Although you may spend your life killing, you will not exhaust all your foes.
– Nagarjuna

The Buddha stated that to live is to suffer, but he also said that there was a way out of it. He called this ending “enlightenment” or the end of suffering.

Most often we don’t realize that we’re suffering, because awareness has inhabited, through focus, an identity. We dwell in an identity of likes and dislikes, desires and attachments. They have become who we are.

Awareness has funneled mostly all of its attention into fitting the form of a “Kate” or “Steve”. It has created the perfect illusion by adjusting to this dwelling, this costume of a Steve or Kate.

Kate or Steve are synonymous with suffering. As long as they exist, there will be suffering.

Kate and Steve will never make it. They will never, ever make it to the end of suffering.

Who are you?

This question is the origin of the path of direct inquiry or Advaita Vedanta (not two/non-duality)

It is remembered on this path that what you are is not this identity. It is registered that what you are has never suffered.

Realization is as simple as losing interest in yourself. Completely.

Awareness has become so absorbed in its separate identity that rarely is there a gap that is long enough to reveal that there is absolute peace and stillness, quiet presence, an unbroken state of aliveness that was and is doing the looking, listening, speaking, thinking, feeling, sensing. It has always been known that what was here, what was right here just IS. Life. It just is, alive. Right here.

In essence, this does matter. Don’t live an entire life only to find at the doorstep of your death that peace was here all along.

Kate and Steve will never find peace. They will never make it.

To see this, simply lose interest in Kate and Steve. They’re not running the show and they never were.

They weren’t responsible for you desiring, or getting, or losing. It seemed like it in the dream. In the illusion that they made choices and arrived in certain destinations and made it to money, or perfect health, or love. But they didn’t. They never did anything. In fact, they were never here. They were being dreamt up by life, moment to moment. They appeared when they needed to, but they also disappeared.

Are there times when you’re not playing out you? Are there times when there is just life, just stillness? Like when you’re making love, doing something you love, or having an incredible conversation. This can be said that you disappeared when you were “in the moment”. But you were never in the moment because you’re not really here. You seemed to have disappeared and all there was, was the moment.

Kate and Steve will never make it. No matter if they meet the perfect partner, find the most rewarding career, have the ideal amount of kids, heal and save the most amount of people, eat the healthiest diet, they will never ever make it.

Loose interest in who you think you are, only then will you find this infinite, indwelling ever present reservoir of stillness. It’s always been here, it’s never left you. IT is always here, right where you are. Never in anything, or anyone or any place. It’s always right here. You could be locked away in a dungeon, in prison, you could be in the middle of extreme depression, you may have been going through death or divorce or cancer. But it’s here. It’s in your cancer, in your prison cell, it’s right here. It’s in it. It is it. You are everything.