As This Story Had Gone...

How it seems, presently, is that I started this looking, this digging to figure out what All This is all about, probably as a child.  It goes back as far as I can remember.  And there have been iterations.  


There will be more.


In the past few years, all of my searching for answers intensified as I perceived a self who would face greater and greater personal challenges to that fictitious state called Happiness.  My initial relentless pursuit was to establish a real coping mechanism to handle my story's "less desirable" aspects, those I imagined were coming soon.  Lots of people do the same, thinking that a spiritual or truth pursuit will spare the pain of a difficult situation.


There's no such thing.  Everything appears fully as there's nothing, no self, to prevent it.


Religion is a false buffer if it's used to shield.  And so is No Self. Everything that life is, is faced fully. There is no other way. The false shield of thought, the overlay, is a mask, a pattern of thinking that claims to try to alter the story. And yet within that fantasy, this masking is ultimately felt as more harmful than good.


So what do I mean about ending suffering with regard to seeing that there is no tangible self?  It's not that there is no pain, no anger, no anxiety.  Those are elements within Life Itself.  The freedom is in the fact that there's nowhere for it to stick.  Because when it comes up for any of us, the suffering is in hanging onto it as part of an identity, or trying to push it away as part of a desire to have it not be part of our identity.


Once it's seen that there is no identity except for one arbitrarily constructed in wisps of thought, there's no either clinging or pushing it away.  It just is, as it is, nothing more.  There's no one there to hold it or carry it.
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photo credit:  everRiviere on Deviantart