How do you honor a deep and poignant feeling? When you feel intense love, how do you hold it so it will never go away?
You must connect with the permanent. The rule of feelings is simple: All feelings which rise will eventually fall. When a feeling of sadness arises you may feel pain, and then when it falls you may feel relief. When a feeling of happiness arises you may feel relief, and then when it falls you may feel pain. Both happiness and sadness bring pain and relief because both feelings are temporary – always arising and falling. When the question is how to honor the relief, or how to hold joy so close it never fades, the answer is to look outside of feeling. When the rule is all feelings arise and fall, then the only way to honor these feelings is to connect with the permanent.
Connecting with the permanent will open the floodgates of all joy. The permanent is the awareness inside of you which knows you. The awareness which witnesses childhood, then adulthood – who perceives simple thinking, then complex thinking – who is present when the body falls asleep, dreams, then wakes, is the permanent. If you were to draw on a piece of paper an image from an emotional memory, the image on the paper would be your memory, and the paper itself would be your awareness. When you have an experience, the experience is arising and falling, but the canvas on which the experiences arises is your awareness and is permanent.
When you connect with the permanent, you find an ethereal presence which is more than concrete. You find a subtlety which is directly noticeable. You look at awareness which you have always felt and had, which is not an idea or a God to have faith in, but an utter reality you live in every day. You see your own awareness, and you know it is real because it is literally yourself looking at yourself. Connecting with this is connecting with the paper on which any story can be written – and on which any and every story which has ever existed has been written. You connect to the concrete source of experience.
If you are lost in the waves of feeling, you can not honor feeling. You will feel intense joy, but in time your joy will fade and the intensity you once had will be at first diluted, and then forgotten. Your pain likewise will move along in waves. Pain will rise, and swell, and pop. Relief will wash in, and wash out, and the cycle will continue. To honor the feelings, the honor must come from outside of the cycle. The honor must come from the permanent awareness. Abiding in permanent awareness will put in your mind the direct source of all joy. You will have the power to see the paper on which all stories are written, and you can honor all stories by honoring the paper. When a new happy story is ready, you will know where to find the paper. When a cycle of pain begins, you will know where to find the paper.
Eventually, you will identify with the paper and not the story. You will know every story is just a permutation of what the paper can say and be in a single moment. You will know the paper as the permanent, concrete, eternal truth. You will know with your heart, with your feeling, it is the source of all joy and Peace. You will feel the immense sensations of the person and the experience, and you will simultaneously feel the subtle presence of the paper. You will notice the subtle feeling always proceeds experience, experience is always painted on the subtle feeling, and under all experience is the paper. The paper will remain when experience changes, when experience is forgotten, and when experiences are born. You will feel the paper, and eventually, the paper will be the bigger feeling and the experience will be subtle. Your attention will shift. In that moment, when your paper is the focus of your attention, you will feel intense joy because you know the boundless generosity of the paper and because you can feel its intense potential and benevolence. You will feel permanent joy, and you will feel you are honoring all experience. You will be unbiased towards pain or joy, knowing both are written on the same one all omnipotent, all infinite source – the permanent paper: Awareness.
To honor experience, abide in awareness.
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