely the most common sight every sailor see's most of the time. I think it's one of the most remarkable sites a human being can witness and yet I wonder how many sailors have never noticed it.

I noticed this long before I ever recognised the lie of self and so I couldn't process what I was understanding on a concious level, but at a deeper level beyond words it was there. A feeling of unity with the earth, as if the self, the sea and the sky were all part of one existence, one reality. Mental problems became insignificant and impossible to identify with. When you stare the huge depth of reality right in the face, you don't see a diminished sense of self in the reflection, but rather the absurdity of self as a concept.

Human beings often think of themselves as somehow separate from the rest of reality, they build special moral and religious codes that give them privileged status over other animals, or even over their fellow man, separated by skin colour.

However these constructs are as false as the very self they are built to protect. The real truth of course is that there is no duality, only reality. The sense of self most people create is a lie and puts people at war with reality. How can a person truly enjoy and witness a sunset and yet be thinking about how it relates to the false construct they call self?

This is what people like Eckhart Tolle and others mean when they talk about looking at things without labelling them. See something for what it is, without creating a duality from it and you can see reality in all it's beauty.

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Daniel Gillen
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