The Infinite Heart
A Journey Into the Teachings of 150 Great
Mystics, Masters, Poets and Saints
WEEK THREE: Tuesday
Before you start us on something else, I still can’t figure out the big catch twenty-two. You aren’t supposed to have any goal of becoming awakened, but how the hell is it going to happen if you don’t even want it to?
Then let me try to be clearer about this. Some of what I say may not be what you want to hear,–
–Gee that’s a shocker.
But you can just see if it resonates as true within your heart, even if you feel your defenses resisting it.
Me resist? Please!
So, it’s fine for a want or a need to arise inside. For desires to come and go. We cannot make them go away by fighting with them. The problem is when we take on the agenda of trying to get what we desire. When we insist on getting something different than what is here right now.
The intention to change anything happening in this moment always accompanies with it a resistance of this moment. A pushing away of the only place and time Pure Being can flow through you. Even if your goal is to become an empty vessel for Essence, this agenda to get to a truer place is flawed. It gives you justification for continuing to push away the depths of this moment just as it is. This is a great distortion. There is never anything that must happen first. To believe otherwise is to believe, “I might be able to become one with Essence sometime in the future, if I can just do all the right things to get there.” If this is your hope, whatever this treasure is that you are chasing after is fool’s gold. It’s not real, regardless of how profound a name you might give it.
What do you mean it’s not real?
The True Treasure is right here, right now, with no preconditions. The only requirement is to stop pushing away the infinite depths of the Pure Present. To finally give up all the preconditions you have held on to for so long. “Once all these conditions are met, then I will finally rest inside. Then I will finally give my life over to Pure Living Love.” So, if what you are looking for only becomes available to you after a check list is finished, you are chasing a lie. An empty rainbow. A false god. And if you aren’t willing to have what you claim to be looking for until a check list is finished, you aren’t really looking for it. It is actually less important to you than your checklist! If this is the case, then what you must really want is to keep things as stable and under control as possible, while letting yourself believe that you are really trying to find Truth. So, either you are chasing after a distorted illusion that you can never reach, or you value being the master of your life more than you value Truth. The only other possibility is that you are already endlessly falling Home. There are no other options.
Damn! Don’t hold back on my account. I mean, you’re not leaving me with much squirm room here.
I don’t say this with harshness.
Well, it sure feels like it. The sharp knife of truth can only cut illusion. So anything threatened by it can’t be real.
Well at least give me some fricking anesthetic! You know, this reminds me of when you talked about Aslan’s claws. Like you said, if you think you’re the dragon, the cutting feels harsh and painful and real.
When old skin peels away, it only hurts if we still have our own nerve fibers attached to it. If we’ve truly stopped holding on to it, we hardly notice it falling away. Of course, our newly uncovered true skin may feel raw and tender and delicate and more sensitive and exposed than ever before. But what beautiful tenderness it is! What sweet rawness!
Maybe it’s kind of like cutting off a cast you’ve been wearing for months. It doesn’t hurt, but you might feel a little strange and sensitive and weak and vulnerable for a while.
Yes, exactly. So, in any case, when we have a goal to become awakened, it is our will trying to get rid of our will so that our will can finally have what it wants. This tends to be rather problematic. This is the endless circling of the volcano’s mouth.
And then finally you just stop circling and jump in.
No. You cannot jump into the volcano. Ever. That requires a doer. No effort can let you fall into Effortlessness. So any effort to jump in is just hopping around the rim. And so you are left circling and circling, cursing yourself or God for not being able to have your Beloved. “I’ve tried everything. Nothing works. I’ll never be free. It’s hopeless.”
I thought you said it was good to realize it’s hopeless.
It’s the difference between a soft heart gently breaking open through tenderly seeing something painful, and an angry, resentful heart having a tantrum.
Okay, so what happens? Eventually you just kind of stand really close to the edge and let yourself fall?
To intentionally fall is to jump, correct? To deliberately stand on the precipice and allow yourself to fall in is to dive, to jump, to try to get somewhere that you are not because you believe your life will be better or because you think you are supposed to. As long as you hope to be elsewhere, regardless of how noble the reason, you can never completely fall through the Doorway of Now into Infinite Being. That which is closer than here. Sooner than now. More intimate to yourself than you are.
