The Impossibility of Acceptance and Rejection
The effort to accept or reject are stories superimposed onto the raw actuality of experience. To accept or reject implies a structural, dualistic relationship: a separate “me” that is doing the accepting, and a separate “something” out there that is being accepted or rejected. The conditions or experiences that you believe you are resisting or accepting do not actually exist as separate, independent events that can be pushed away or grasped.
Nothing is rejected, everything is already “accepted” by the experiential field. Presence intrinsically accepts itself simply by the de facto reality that it is present. Qualifying this reality as “acceptance” is ultimately an arbitrary human label, because “non-acceptance” or “non-presence” is not even a possibility!
The moment any experience arises you are already engaged with it; it is already too late to accept or reject it, because its presence is already a given. The experiential field is a seamless, undivided whole where every appearance is an expression of the total reality that we are, making any attempt to push away or isolate specific experiences fundamentally both unnecessary and impossible. Everything that appears is already completely embraced by the ocean of existence, because nothing can ever leave from the all-inclusive field of belonging.
Because nothing can be truly rejected or conditionally accepted, what’s left is a simple noticing of what already is. Noticing is not a strenuous action you must perform or an effort to change your state of mind; it is simply the recognition of the present reality just as it is. Noticing is experiencing. You are experiencing. Your experiences are experiencing. You simply notice – experience – the actual reality of the nature of your experiential field, seeing that it is already completely full and occurring spontaneously without your effort. There is no need to alter your experience to reach a “better” state, because every experience is equally the miracle of existence in expression.
It becomes clear that the sense of “me” cannot reject or accept. It is an experience among other experiences within the experiential field, made of the field. The feeling of being a separate individual who makes choices to accept or resist is merely an apparition that appears within the field, completely devoid of any autonomous power. Because the “me” is simply an energy pattern appearing within experience, it cannot be the doer of acceptance or rejection. You cannot find a separate “you” that stands apart from your experience to do the accepting or rejecting; the “experiencer” and the “experienced” are one and the same seamless presence.
So, the ‘me’ experience is accepted by what we are (we are the experiential field). There’s no need to reject the sense of me; it’s neither possible nor necessary. There is absolutely no requirement to reject the ego, the personality, or the sense of “me,” because the very feeling of “I” is a genuine expression of wholeness. There is nothing wrong with feeling like you are you; your conviction that you are a “me” is itself a perfect expression of the universe dancing with itself. Because the “me” is an inseparable part of the continuum of being, there is no need to dismantle the personality, shut down identification, or purify yourself of your human psychology. It is a unique spontaneous event occurring within the unending, undefinable context of the whole, and it is perfectly allowed to be exactly as it is. You are the entirety of the field, and in that boundless wholeness, every aspect of the “me” is already unconditionally embraced.
