The peace spread like wildfire within him. After months of a tortuous war between his soul and his mind his soul had won the battle. He settled in, relaxed, took a breath and wished it all away.
It was gone. The struggle vanished. The voices silenced. Need evaporated like a shallow puddle in the desert sun and the sense of vultures circling ended. It was what it was, not what he made it out to be. He smiled, and journeyed back into a place he hadn’t been in quite some time. There, he found himself.
He had been struggling in this, the “worst” year of his life. Gone was the sense of family he so loved. Gone was the woman he had gotten so used to seeing, to talking to, to being with. Gone was the family who had taken him in, loved him, and made him feel part of something bigger. Gone was the income he had gotten used to, the lifestyle he had grown accustomed to and the things he had grown attached to. In a flash of fire and brimstone his world had turned to ash.
She softly caressed his soul. That beautiful vision of love he experienced during that raging inferno caused him to sigh and smile at the same moment. He smiled as he sat in stillness at the thought of her and at the realization that she was his vision. She didn’t really exist outside of his Being, and although her physical form still laughed and cried, breathed and slept, the part of her he loved existed in here, not out there. He could sense her moving through his Soul, and no longer could feel her moving outside, stirring up the ashes and reminding him of the sources of the burn marks that scarred his heart. In a moment of pure love he let her go, allowing her to walk freely in her own experience while holding her tightly in his own heart. The others did not matter. What she could do to him became irrelevant in the knowledge that she could do nothing to him that he did not allow her to do. Her willingness to hurt him or not hurt him was also irrelevant as she had no real power to do either without his consent. Even so, he could see her own light shining brightly in his heart, and he knew her then to be a beautiful, honest soul. Regardless of his complicity, he knew she would not hurt him because that was not who she was. She was love, devotion and honesty.
He knew their Souls walked eternity together. He felt her in his breath, in his heart, and in his Entirety. He could sense an outward need for her but felt a much greater inward Love for her. He trusted his heart, and with each beat his heart said her name and reminded him of the beauty they shared. The fear, the mistrust, the desire for the things his ego demanded be given seemed trivial to him as he realized the Truth. What mattered is what is in here. What’s out there is just an illusion, a place where ego could ruin even the sweetest of dances.
Then he forgave himself. He had become a lover-turned-fighter who simply wanted to be a lover again. He could hear Something say “drop the illusion of strength. There is nothing to fight and nothing to protect yourself from.” His ego replied, but the voice seemed garbled in this sense of stillness. He could feel himself floating on the River, and he put his ears under the surface and focused on the sounds there. The ego cannot speak here. Instead it is forced to sit and listen too.
Then does not matter in the presence of Now, it cannot survive in that space. What is gone ceases to exist and ceases to matter in the experience of this moment. When he dropped the attachment to then, something beautiful happened Now. He began to live. He began to cry. He began sense his Self. He could love as a matter of practice, not as a matter of condition. He could trust as a matter of fact, not as a matter of proof. All he needed to trust was within him as nothing outside of him was real. All he needed to know was here, right now, and nothing that was outside of here, right now, existed. Where he sat was truth, and where he was he called “home”.
He began to truly love those he had once believed had harmed him, as whatever had decided he was harmed in the first place went silent. He began to see beauty in everything as the voice that once spoke of ugliness faded into the light. He took the fig leaf he used as a tool of separation and threw it away. He stopped hiding behind the Tree and walked out naked into the world. He no longer wished to eat of the apple, and he no longer wished to be a slave to the serpent, the sinner, or the saint. He was the book, and in it he would write the story himself, creating words and definitions of his own along the way.
He began to realize the potential of his sexuality with the absolute knowledge that Divinity showed itself in the art of making love. Pleasure is a unifying experience, the act of One knowing Itself. It is that ripple upon our surface that echoes throughout our Beings, gently giving rise to the tsunami that ends with a body spent and a soul renewed to its purpose. Sex becomes dirty only in the mind of the unholy, those who are afraid to touch the face of God and actually have God touch them in return. The unholy thrive in the distance between God and Her Son, manifesting itself in a voice of ego that calls us away from home in the moments we forget where we are.
He had risen out of the smoldering remnants of a life he believed he lived to see the Universe renewed within him. Everything he had believed as true within him he saw now around him as a dream conjured up by his ego’s need for control. He had found a great star in the sky and followed Her to a birth of a new king. He now sensed a new understanding, one where the facades of a human’s existence would drop away like dried mud from his skin exposing the Being within. There would be times when his spirit would be tested from the onslaught of his own mind. Fully aware that fires could burn again he steeled himself in solid stillness in where he sat, focusing on the coolness of Now.
“They are not here now, so they do not exist.”
He had surrendered and he had won the battle. Yes, he was home.
