We live in a world of constant comparison and competition, an idolatrous condition construed as virtue. From the time we are born, through school years and adulthood, into senior years, even unto death and beyond, we are plagued by this virus of comparison and competition.
Contribution and legacy become buzz words that speak of success and achievement. Blatant acts of seeming altruism are deemed praiseworthy. Yet, unconscious and deluded, we remain lost in thought, trapped in finite ego, caught in a net of views. All actions and words stem from dualistic apprehension of self and other, no matter how noble they appear.
Notions of merit coupled with the chimera of measurement fallaciously grasped as valid and real are adopted as universal truths. Human mind in its egoic addiction and fixation wallow in the mud of ceaseless comparison and competition.
Religious and secular ideologies preserve and legitimize these notions, perpetuating the insanity of civilization. Radical as the idea of grace may be, even that has become appropriated and domesticated as a law governing successful acquisition of health, wealth, soulmates, and babies. Faith and its correct exercise become euphemism for spiritual merit in another tongue.
Grace that is also consummate wisdom is not conformed to this world. Only when the finite self born of thought, feeling, sensing, and perceiving awakens to its own falsity and emptiness can there be any possibility of freedom. Freedom not as a goal to be sought by an ardent seeker, but as the end of the known in its totality. Honestly and ruthlessly inquiring into what is, the known loses itself in the fire of knowing. It is a fire that folds and folds upon itself, melting into a whole new dimension absolute and indescribable.
Wordless and choiceless knowing beyond stories of God and everything else unfolds infinitely, timelessly, spacelessly, personlessly. Dimensionless knowing beyond knowing that is grace and grace that knowingly knows, not born and not subject to death. Transcendentally knowing grace that is intensely person-able not from some fixed centre of gravity that is the self, but as unimpeded spontaneous display of love that is seamless being and distinctive caring.
Only when thought and all that is born of thought dies; only when the comparing and competitive ego both individual and collective is crucified—only then can timeless knowing and grace be our living reality, moment by moment, timelessly. Comparison has pared itself down naked. Competition has petered out into ashes. There is nothing to do, nobody to be, nowhere to go. Amen.
