It may appear that there is (a) a me here, (b) experiencing certain things, and (c) living in the world. These may appear as three somewhat different things.
That’s how it seems when we filter our experience through beliefs, or….. identifications with images and words, or….. when there is velcro and some images and words seem attached to feelings (which lend them a sense of solidity and reality, as if they reflected a reality “out there”). These are all different ways of saying more or less the same.
And yet, what’s more real is that it’s all a seamless whole. There is only this field of experience as it is right now, with sounds, smells, tastes, images, words, sensations. That’s all. That’s my world. That’s who and what I am.
Any images of past, future, present are images happening in immediacy, and those are who and what I am as well.
If I reject a part of what’s here now, I am – in a very real way – rejecting a part of myself. That’s why it hurts. That’s why it hurts to wrestle with what is, here and now. And that’s why it’s such a huge relief to notice, allow, and find love for it. To feel sensations, and find curiosity about words, images, and sensations making up my experience.