Quick Reply on Living

November Project: Question #7

This question comes from A in the comments on a previous post Quick Thoughts on Living:

What is the the most significant or the most major difference you feel between a ‘separate feeling of being alive’ and no ‘separate feeling of being alive’? You have known the former before the accident, I guess. Would love to know.

Thanks for the question, A

Honestly, I don’t remember much of what life was about back then. Certainly it moved along some path or another, with many different jobs, locations, attitudes, and so on.

There was most likely a person, thinking itself to have a life, with struggles, conflicts, hesitations, and worries for the future. But what any of those things may have been about, I cannot really remember. And as far as the former and the latter is concerned, I can only imagine a comparison between the two….

…so let’s imagine for a moment.

Before, there must have been a person and events. And the event’s apparent importance arose only as backdrop for said person’s particular sphere of drama.

Or perhaps there were no events, and only personal interpretation?

Or maybe it was the person, merely interfering and interacting with the physical world?

It could have been all or none of those things. Perhaps more. Perhaps less. Whatever it was, is not so important now.

These days, the past has little importance, apart from its usefulness regarding memory. Well, it is a great resource for navigating the physical world, and essential in that way. So we could say the past works as it is needed (or we could also use the word memory in place of past). That is also the only place where time, and the past, exist; in memory.

The person is dependent upon the past that sustains it (the person IS that past). And that same person hopes to remove the past to have a better life in the future. That is essentially what the seeker is doing; looking for a way to end its ‘non-essential part’ in order to have a more complete ‘essential part’ and then sustain a new and better life with it.

None of this really interests me anymore. I don’t want to say it has never interested me, although I am sure I have said that, haha. Life is attracted to life, and even saying that much could be considered gratuitous, as the words cannot hold the thing as tightly as we would want them to.

There is life here, and it is different from the life behind the eyes that will read this. Different and the same. These eyes take in sights no one else will ever see, and it is the same for yours. If there is an interpreter behind your eyes, there is nothing wrong with that. Rather than struggle with it, if you do, just embrace the thing and get on with living.

There is no feeling of life here…no feeling of a life being lived. And while Takuin is definitely alive according to the definition of living, he doesn’t really know he is alive, and he never will. Only his thinking would tell him yes or no, and that in itself will never be a problem unless he starts believing it.

Someday, A, you may be free of your need for freedom. That may be the only freedom…

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Thanks for your question, A. I don’t know that I have answered you, and I may have gone off into other areas, but I did my best!