Here is another verse which echoes the message of “Are You Awake?”
life is not where you think it is
it plays in the gaps between thinking
we stare at the bars, missing the sky:
love’s gaze unbroken by blinking
* * * * * *
The power and magic of direct experience is not to be found through the complexities of the constructed world of our thoughts and meanings: these are a secondary process you could describe as being ‘interpreted experience’.
Focussed upon our world of interpretation, or story, we dismiss the “gaps” in this process, the brief moments when there seems nothing relevant to interpret – the gaps between thoughts.
Yet there is nothing wrong with thinking, it is not to be downgraded as worthless experience. We don’t try to get rid of it so we can have lovely peaceful meditations (well we might, but such pleasures only continue while we meditate). The problem arises because we see everything from the point of view of our story-thoughts, our view of me and what happens to me. This is the “bars of our prison” when we are stuck within this view.
Were we to focus upon the “sky”, we could realise that everything is sky, in the sense of being the open space of awareness. The bars are only bars because we don’t see beyond them.
To live in this state of intimacy with experience continuously is to live as pure openness and clarity, which is not a neutral state, it is also pure sensitivity, which is Love.
Pieces of Five 