Forget about whether or not there is free will or whether there isn't. Forget whether the I exists or doesn't. Forget about whether you can know the truth or can't. A fascination with the absolute, makes the relative dissatisfying. A fascination with ideas, makes the actual dissatisfying. Life is happening. If there is any truth, that's it. It is not in ideas, ideals, idealism and philosophies. It is here and now.
Being rational has the tendency to make ideas more important than reality, to make ideals more important than the everyday experience of being alive. By doing so, being alive is missed. Here and now is missed. I'm not hinting at some esoteric reality or the discovery of a substratum, but to the obvious. I'm not talking about missing Presence, but about missing all things present. I'm talking about isolation, aloneness, disconnection and sadness because life doesn't match my ideas of life. I'm talking about how the real never quite measures up to the ideal, and how the ideal is ultimately unsatisfying. I'm talking about how the vision of the mind obscures the seeing of the heart.
Without being philosophical, theological or poetic, what is life? "This is life. Life is here now." "Life is what is." How did we get on this train that perpetually moves toward the ideal and away from the real? How did we get more interested in beliefs about what is than what actually is? How did we become more interested in thinking than in living? Questions like, "What is the meaning of life?" "What is life about?" "What is an authentic life?" "What is a spiritual life?" "What is a purposeful life? are all evidence of the intellect's inability to grasp the utter simplicity of here and now. It is evidence that the capacity to think has replaced the capacity to deeply experience what is immediate and intimate, what is utterly obvious: here and now.
If you ask what is an ideal life, all will have their opinions. If you ask whether or not this ideal life is possible, the answer can only be, "Yes, theoretically." The intellect promises but never delivers. Why this endlessly seeking of some ideal? What will quench it's thirst? Must the intellect be satisfied by insight: Insight that it is an illusion, that it doesn't exist, that it is not the doer? Must the mind be satisfied by knowing its true nature, by seeing its emptiness or by knowing the truth? You can answer these questions for yourself. One thing is certain, if there is any fulfillment in life, it is living itself, not in having ideals and ideas about life, but in the immediate and intimate experience of being alive.
We never mistake our reflection to be our face, but we almost always take our ideas to be reality. It is this capacity to reflect which creates the reflection called "mind" that we mistake for our original face.
