morning mists

I am staying for a few days at the DIMA centre for conscious living, on Majorca. It's a beautiful three hundred year old finka, or farmhouse, situated in the countryside. And on the east side of the building there is a terrace, with a view out over a valley. Sitting this morning on the terrace, drinking tea, there was a beautiful mist hanging in the valley. And as the sun began to rise higher in the sky, of course the mist began to melt away. And now, a little later in the morning, it is completely gone, and the whole valley can be seen clearly.

And of course, this melting away of mist, is a simple analogy for the way our illusions melt away when we begin to bring the light of awareness into our own mind, when we can risk seeing things authentically as they are, those delusions cannot survive. The light of awareness is like this morning sun. It simply melts away the mists of illusion.

And I like this analogy because in the morning, seeing the mists, they are also beautiful, and our illusions have a certain beauty to them. They are so comfortable. By obscuring the truth, they allow us to live in a fantasy world. And that fantasy can be as beautiful or as ugly as we choose to make it. So by avoiding reality, we can live in a world that seems attractive. It can be very comfortable, and even if we choose to make an uncomfortable fantasy world, there's a great comfort from knowing it. However, it's not reality, just as those morning mists are obscuring the reality of the valley, so our fantasies obscure reality.

And a part of this spiritual journey, a big part of it, is to live in reality. It's a simple way to live. It doesn't need complex interpretations of what is happening. It doesn't need a big story to go with what is. We simply see things as they are. It may be comfortable, it may be uncomfortable. It may be pleasurable or painful. Life carries on changing and moving, every moment new, fresh, different. To see this, though, we have to allow those obscuring mists to melt away, just as the mists in this valley have melted away this morning.