Un petit moment

As electricity is not a light bulb, neither a toaster nor a Tesla, I am not a body. I animate the body. I see and work with the body. For a little while.

Detachment

We cannot see a grain of sand from inside the grain of sand. The perceiver is not the perceived. The observer is not the observed. The seer is not the seen. Whatever I perceive is not me. Not even this body? Not even that.

Light

We are light emitters. Now, from a scientific point of view, all matter emits light, even stones, but ours is an extraordinary radiance, rapturously described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as “the luminous splendour of the colourless light of Emptiness.” We think we are bodies going about the business of the body, but that’s vyakti, the outer self. The inner self, the vyakta, is pure light. I occasionally have the experience of seeing a soft white glow around the head of the man I am counselling. On those occasions I know again that all is well. There’s nothing he needs to do.  

Mistaken identity

No one says, “I am a body. This is me!” And yet this is precisely what most of us hold to be true. Herein lies our suffering. All our problems are body problems.

Field flowers

On this day I will pay my respects to Epictetus by carrying with me a gentle reminder: Every person I see today, including the man in the mirror, is going to die soon.