First there was Innocence. Pure, untouched innocence. The emptiness of the sky.
All I knew was the sky. I was the sky, and the sky was me. Everything was sky.
Soon the clouds came. They started slowly but over time more and more came. And they got thicker and thicker. After a time they covered the sky.
I forgot the sky existed. I thought there was just cloud, and so did everyone else.
Sometimes someone would say,’ Have you heard about the sky?’ but I no longer knew what they were talking about.
Occasionally I saw something bright and open and beautiful and free, but it didn’t last long and soon the clouds returned. A constant cloudy world.
I was depressed, disillusioned, unsatisfied, alienated, angry, dysfunctional and lost. Searching inside the cloud world revealed nothing satisfying, just the same old things over and over.
One day I met a wise man who said. ‘The clouds are always blowing through the sky, but the sky is always there.’
I decided to investigate this riddle. What happened was a journey into the darkness, an unravelling, an adventure and a systematic endeavor to remove, dissolve, ignore or accept the clouds and begin to remember the sky, consciously accept that there is a sky and there always was, I just forgot it.
It didn’t disappear, I did!
Slowly I began to see the sky more and more. I had to change many things. There were some things that made the clouds come again. Like a veil they would return and trap me in their darkness, their sticky darkness. But I learned more and more what was sticky and what was not.
And then strange new things started happening. I began to see things in a whole new way. There was always more sky than clouds. There were a few clouds but mostly it was clear sky. And it was a similar sky to when I was a baby, but this time I had a choice where previously I had none. Now I knew about the clouds and how they come, how they bring darkness and foreboding, how they cover everything, and how everything ends up covered in clouds. And I saw clearly with wisdom, but childlike wisdom. The relief in living in a clear sky was unspeakable and beautiful.
People asked me why I seemed natural and relaxed and real. I told them the story of the clouds, and the sky, and the forgetting, and the remembering, and they asked me to tell them. So I decided to write down the story of sky nature and the cloud world.
When you are a newborn baby, all you see is sky. That’s all you can see as pure and innocent consciousness. The clouds come soon in the form of learned responses and behaviors. We call it conditioning but really these are, at first, survival techniques. After the first few years of life we no longer see or know the sky exists. All we know is clouds, clouds and clouds. The great forgetting. The great thinking.
BUT…if life proves unsettling, unfulfilling and empty, we may start to wonder why. Something is wrong.
We may have a flash here, a glimpse there, of something beyond the clouds, but it is fleeting and soon covered up again. Just clouds and more clouds, and everyone else’s clouds.
Don’t let thinking dominate your sky.
Remember your sky nature, the truth beyond the clouds.
