Vachon Imagined

Letting go of identity is hard. Being God is easy.

Because God has become a word carrying both conflict and peace, even reading this sentence will depend on your perception of the word. This is good news.

Your perception of a word is not the word itself. It is what you have learned about it. Over time, you formed an identity around that learning. People told you what things meant long before you had an ego capable of testing them for yourself.

The ego can test things.

I can place my identity on a piece of paper and write: I am a white woman married to a Black man, and together we have a beautiful son.

Immediately a story is born.

You may praise it. You may condemn it. You may admire it or reject it. Yet it remains a story. Your reaction says as much about your perception as it does about me.

This is double consciousness: the consciousness you send into the world returns to you. Repeated enough, it gathers momentum. It returns with greater velocity, greater intensity, reinforced by the identities that created it.

Now imagine there is no paper.

No story.

No label.

No me.

Where did I go?

I am still present in your mind.

And so the question becomes: how do you lose the mind that clings to the story?

First, you lose the body.

Not by destroying it, but by no longer mistaking it for who you are.

How do you do this?

You breathe.

And then you breathe again.

You sit long enough for the stories to loosen their grip. Long enough for the identities to become transparent. Long enough for the narrator to grow quiet.

Then there is no story.

There is no you.

There is no other.

Only the awareness that was here before the first word was spoken and will remain after the last one disappears.