Shadow and Light

As it is One Life, everything is present always, everything and everyone is living One Life with Shadow and Light everywhere.
 
For every shadow and darkness there is light and brilliance, all is alive, arising and dissolving in the rhythm of life. Everyone has challenges and everyone has gifts. You cannot avoid your challenges, nor can you hold on to your gifts. One Life unfolds in an unknowable fashion, and you perceive what you cannot know as shadow and light.
 
Your perception is a perception of appearances. A subject viewing an object. You contrast and compare everything you think, see, hear, taste, smell and feel. Amongst those contrasts and comparisons lie many, many stories developed over many, many lifetimes, elaborating on the appearances of the world of duality. Sometimes the stories of the shadows frighten you, sometimes the stories of the light invigorate you, but almost always they fascinate you. The stories keep you believing in your world of appearances. You usually believe these stories as truth or reality and forget over and over again that they are just stories.
 
This is not said to diminish the value of the stories, or to make them seem foolish or inappropriate, but to remind you that shadow and light are fascinating aspects of the perceived reality story, but cannot be held as absolutes. Detaching from the notion that shadow and light are necessary attributes of everything perceived can engage you in a more profound view of your life as One Life.
 
Imagine that every perception you experience is precisely held by someone else, in precisely the same moment as precisely its opposite. If you perceive shadow, someone else, somewhere, is in the same moment, perceiving light. Would one person be right and the other be wrong? Or would both of you be in service to each other’s perception by merely, effortlessly, and without consciously knowing it, participating in One Life arising and dissolving?
 
We ask this question simply to awaken in you the loosening of your grip on reality as being composed of shadow and light in an absolute sense. Anything can be shadow in one moment and from one perspective, and the same is true for light. Everything is real and un-real, manifest and un-manifest, alive and dead, happy and sad in every moment. In every lifetime there is a natural inclination to experience as much as possible—as much shadow and as much light—as possible. There is no way to avoid or promote anything other than a full range of experience. You cannot protect yourself from shadow or suffering, nor can you guarantee yourself joy and all light. This does not mean you cannot prefer one thing over another, and make choices to align yourself to experience what for you would seem to be the best possible. Of course, this is how you lead your life. You learn over the course of your life that one choice is more likely to lead to happiness, while another is more likely to lead to unhappiness. But, you can never ensure a particular outcome. There is always room for a random occurrence, for life to bring you the unexpected light or shadow. Then you generate a story around the perception of the experience and learn to modify your choices the next time something similar arises. We would call this a reality strategy. A way to try to control your reality, all the while realizing there is no way to control anything absolutely. All the while, One Life arises and dissolves around you and through you.
 
It takes a great deal of awareness first to notice this reality strategy. Then, to step out of the conditioned and habitual parts of this process, your awareness must be coupled with the courage to see that no reality strategy can work to give you complete control of your life. It is after all, One Life unfolding. Your life is the story of your perceptions, One Life is All That Is.
 
If this idea that ‘in One Life awareness, All That Is unfolds’, is difficult to accept, you are probably feeling a loss of control or self-identity which are necessary for your stories of your life’s experiences. Losing your self can be quite disconcerting, however it can also be truly liberating. Forgiving yourself for past ignorance can be excruciating if you hold on to your identity and control, but can be really simple if you do not hold on. Trusting that everything is always present everywhere allows you to loosen your grip on any suffering you experience by reminding you that suffering is everywhere and cannot be avoided, but can become joy in a nano-second, because joy is everywhere also. All shadow becomes light, and all light becomes shadow. Such is the promise of duality.
 
All shadows and lights are manifest all the time. All of it is appearing somewhere. In all of your lifetimes you will experience it all. There is no one spinning the wheel of life and determining what the challenges will be ahead of time. It is not like you are climbing a ladder from one lifetime to the next to get to the top where there are no more challenges. There is nothing ultimately making a lifetime better or worse, more fruitful, or more appropriate, or more necessary or unnecessary than another lifetime. The human inclination is to incarnate for experience and it isn't to pick and choose those experiences. The spinning wheel of lifetimes just lands where it lands and there is exactly the same opportunity in every single lifetime to abide in the natural state of enlightenment. This opportunity is the same for everyone throughout all all time. Some lifetimes may appear as if they are full of difficult challenges while some lifetimes appear as if they are easy, but each person living that lifetime is living at their 100% experience level. Shadow and the light are present for everyone in every lifetime. There is no hierarchy in One Life—no being and no lifetime is better or worse than another.
 
Understand all lifetimes as perfect without attachment to any stories attempting to describe the appearances of these lifetimes. There is simply One Life that everyone is living together and everyone is doing their part, experiencing whatever their challenges and karmic inclinations are in service to everyone else. Just living your life is your service to humanity and all sentient beings.
 
Absolutely everyone is doing their part to create all experience and all experience includes all perceptions of that experience. It includes everything you can imagine, and more than you've ever imagined, and it just is what is occurring all of the time across all this universe with no limits or boundaries to any of it
 
If there are floods in one place, there are droughts in another. If there is poverty in one place, there are riches in another. If there is shadow here, there is light here, too. One Life Awareness pervades the perception of shadow and light. One Life is everything all at once, and when you have the capacity to expand beyond the limits of your immediate perceptions and your habitual stories your blinders come off and your view becomes inclusive of All That Is.
 
Open to the purest and largest view that you can imagine in any moment to have the greatest sense of One Life. A greater loving kindness and compassion fills you when you expand your view. This view is omnipresent, timeless, and cannot be conceptually created or become another reality strategy.
 
On the one hand, appearances seem to suggest that you are separate. Yet the deeper wisdom is that all are one, that there is no divisibility whatsoever amongst anything other than the temporary momentary designation that is made through the discursive mind. The mind encoded sense of duality identifies this and identifies that, but cannot in any way limit the capacity to additionally and paradoxically “feel though” the duality to One Life consciousness. One does not eliminate the other. In other words, you don't eliminate duality by knowing One Life, nor do you eliminate One Life by knowing duality.
 
One Life speaks to the wisdom that everything that is shadow is also light. Love it all exactly as it is. Respond as you respond, with compassion and love. Let go of your reality strategies in favor of a simple, yet profound deeper wisdom. As it is One Life, everything is present always, everything and everyone is living One Life with Shadow and Light everywhere.