The most beautiful thing in the world is when you lose your POV. It can happen anywhere, anytime. You’re sitting, having a beer and pizza, watching a spectacular sunset at the other end of Main St. in Ventura, CA. You are listening to music, traffic sounds, and voices of passersby, and, for no particular reason, your point of view, the habitual, ‘me-centered’ way of seeing life, just drops away. I say ‘drops away,’ but I don’t know what happens or if anything happens to it. Maybe it just becomes irrelevant. One minute, there is yourself looking out on life with all of your lifetime of baggage, thoughts, and concerns, and the next minute, ‘poof,’ that little self with its point of view is gone. Nothing really changes. There’s still the music, crowds, sunset, and palm trees, but you have been relieved of a tremendous burden; the notion of a singular little self, so full of ‘shoulds,’ so in need of approval, so afraid for the future, and regretful of the past.
Life is like a strong wind, always seeking an unrestricted channel to flow through. That channel is open when not hemmed in by our constant, unconscious habit of self-concern. This is the meaning of liberation. It means we are open to life in all respects, even difficult situations and people. It means that fundamentally, when the notion of a singular, separate self falls away, our relationship with life makes a quantum shift, and we are free.
The good news, of course, is that we already are and always have been free. Life just wants us to wake up to this fact. That awakening starts and ends with attention to what is right now. That simple attention is the doorway to the beauty of losing your point of view.
-Ojai, CA. 10/18/24
I gather "POV" is "Point of View"...BTW I was so tempted to buy "El Gull" or one of your similar works....so appealing....but I have zero wallspace and would have to put it on the ceiling!
Beautiful 🙏