Stained glass by Adeline Hébert-Stevens in Church of Passy, France
First, you have to dig. You have to dig beneath every thing that qualifies you. You have to find that pure ‘I am’ hidden under all that this ‘I am’ is or can be. You have to find the raw substance of that which you are referring to when you say simply ‘I am’. What is this pure, unqualified ‘I am’? Over the years, piles over piles of experiences, beliefs, conditioning, have acquired substance and have overwhelmed this simple experience of ‘I am’. This substance has mutated into an apparent self, and ‘I am’ has been buried under it, and made into a collection of ‘I am this’, ‘and this’, ‘and this’, ‘and also this’. So that we can never ever truthfully feel ‘I am’ anymore. It is gone. ‘I am’ is gone with the wind of endless qualifications.
So we have now to resurrect that ‘I am’. To un-qualify it. To strip it bare of its qualities, of its acquired competences and idiosyncrasies. We have to purify the wine of our self, distil it to its essence. An essence that was never lost but only diluted, made secondary and unimportant, when it is in fact the only thing there is. This essence is simply the realisation of an emptiness that is the core of our being, that we never had the guts to look at, or enquire into, but which a simple question and a good-will to find out, could simply reveal with a dumbfounding ease and precision.
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A celebration of the purity of being, before it becomes qualified… (READ MORE…)
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The Dawn Within 