Released from prison

From John Sherman, emphasis added by me:

Expect ego to continue, and with it the drama of the story of your life, but it will mean less and less to you, it will lose the feel of desperate importance to you. Ego, after all, is not the problem. The lie that ego is you is the only problem.

And remember always: you cannot do this wrong. All that’s required is the firm intention to look at yourself directly whenever you can, and all else will be taken care of.

This is all that is of any value to be seen in my misdirected efforts. For all my foolishness and taste for drama, everything I did once I turned to self-inquiry inadvertently brought me face to face with the direct experience of myself, the truth of myself, again and again. And it was that, only that, never what I thought was going on, that in time eradicated the lie that I am my life. No matter what I thought was going on, I was repeatedly, unknowingly, looking at myself again and again, and it was that alone that took from me the lie.

I continued the inquiry; I continue it to this day, and I expect to continue it with my last breath. Over time, my belief in the story diminished and seems now to have disappeared entirely. I cannot say that on this particular day I found liberation, or that on day I awoke to eternal freedom without condition. In truth, there has never been a moment when I have not been what I am, and what I am is nothing other than that certainty of being that is eternal freedom, and peace, and love.

As to the story itself, as to my life, it has certainly changed. What was hard has become soft and easy, what was bitter has become sweet, what was deprivation has become fulfillment, and what was bondage has become eternal, shining freedom without condition. But in truth, it has actually always been so. The circumstances have been and still are, sometimes hard and other times easy, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, sometimes lacking and sometimes full, sometimes cramped and other times open and free, but life itself has never been anything at all other than the instrument through which I get the taste of myself, through which I see the endlessly unfolding, glorious and futile attempt to say what I am to myself. All life is that. The entire cosmos and all of time and space is that. Every good thought and every bad thought, every generous action and every selfish action, every moment of clarity and every moment of dark confusion is a thread in that infinite, endlessly becoming, tapestry of being.


What has most wondrously changed is that in the absence of the belief that I am my life, in the absence of any belief whatsoever about what I am or am not, the energy of aggression and hatred and betrayal that naturally flows from belief about what I am has vanished. Nothing is at stake here. Nothing that happens here touches me, takes anything from me, gives anything to me, or changes me in any way whatsoever. That has always been so, and it is only the belief that I am my life, that I am any thing at all, that has made it seem otherwise.