
Life is constant movement, an unending evolution. We have spoken for centuries as if things are static and fixed. From atoms, to organs, to trees, to buildings, to minds, to beings, to spirit, we have been consumed with the idea that things are static and can be pinned down. In almost every field of expertise, elaborate systems of labeling have taken over. Even in the field of psychology, where one is dealing with the most fluid plasticity, we have managed to try and pin people down to diagnoses and boxes. These labels have a place, certainly.
They help us to communicate about things we cannot know directly through thought. Thought merely crystalizes the natural movement of life into an idea, something static and fixed.
But movement is never static and fixed.
Therefore, life is never static and fixed.
In fact, if you take the question, “Where is life” into deep inquiry, you will never find it. You will merely land on a concept, feeling, image or sensation, which will then fall away because each of those things are in movement also.
We have even tried to pin down our most metaphysical comforts into fixed things such as spirit, awareness, Oneness. But that also is thought, trying to pin down what cannot be pinned down at all. I once believed that spirit or awareness was the only thing that was static, unchanging and real, until I looked for it in deep inquiry. I could not find it. I had been lazy for years, believing all the books and teachers, just assuming that it was something fixed and findable. It was the mind simply landing somewhere, a convenient label for something that cannot be known. And when mind jumped off of that notion, life felt more vibrant.
Change was welcomed because it was the only thing happening. Since then, there has been no need to consciously manifest anything for everything is always manifesting itself. Pain lied in the belief that there was a fixed life and a fixed me that had to manifest fixed things in life. It is circular and self-defeating. This notion does not hold up when one really examines.
If you want to know life, look not to the labels. Use the labels as merely very rough signposts. Instead, observe the movement of your eyes as you read this, the movement of mind as it interprets, the arising and falling of sensation and emotion as you react one way or another to this writing and the movement of your physical body as it simply does what it does, with or without your consent. The movement of blood, breath, stomach, lungs, arms and legs. Observe the ant who is constantly moving, the dog whose breath and fur is always in movement, the wind blowing the trees into motion, the water flowing, the people scattering their bodies about everywhere, the images flashing upon your TV screen, the sounds all around you coming and going. Notice that there would be no way to truly pin all that movement down and that all attempts by the mind to pin anything down are very rough estimates at the least, illusion at the most. Even our labels are in movement.
This is when death is no longer scary because you see that you are not a fixed thing. Only fixed things can be scared of their own death. We don’t die because we were never born into the kind of fixed thing that we take ourselves to be. You are not any of the things the labels say you are. This is when harmony comes to relationship, for none of the people you know are the labels you place upon them. Your governments and leaders are not the labels you place upon them, nor are you the labels they place upon you. When we see that we cannot know each other through the mind at all, the mind becomes a thing of play, an extension or tool of our existence. It is not what we are. And it cannot show us what others are or what life really is.
To know what life is, one must examine it, watch it, live it and be it. In this way, you are being what you are. Not something static, but movement itself. This is when all of your dogma dies also, all of your arguments with others, all of your political, scientific and spiritual knowledge. It all becomes merely convenient labeling, not truth by any stretch. Everything is a moving target. Everything is evolving.
There is such a deep surrender to life itself and a magnificent peace when you realize that you were arguing with life and it cannot be found.
All that can be found is the movement. Be the movement.