Vachon Imagined

The story of God giving man a woman is often told as the beginning of companionship.

But ultimately God gave man himself.

The woman was not the point at all; she was and remains rather the revelation.

Human beings have the peculiar ability to see themselves. Not merely to exist, but to observe existence. To experience ourselves experiencing. To look at what is happening within us and recognize, I am experiencing this.

That is the beginning of relationship.

When you look at someone, you are seeing. When you experience someone, you are experiencing. And what you perceive determines how you relate to what you see.

So we move, constantly, from self to self.

And we can become fixed there.

What I did yesterday becomes who I am today. What happened before becomes the relationship I continue to have with myself now. The past walks into the present and we call it reality.

This is bondage: a fixation on what has already happened while it continues to happen in the present.

And the future is no different.

The past and the future are not separate places. They are both experienced now. The past is remembered now. The future is imagined now. And the present allows both to appear.

So when you say you are not in a relationship, that is impossible.

You are always in relationship with yourself, and from that relationship, with everything around you.

A cleared self sees more clearly. Clear perception creates a different relationship with what is being perceived. And what happens within you extends outward, only to return again to you.

You are at the center of your experience.

That is how lucky we are to be human.

God did not give man a woman.

God gave man himself.

And then gave him the awareness to recognize himself everywhere.