The Familiar
By Michael Erlewine
In dharma truth, familiarity with the nature of our own mind is the whole thing. However, the concept of ‘familiarity’ can be subtle and hard to get right.
The ultimate refuge is the mind itself. When all else seems distracting and one wants peace, as in peace of mind, there is always the familiar. What is that?
And when I say peace of mind, I mean our own mind, just as it is for us as opposed to ‘textbooks’ or other’s take on the mind. Each of our own minds.
Becoming familiar with the mind as we know it is not, as we might think, our becoming familiar with what is or has been unfamiliar, the ‘unfamiliar’ and strange, but rather our not searching elsewhere than right here and now where it has always been, OUR finding the familiar as already familiar and recognizing it as familiar. We are at home there.
At the last, it’s familiarity that we find; and by definition it’s already familiar to us and not some stranger. We don’t have to move an inch. We just cease and desist with this sense of ‘otherness,” other anything -- duality.
Abandoning pretense, abandoning pretending even with ourselves because what possible use could it be? It’s just us. As mentioned, we turn to and find what is familiar rather than we become familiar with what is unfamiliar and strange.
Familiar is already familiar. It always has been this way. That’s what the word itself says.
Familiarity is a refuge, not somewhere outside to get to because we don’t have to get familiar, we already are. We are already familiar. It’s not outside, but inside us, and makes up our core.
We just stop pretending and fall back into and accept what already is familiar to us, just as it always has been. Plain old us. That is the familiar.
Recognizing what is to us already familiar (yet unique) about our own mind, our particular take on things, is empowering, that is: accepting the nature of things as recognized by us. This is recursion at its most effective.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.