All your experience is no more than story in a book
Roy Dopson
A map is used to give a different perspective. From this different perspective you may be able to better see where you are and where you can go.
The ‘One-Step Path’ is a map. It gives you a different perspective, not on where you are, but on who you are.
This different perspective is: What if everything you think you are – every way in which you describe yourself – is not your True Self, but an illusion, an apparition, a fictional character manufactured by the mind and having no existence apart from the mind? What if everything you think, and therefore your entire subjective experience of Life, is itself, just a certain perspective?
What if a slight shift in this perspective could bring about a profound change of experience?
Consider the following:
You are reading a novel. You become so involved in the plot and associate so strongly with the main character that you lose awareness of yourself; you forget that you are actually the reader and begin vicariously living the plot in your mind.
What if this is exactly what is happening right now, in/as this very reality? What if the character your name here with its likes, dislikes, desires, hopes, fears, joys, sorrows, loves, heartaches, attractions, aversions, birth and death, has no existence apart from the consciousness that gives it Life?
Just as the words in the book translated by the mind of the reader into thought gives the story Life, so do the thoughts of your mind give the story of (your name here) Life. What if this is the single fundamental reason why nothing within this realm ever completely satisfies?
All experience within this realm is no more substantial than the reading of a story in a book.
The One-Step Path proposes that the idea presented above is more than metaphorical. That proposal is the map pointing you back to, reminding yourself of, your True Self.
Once you accept the possibility that there is a higher Self (does not every single religion say there is a higher Self, a higher level of Reality?) then that possibility can be transmitted into actuality. This transmission of idea into actuality is the shift in perspective from believing you are the character in the book back to the realization that you are the reader of the book.
This shift in perspective requires only one step:
Pay attention to the space between your thoughts.
If the thoughts in/of your mind are the reading of the book, the silence/stillness between the thoughts is the reader. The map that is this book will point you over and over, from different perspectives, always back to the same place.
This is the path. The path that brings you back to your True Self.
The One-Step Path.
The truth of the teaching can only be tested in/as your direct experience. Investigation into the thought-free state will reveal what it will.
Truth is absolutely Self-evident and therefore impossible to believe in. Belief necessarily implies uncertainty. Uncertainty is inherent within belief. Does one need believe that they exist? Directly experiencing one’s own existence, what is there to believe?
Excerpted from the Introduction to the book, ‘The One Step Path’. Roy teaches the One-Step Path in Canada and the US.
Roy Dopson
