The Fog

There is a gateway far off in the distance. I have been struggling to get through the fog to reach it. How long? I don’t know; the fog set in before I sensed the gateway was somewhere ahead of me. I needed to reach it; that much I knew.

So I spent my life fighting the fog. It was my enemy. I never knew it could lift. Oh, I hoped so. I prayed for that to happen. Because the gateway lay out there in time and space and I was headed in that direction.

The problem was not only the fog, but that it took my sense of direction away. I could not distinguish form from form or thought from thought. Everything I did confirmed that. I lied about it to save my self-image. That is what everyone does. They say they can see while running into one obstacle after another.

Many teachers appeared to show us the way; they, too, were deluded. We all were.

“Next” became an important word to all of us. “What happens next?” we would cry just after bumping into the latest object. No one knew, although some pretended to.

I wanted bliss so bad I could almost taste it. Sometimes it tasted like human love, but then that was taken away. It even tasted like food, like my next distraction from the pain. Advertisers told it us it would be found in their products and we continually bought into that lie.

Bliss was missing in the fog of everyone’s life.

One day I met someone who was clearly not in the fog and he begin to teach me. “There is a secret no one knows,” he said. “Never wish for the fog to lift. It can’t. It is just a fog.”

And I knew I had met another person with yet another answer and I became sadder than ever. But this man would not give up. He told me something else, “You were never in the fog. Why try to lift an illusion?” And I said to him, “Sometimes illusion is all I have.” And he smiled, understanding the human dilemma.

“No,” he said, shining a light into my body, “I see that is not the case. What you have is pure truth and there can be no fog in that. It is okay to see pain and suffering. Without being able to see that, the illusion would never go away. You must see things exactly as they are.”

So I took another look, this time with full conscious love. I stood alone. No fog, no wise man, nothing but truth. And this, my friends, is what turns to love. Love is the gateway to bliss. Bliss is being who you are and knowing what you know. The fog cannot disguise the truth. Never.

Vicki Woodyard