Don’t separate yourself from your experience.
Welcome the totality of it, the sensations in your body, the sound of my voice and the birds, your thoughts. All of that is at a zero distance from you. All of that is in you.
Even if you create the thought that there is someone who is separate from that as the observer or the perceiver, this thought itself is one more appearance from which you are not separate.
Recognize the immediacy of all appearances as a fact. The separation comes after the fact, as an interpretation of the fact. Separation can exist only between two perceived objects, between a chair and a table, for instance. But how can we talk about separation between something that we perceive and something that we don’t perceive? Between something that is perceived and that which perceives? In order to see, to establish such a separation, we should be able to perceive the perceiver, to see it as separate from the perceived. And that is not possible.
Ask yourself, “In my experience, do I stand separate from that which I perceive?” Your experience is the only point of reference in deciding this question. We are not talking about philosophy here but about perception, how we perceive the body and the world, our life itself. It may sound theoretical but it isn’t. It is only practical. Practicality demands that we eliminate anything that has no purpose, no meaning and which is a waste of energy. Any activity, thought or feeling based upon the illusion of separation is such an unnecessary burden. And that is especially true of the way we perceive the body and of the way we perceive the world.
We can perceive the body and the world free from any psychological interference, free from the superimposition of a ‘me,’ from fear and desire, from like and dislike. See just the facts, the facts of the world, of the body, of the mind as they arise.
See also the tendancy of fixation of the attention either in some form of thought running in circles or some form of bodily sensation, a localization of the body. The mind always wants to have something, some object to chew on. The restlessness of the mind has to be completely seen.
That which triggers this activism is often a sense of lack, a compulsion. We have to welcome it completely at the feeling level. The way to welcome it is to give it the space and the time it needs to unload its psychological content. We can meet those fixations in the body with total indifference. The last thing we want to do is to try to eliminate them, to work on them, to interfere with them.
The peace of our true being doesn’t get revealed by the elimination of objects, but rather through our overlooking of the objects, through this dispassionate welcoming. The object being contemplated with this indifference liberates the awareness, makes it available to itself.
That which is perceived is part of the mind and we don’t share it with others. That which we share is not perceived. It is the perfume.
It is the perfume of the seer knowing itself, of seeing knowing seeing, of seeing seeing seeing. When we are among truth lovers and when seeing seeing seeing—-in other words, seeing that sees itself—-takes place, we all feel pulled inside by this seeing in which there is nothing to be seen.
It is very mysterious how this silence propagates. It comes from the inside.
Transcript of a guided meditation by Francis Lucille
Tampa, Florida, 2002 retreat
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