The Unknown....

Remembering back to days in college, when many of my friends were experimenting with every conceivable drug... I would go picking wild mushrooms with them. I can't recall what they were going to make. Brownies? No, that's marijuana! Soup, stew? Some crazy concoction or another! My repeated question was, "what will it do to me?" If I heard one thing that sounded too risky, I was not messing with it. So, I did not do the mushrooms, not the acid, nor lots of other substances with too many uncertain variables for my liking. Alcohol seemed safe enough for awhile, until there were just one too many incidents of loss of control. Marijuana seemed harmless enough until I tried some that I brought back to school from home (Jamaica). I recall sitting paralysed on somebody's sofa, while I desperately hung on to my mind, fearing that I was going to slip off into the abyss of madness. Enough of that. So, some part of me likes to know what's going to happen, what could happen. I like predictability. Some part of me likes to know what things mean. I remember being on the Avatar Wizard's course, hitting a lot of unknowns and my thinking mind scrambling to attach meaning. Thinking, thinking, thinking. What does it all mean? There has been a sense of comfort... security in knowing and having answers. Now I find myself in a curious place, where I feel drawn to the unknown. Venturing forward into a realm where I have no answers, no reference points. I feel such a strong impulse to enter... Adyashanti writes in an essay on "That Which Thought Never Touches," "Fear and insecurity always wait for any and all who dare to probe the depths of the Unknown. The true seeker of liberation must have an uncompromising desire to discover Eternal Truth, a desire that outweighs any tendency to hesitate and contract in the face of fear. It is only when the fear of the Unknown is openly embraced that it begins to transform into the positive energy and intensity necessary to awaken from conditioned existence." He continues, "The aim of spiritual practice is to discover in your own present experience That which the movement of thought never touches. This does not mean to suppress the thinking mind, nor does it mean to attempt to understand by using thought. What I am pointing toward is the Unknown: the already, ever-present, silent-still-source that not only precedes thought but surrounds it. You must become more interested in the Unknown than in that which is known. Otherwise you will remain enslaved by the very narrow and distorted perspective of conceptual thinking. You must go so deeply into the Unknown that you are no longer referencing thought to tell you who and what you are. Only then will thought be capable of reflecting that which is true rather than falsely masquerading as truth. What I am talking about is a condition where the mind never fixates; where it never closes; where it has no compulsive need to understand in terms of ideas, concepts, and beliefs. A condition where you are no longer referencing the mind, feelings, or emotions for security in any way. What I am talking about is the complete surrender of all separateness until liberation becomes a permanent condition, and you are forever lost in the freedom of the Absolute." Something about that feels incredibly beautiful to me. I feel myself softening and melting into the sweetness of it all. My adventure continues as the path unfolds before me. You just gotta love life! Never a dull moment! Love, Nicola