When everything falls apart and you feel totally lost and abandoned, what can’t abandon you, even in the midst of those feelings of total abandonment? Even when everything else has disappeared, what can’t leave you? It’s who you are. Even the feeling of abandonment, if that’s what’s arising, is welcome in what you are. Even when you feel totally abandoned, this is still here, this ocean of consciousness, allowing in the wave of abandonment. So what you are is never “the abandoned one”, even when there is a feeling of abandonment. And what you are is never “the lost one”, even when there’s a sense of being lost.
In fact, you are never “this one” or “that one”, you are the one – the one-without-an-opposite, the wide open capacity that is life itself. You are not “the sad one” or “the happy one”, “the enlightened one” or “the unenlightened one”, “the successful one” or “the failed one” – you are the undefinable, ever-present space that holds it all. Even when there’s a very intense wave, a strong, violent wave – for example, a wave of fear or pain or sadness – the ocean that you are is still fully present. Even when there’s sense of being totally lost, the wide open space in which the sense of being lost is allowed to arise, is not lost. Lostness is allowed to arise and dissolve in you, but you, as the ocean, are never lost. Even the sense of being lost is already being held here, it’s already being allowed in. That’s why you – who you really are – can never be lost, precisely because it’s there even when you feel lost. Consciousness is never lost.
