Q&A: Beyond Even Grandness

Question: Hi Rodney--Greetings and cheers! I hope this finds you well. It's been a long time since I've corresponded with you.

Rodney: It has indeed. Though we are right in the middle of the pollen season now, allow me to wish you belated Happy New Year!

Q: Thanks! I'm 70-plus years old, so I'll take it!

Rodney: You're probably hardier than I am, so don't sweat it.

Q: I'm continuing to closely read Charlie Hayes' books and Web site. He's sort of a "master pointer" for me.

Rodney: That he is. Charlie continually points to the heart of all this, and he minces no words while doing so. So continue to read whomever you resonate with, until your thinking and conceptualizing is naturally and fully stopped.

Q: Which is, I believe, Sailor Bob's expression for that sort of thing.

Rodney: Exactly, and it's a fine one. As for understanding itself: On one level, the movement of thought is suddenly and timelessly halted; and on another level, this cessation is a hushed and thoroughly undramatic occurrence. Your thinking, of course, isn't permanently halted. There is just this complete and instantaneous seeing/understanding that awareness is vividly present. And once seen, it is not lost.

Q: I also read your pointers frequently, and they often create a silence and stillness with me too.

Rodney: Yes, but the stillness isn't being created. It is being discovered or recognized--by you. Or more accurately, your attention is being brought to the ubiquity and ceaselessness of presence. I am simply pointing to something that you are seeing for yourself. Nothing has been newly-created, summoned, or ascended to.

Q: Got it. Thanks for the correction...Would you elaborate on your expression "that what is presently within and before you"? I just want to make sure that I'm understanding this properly.

Rodney: When I say that presence is "within and before you," I mean it literally. This moment is it. Awareness isn't something that is going to magically appear after x-number of months or years of meditation, or after x-number of sessions of sitting. It brims before you at this very second. Read the next sentence slowly: Presence lies between the spaces of the words in the sentence that you are reading right now. You, no doubt, felt something deep, unmoving, and indescribable as you carefully perused the above.

Q: Yes! I definitely had some sense something. But it was only for a second.

Rodney: That conceptual-slowing or cessation points to a more significant one, one that is nothing less than your natural and ever-present state. In fact, the pause is you. There is no separate, individual person witnessing awareness. Again, you are the pause.

Q: Yeah, I guess I keep thinking that, on some level, this is something that actually "happens."

Rodney: Right, that it is event-like, which isn't the case at all.

Q: But as you said, it's right here and now. I guess I'm just missing it.

Rodney: We go through life largely overlooking these natural and very potent pauses, multitudes of them throughout the day, actually. And we do this mainly out of habit. So I try to bring the reader or seeker's attention back to this pristine and ever-present spaciousness, which, in effect, is being ignored. But once it is recognized or understood, it will indeed appear to be thoroughly within and before you. There will then be no doubt that awareness is absolutely everything everywhere. Truly, no grandness--however cosmic, erudite, or spiritual--can ever excell your essence. For you are That, One without any second, at--this--very--moment.