The great game of pretending

Well, I can’t answer for anybody else. What it’s like being you is your affair and not for me to tell you. What I have to do is see how it is here, just now. And I swear I can find here no-thing whatever, no solid object at the mid-point of my universe, no flesh-and-blood house or box here in which I’m shut up, but only this marvellous Emptiness or Absence or Light or Clarity or Openness. And this Wide-openness, so far from being mere vacancy, is at this moment visibly full to the brim with the clouds and trees and flowers outside my window, and the chairs and tables and carpet in this room, and these legs and this arm and hand and pen and paper on which these words are now forming themselves. Insofar as I am at all, I am at large in this familiar scene, replete with this assembly of coloured and moving shapes that is now presenting itself: all these are in me, are me.

What I am here for, the purpose of my life, is to stop the great game of pretending, just look, and be Myself. Nothing could be simpler, or more urgent.

From the article, The Great Game of Pretending, published in As I See It, a collection of essays by Douglas Harding.