As two from one in zero

The cycle continues. The cat mouse game carries us along as two. We are enlightened or deluded. We assume the game’s rules are clear that upon enlightenment, the delusion will vanish, and we will be one. But that is a thought in a dualistic game with no winner and a never-ending cycle of suffering. We never find one because one is something else. From here to there is two, and two can’t be one.

Then we awaken for a moment. We glimpse the dimension of one as one without a two or an I or a we or a subject or an object. Everything is of the same quality, a dreamlike insubstantial potential of all possibilities as absolute motionless, vivid awareness. We see the NOW, which precedes time and space, thoughts and concepts. There is no I in NOW because NOW needs no I as everything there is or can be.

Then we are back. We are an I that has come from the experience of one. It wants to cling to the experience of one as a victory in the cat and mouse game. It wants another experience of completeness, forgetting its annihilation as a condition of victory. It’s still two, believing it can be one.

But something has changed. There is a secret that has been revealed. It’s a secret that an I can’t know. It’s in plain sight but ignored as insubstantial by an I. The vivid stillness from which an I arises is ever-present. What I am before an I is right here as NOW. I can’t experience it as an I, but it can be known in every experience. The I that I think I am can have every thought about how enlightened or deluded it is, arising out of and within the vivid stillness that is the space for an I. This is what it is to be human, where even enlightenment and delusion ultimately dissolve into essential nature. At zero, there isn’t two or one or even NOW but the capacity for it all. This is what we are, our original face, space for the world, vivid stillness, luminous emptiness, zero.