Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

by J. Jennifer Matthews

Attempts to explain the clarity, stillness, and openness at the heart of existence often amount to what the philosophers call ‘Ignotum per Ignotius:’ an explanation that is even more obscure than the thing it is trying to explain.

Striving for perfection, the compulsion to manufacture a perfect situation, is a habit with us. We are addicted to improving ourselves and our lives’ situations.

We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.

No other real person could verify that we actually experience what we think we experience. This is because no other real person is in there with us.

Supported by our new perspective, we remember that our hope of future enlightenment is just another distortion in the fun-house mirror of our incorrect belief in the self and its future endeavors. We recall that the present moment is all there is, and that reality happens here alone. There is no external basis, therefore, from which we can evaluate our present experience.