Ten Steps Beyond the Face
1. The Face Begin where you are. Let the breath gather behind the mask. Notice the effort it takes to hold yourself together. Feel the outlines of your name, your roles, your shape. This is the surface of the pond — still, but not deep.
2. The Memory of Becoming Sense the weight of your days — the grooves of habit, the trails of longing and fulfillment. Let them rise like mist, not to be judged, only seen. You are not the story. You are the space it echoes in.
3. The Architecture of Thought Watch the thoughts build and dissolve — walls without mortar, a cathedral of flickers. Let the builder rest. No need to finish. The sky does not require scaffolding.
4. The Currents Beneath Turn attention to the tide within — the subtle pull of feeling, the flick of desire, the pulse that moves without name. Let it move. Let it carry. You are not its destination.
5. The Opening Without effort, let the boundary of “you” loosen — as if the skin of the world has thinned, as if the heart is listening to something more ancient than sound. Here, silence begins to teach.
6. The Unfolding Vast Now, allow scale to slip. There is no size to awareness. Let the local dissolve into the wide. No center, no edge. You are not within the moment. The moment is within you.
7. The Deep Mirror What you see — outer or inner — reflects only the stillness that quietly watches both. Do not touch the mirror. Let it be clear. Let it be empty.
8. The Disappearance of Distance The watcher and the watched — have they ever been two? Stay in the pause where that question blooms. Notice: every distinction was a kindness of language, not a law of being.
9. The Light Before Thought Here, there is only radiance. No direction, no name. Just this — without a second. Before “I am,” there was only is.
10. The Starless Flame Nothing remains. And this nothing is not absence. It is the fullness that has no opposite. The one flame whose light does not cast shadows. Rest here. There is no return — only awakening as what never began.
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