How the Hell?

Reading some more from Just Perception and this caught my attention (even more than normal): "Just about the biggest core stumbling block to every genuine (and ingenuine) spiritual seeker, ever, is the fact that they are too in love – and too in fear – with a totally identified and completely, utterly misdefined life (i.e. who they believe they actually are) to ever want to stand aside and finally allow themselves to die completely–let alone assist in that very self-dismemberment – a midwife to their own demise."

This is what I've noticed the past few days--this core stumbling block. I mean, that's me in that description! I'm the one who cannot see how I could make myself, allow myself, to die completely; despite the apparent reality that I do want that, or something wants that. I mean for real--how do I do that? How do I stand aside? I can't even get beyond a thought of "I." I sit here just trying to let go. "Just let go," I tell myself. "Let go of any idea that there is a Natalie, a woman, a person, a human, a wife, a lover of cats, a compulsive overeater, something with a body, etc., etc., etc. Let all that go." I can feel a sinking or an expansion or a lightening as there is a perception of an easing in the chest, the stomach, the legs, the mind, the story(ies), the physical world falling away. It seems as though whatever is happening is allowed to only go so far before the leash is pulled tight and it is brought up short. It's queasy out there on that edge. Nausea, waves of sweaty fear roll through at the edge of that letting go. I can't push it. Nothing I do seems to make it go further. Further, as Jed says. Further into the letting go.

What is letting go of What? Can "I" let go of myself? How is that possible? The only way that it seems possible to me is that whatever the identities, the stories, I'm too in love or in fear with to let go of are, it might be possible to chip away at them layer by layer--like mica. The thinnest of thin layers of transparent, yet hardened substance, which can be peeled away in flakes and maybe without the ego noticing.

I watched The Matrix again recently, and there's a line that Agent Smith says to Morpheus that just got me. "Have you ever stood and stared at it [the Matrix], marveled at its beauty, it's genius?" These layers and layers that make up the matrix of Maya are beguiling and intoxicating. The layers and layers that make up the matrix of "MY" identity are a million times more beguiling and intoxicating to me. I adore "me" and what I don't love, I worship.

Even writing these posts, doing this process, there's the ego and the ego and more ego. "Maybe Jed will read this and write to me. Maybe David will read this and write to me. What if no on sees this? What if no one notices? What if someone notices and laughs at it? Maybe I'll "save" someone. I should sound more enlightened. I should sound more serious. I don't sound like I'm really getting this. No one is going to take me seriously. People will think I'm nuts." and on and on and on.

How to give that up? I'm tired of it...so powerfully, sick to death of maintaining the illusion, the identity. Yet how to give it up. How to know where to go once started. How to keep going through the waves of fear and nausea. And really, how to be honest; unflinchingly, unfailingly, honest. Maybe one impossibly thin, almost invisible, layer at a time.