By Degrees

By degrees: 

it doesn't feel right to call it self improvement, most especially as there's little real improvement and any sense of self is seen through as a temporary assignment to a role well played. So there's no one present that actually needs to be improved - and yet everything has changed, life seems just a bit easier by degrees, lighter somehow, as if unburdened of a weight I never knew was being carried. 

and of course, things are much the same as always. 

so let's call it self-surrender, or even better...

simply letting go. 

again, my life is easier by degrees, perhaps barely registered on a scale of self improvement. My issues are still present, some large and others reduced to seldom being noticed. Honestly, I couldn't really say what's better or how things have exactly changed for better. There's just no measurement here, my actions aren't given towards a goal of judgement, not even in regard to the benefits I might have been initially seeking when I began their practice. Meditation is an example, started decades ago in the hope that at the very least I would be a more efficient, happier person, and at best, ultimately, I would be enlightened. Maybe some of that has been realized, I'm certainly happier, and it wouldn't take much to be more efficient than I was back then, being a heavy drinker and lost in the fantasy that was worthless as a person. Meditation changed me, yet it wasn't by my own effort, it wasn't self improvement in any possible way - and I have no way to possibly describe it, little desire to actually try, as I meditated...

everything changed.

easier by degrees.

same with yoga, breathwork, some forms of self-inquiry, all things I practice, but no longer with a goal in mind, they're not an endeavor embarked on for transformation, although I've been transformed. Just not the way I would have imagined so long before, back when I was so hopeful that I could be a better man, improved upon in every measure. 

that person is actually gone.

really, he never existed at all. 

there was  only the myth of self improvement.

but no self. 

or at least not a singular one, there was no lasting persona that survived the decades of deep silence found through meditation, disappearing in a long stretch of an asana, with only the breath sweeping through the body, not even a witness to observe its motion. From very first sitting and asana, no self exists that has ever been improved, no self that has lasted to this day - although everything has changed, subtle, somehow...

by degrees.

with no true, or lasting self, having been involved.

~

Peace, Eric 

~

Peace