However

The most unbearable tickle is the understanding that there is no separate aware-er here--that consciousness or awareness is made up of exactly everything in this moment. It's nice to believe in a sort of "giant essence of everything" that by definition is somehow, on some level, apart. There is no harm in it; there is no lack, really, and nothing to locate or contact. If I manage to peel everything away, all the layers of crap and forks in the road, I would still be here, now, my own lover, and not even that.

The deep tickle comes in with the complete failure of cause-and-effect. I am not "causing" a world to happen, or vice-versa. It just is/n't, with all its qualities, unqualified. There is nothing I can do, nowhere to hide, nothing to accomplish first. All here, all the time. Nothing left out, no need for a director.

I am learning that this kind of a tease is something not too many human personalities can bear, or even want to acknowledge. It doesn't matter what intelligence we assign to this situation (Being) here...the freedom of unknowing eats all its own crutches, excuses, every victim story, every shred of white-knight armor, and renders itself so naked as to be unborn. The freedom isn't even "freedom" in the sense that I often wish. Without my layers of denial, all the possibilities, response-abilities and a painful, glorious honesty shine untouched. Details are intensified--suffering and love, also. The potential of US is fabulously evident, as well as the attempted repression of said potential by every institution created by US--as if we can't bear to see how this truly is, or change or accept what we truly can.

Then there is the beauty of it all, just as it is/n't.

Beauty happens when the mind lies down with the heart, and senses--sense-abilities--are born.

I might be slicing cheese, staring at a column of numbers or walking into a forest. Cheesing, numbering, foresting. A second ago, there was a person-in-charge...now, just happening-of-its-own, with a dusting of awe, here and gone. What lingers is appreciation in the poetry of Being. That's it.

All my glory unsharable, all my love unrequited. If I laugh, only stars can hear; if I cry, the wind carries it right into silence. I am, indeed, absolutely alone in an incurable way. There  is no comfort in this, as far as the mind is concerned, because love can only be a word to the intellect.

However...