the trance

I was born into the trance, as were most of us. For me, there was no real opportunity to avoid it–my parents nourished me daily with the notion of separation.

In the non-dual teachings we speak of pointing out instructions–but they can just as easily point to separation. My parents believed the trance and so it was passed on to us–by touch, voice, by example, and by pointing out. If we continue to believe in the dream of separation, we then pass it on to our children.

So few of us examine our direct experience; we take what we were fed and swallowed as children and never actually question reality. Good heavens, it took me sixty-three years to even begin looking. But once I turned inward to examine my own experience, the trance unraveled far faster than it was constructed.

As a weaver, I have experienced that cloth will unweave unless the ends are hand or machine stitched. Its unadorned nature is to come undone, starting at the edges and unraveling toward the center. So it is with the construction of ourselves. At first, the threads of misunderstanding dangle lightly from the edges, but when those are tugged and encouraged, the whole constructed fabric of belief in separation falls apart. There is a point of no return when we cannot reconstruct what we have seen through, even if–out of fear–we desperately want to. This is not the place to stop. Welcome the new holes in the fabric, and allow the full breadth of emptiness to shine through.