“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
―Sun Tzu
 

nderstanding when you’re identified with the illusion is the first step to popping out of it. Oftentimes, it’s the entire journey to freedom itself.

I’ll never forget the story about the cook at the Zen monastery (before I became the cook) who said, out loud, in the kitchen, “I’m identified.” Being identified, at my monastery where I trained, was code for “stuck in suffering.” It means I’m frustrated, angry, upset, fighting something, believing something, or caught up in feeling bad. It’s the “trapped as the actor in the play” position in which you don’t realize you’re the actor in the play. You just believe you’re truly the person and what’s happening to you is real. When the cook announced that she was stuck, it not only extricated her from suffering but it reinforced her chances of doing it again. Now she could see when the illusion was attempting to keep her in the story and that she could disidentify from it at will. This skill is what we’re practicing to master: Closing the gap between suffering and freedom by training our attention to stay where we want it.

The good news is your desire to be free belongs to the face of freedom staring back at you across the abyss. The moment you see through the illusion is the moment you become that which you are looking for. Where you are going suddenly becomes where you are. Presence meets itself as it cuts through the fog of delusion and dissipates it to the winds. Suddenly, in a great knowing, you are once again home with nowhere left to go, or do, or be.

Awakening is a recognition. You are recognizing authenticity and it becomes a reunion with what is already inside of you. When you are caught up in a challenging inner story you simply forget. You experience yourself as separate from grace. So you begin to develop a longing for it. You want something that you believe is out there somewhere. But you wouldn’t know to go looking for freedom if you weren’t already experiencing it from within. That’s the irony of spiritual practice. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to be.

Practice is about remembering your real face.