Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

by J. Jennifer Matthews

our return to the mystery and intimacy of the present moment doesn’t have to be thought of as a goal, and certainly not a distant one.

They experience peace because they have been willing to discard an innately disturbing illusion: the illusion that there is a self which needs to be ‘realized’ or ‘fulfilled.’

If we want to appreciate the mystery of life, it is essential to evade the compulsion of our desires by understanding that there does not need to be anything else in our current situations. There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be liberated from. This is it. And this poignancy is always here. We can give ourselves permission to experience it; to be right here with it. To be available to it. To be available to the mystery of life is to be free.

But in its darker, less innocent aspects, the belief that we need to wake up can be something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. When we entertain it, we keep trying to pinch ourselves and wake up from present-moment experience, rather than appreciating the mystery of present-moment experience.