Waking Up
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to.
The good news is, there’s no ground.”
Chögyam Trungpa
I remember very vividly, being the shy, socially awkward kid, far more comfortable with my own company, terrified of being exposed as valueless, empty, lacking a strong personality projected out into the world. I rehearsed every conversation ahead of time so I would have something to say (of course it never worked), desperate to stay in control.
Half a century later, I can still sense echoes of that defensive, contracted impulse. I did a radio interview recently on a poetry forum to discuss my writing (Victoria in Verse on Bloomsbury Radio) and that palpable fear of having nothing of value to say was still a wall I had to walk through to recover the ease of being I now know to be my natural self—beyond identity.
And that’s the ongoing inner dialectic—quietly playing itself out in one form or another, most of the time. (even sitting here on the cushion writing this essay): the compulsive need to be ‘someone’—to be ‘special,’ with a known repertoire—versus simply resting in the boundless, indefinable essence of awareness: not an object to know, but a source we come to know by living as it.
Read the poem: https://www.petermitchell.blog/nothing-in-it-for-me/
Being someone ‘in particular’ is sticky—and deeply insecure—for it rests on no true foundation. It is a construction of mind, desperately grasping at straws to build a strawman to hide behind—fearful of discovery of its own fallacy.
When you consider that living behind such masks is considered normal, or even sane by society at large, you realise the weight of conditioning that you face in dismantling this inner architecture.
For at heart, we have hidden depths that are only uncovered when we find the courage to peep from behind the mask of conformity (or even rebellion – still an identity and possibly harder to see through).
Masks serve more than one purpose—not only to present a face to the world, but to filter our perception of it, to fit our ‘world-view’. When our vision clears and we see things as they are, the boundary between world and self—the window we imagine we sit behind looking out—dissolves. The discrete worlds of inner and outer are seen now as overlays of experience, false divisions of something inherently and eternally whole. The self we imagine we are arises and is intimately woven into the world arising at the same moment. We discover we are nothing but the invisible emptiness holding it all in a gentle embrace.
Read the poem: https://www.petermitchell.blog/water-in-a-sieve/
From this perspective, not being anyone in particular is our natural state. There is nothing to be fearful of, for we are deeply at rest, sitting at the centre, not separate from any and everything.
Read the poem: https://www.petermitchell.blog/astonishment/
And still, we function in the world as an individual, fulfilling many roles in the course of a single day. The mechanical awkwardness of trying to role-play our way through life is replaced by the wonderfully freeing flexibility to be whatever we need to be—able to draw on a lifetime’s experiences and access something much deeper—a living field of presence carrying infinite potential, that holds us and offers itself as a clarity to see whatever is required. Life is no longer a chore to be borne but a thrilling adventure, forever on the edge of the known, falling forward into the unknown.
Read the poem; https://www.petermitchell.blog/kind-hearts/
Our attention is liberated—no longer distracted by compulsion to be ‘a someone’ and trying to remember one’s lines in a play yet to be written, but free to concentrate completely on the task at hand.
Read the poem: https://www.petermitchell.blog/pink-fluffy-elephants/
We become available for whatever task life calls on us to carry out in every moment. It may be as simple as acknowledging someone in passing to a dedicated project such as writing this essay. The roles are multiple and as long as they never crystallise into an identity then we remain free.
Perhaps this is what Trungpa meant. There is no ground to stand on—because there is no one fixed self to defend. Only this ongoing falling… into freedom.
