Vachon Imagined

When we take things personally, a person is created. A self emerges that believes it has been wounded, praised, rejected, or loved. Life has come forward to feel, and feeling is not the problem. Life has come forward to move, to experience itself through every joy and every sorrow. This is a gift.

The gift becomes burdened when the self begins to cling. I must own this person. I must protect this identity. I must defend what I believe myself to be. Before long, the self becomes less a living expression and more a habit of mind. We stop meeting life as it is and begin meeting it through memory, anticipation, fear, and defense.

Yet beneath the habit is something untouched.

There is an open, spacious life that walks freely in the mind of God. It moves into form, experiences itself as a person for a little while, and then returns again. It does not belong to you, nor does it belong to me. It is the life that gives rise to us both.

As we begin to see this, something changes. We anticipate less. We spend less time rehearsing the future or reliving the past. And when those thoughts inevitably arise, we return—not by fighting them, but by remembering their source. We speak the name of God, not as a ritual, but as a return to the origin of life itself.

That origin is not singular. It is whole.

It contains every possibility, every truth, every person, every self. Nothing exists outside of it because everything arises from it. Every identity is a wave upon the same ocean, appearing for a moment before dissolving back into the water from which it came.

Freedom is not found by protecting the self. Freedom is found by remembering what the self arises from.

We become free when we remain grounded in a truth that does not change the way people do. It does not shift with opinion, success, failure, praise, or rejection. It simply is. It lives through you, through me, through every creature, every breath, every moment. It asks for nothing except that we stop clinging long enough to notice it has been carrying us all along.