Charlotte Joko Beck
As your core belief fades, fixed thoughts, ideals, and glittering images are no longer running your life. And when they fade, things go better. Life gets a little clearer, a little more spacious. I don’t mean you’re always happy. But there’s a fundamental rightness to your life that begins to appear.
Practice is the slow effacement – usually over many, many years – of this false master called the core belief. You efface the fixed picture of how you should be. And when you efface it, you don’t replace it with another fixed picture called ‘enlightenment.’
Through practice, we begin to see through the rigid views we’ve had of the world. It’s not like we suddenly wake up from a dream, though there are moments of that. But usually, it’s just faint effacement going on all the time. And as we wear away the picture, life becomes more real, more fluid. We’re in life, flowing along with it. It’s almost impossible to put into words.
We’re tempted to focus on what we imagine enlightenment is rather than to experience living with a little more fluidity and freedom. It’s the image of enlightenment that’s the problem. True enlightenment, since it can’t even be talked about, is not a thing. We don’t need to worry about it.
You can’t imagine the freedom to be your true self. It’s an absence, and you can’t pick up an absence. You can only slowly just get to be that way. The longer we practice, the more we have a clue about how to slowly become free. Freedom is the name of the game. Freedom to be nothing. It doesn’t mean that you vanish or that you don’t enjoy a good meal. It’s not some spooky thing. It’s an ordinary wonder.