All right. Here we go again. Call me a slow learner. Then how the hell do you get there? Just pretend this is the first time you’ve explained it to me, cause the other sixty-three times were over my head.
You can never get to Effortless Beingness. There is nothing you can do to get there. If it is something you can try, it’s not it. What good news!
Exhilarating.
All trying to do anything is on the level of patterns. Of structure. It’s trying to arrange form in just the right way to let you rest in the Formless. So all doing is going in the wrong direction. Nothing you could possibly do can ever work! This means you are one hundred percent free from the heavy burden of trying to do something to become free. It cannot be done. What a relief! What freedom! You cannot even surrender. You cannot even surrender! Surrender is not something you can do. It’s not something you can control. It is the lack of all doing. Of all controlling. It’s letting go of every agenda. Even the agenda to surrender.
You even have to surrender surrendering?
But even that can’t be an agenda. It can’t be done.
So you even have to surrender surrendering surrendering. This gets really complicated.
No. We get really complicated. This is so exquisitely simple that our complexity misses it. It’s before trying to surrender. For you to try to surrender anything, there must be a doer that wills itself to do something to now surrender. It tries to control what you are and aren’t doing until just the right choice, just the right solution, just the right recipe is found. “Okay, now I’m going to surrender and see if that works. Here I go. I’m now surrendering. Is anything better happening now than a minute ago? Not yet. I better surrender harder.” But there is no action you can take, no non-action you can take. All of that is still in the realm of effort and agendas. It’s still trying to get somewhere else. Trying to improve the surface wave of this moment, or hoping to exchange it for a better one, instead of whole-heartedly sinking into the depths of Infinite Being.
I’ll never figure this out.
As long as you identify yourself to be someone that might one day figure out how to surrender, true surrender is impossible. The Pure Living Light of Essence can never be found anywhere that is not right here. Right now. To live in tune with Pure Being is to be so completely accepting of exactly what is here and now that you would never push anything away. Not even patterns of grasping. You would simply let your heart be effortlessly surrendered to the Sea of Self, regardless of what is happening on the surface within or around you. Do you know what “Self” stands for? Have you realized what it really means?
What it stands for? You mean the letters? I don’t know. But probably not “Some Elephants Lick Frequently”.
It’s so simple. So wonderful. So true! SELF: Surrender Everything, Live Free! Such indescribable freedom! Such unstoppable Rays of Living Love! And nothing that you let go of was ever a real treasure! You are simply trading in your fool’s gold for the endless Nectar of Pure Liquid Sunshine! Who could pass up such an offer?
I lay my head on this Living Moment
No need to change anything first
These endless depths so gently hold me
This endless Nectar quenches all thirst
This endless Nectar quenches all thirst
Oh, what Grace. Endlessly pouring through the veil!
In the center of life’s storm, is a place so Pure and Still
Overflowing with Love, asking us to drink our fill
Ahh, but I’ve lost myself again. Says Rumi: “I can’t explain the goings or the comings. You enter suddenly, and I am nowhere again. Inside the Majesty.” But I suppose we should continue.
Do you want to stop for today? It looks like you might rather just go be in bliss for a while.
I would love to just sit in silence for a while. But I no longer prefer my preferences.
One more time?
When you are resting in the Infinite Heart of Being, you are deeply content with this moment, just at it flows. Even if this moment has discontentment. It doesn’t matter. There’s no more wanting to get what you want. It doesn’t yet feel like it’s time to stop, even though that’s my preference. So I would prefer to keep going.
I think I understood you better when you weren’t talking.
Then that is real listening.
* * * * * *
All right, my friend. Where were we?
Well, you were talking about how there’s not anything any of us can do to have Essence and how there’s not a chance in hell we’ll ever get there and how it’s completely and utterly hopeless, at which point you were overcome with intoxicating bliss. Either that or you’ve been sneaking a swig when I’m not looking.
You know, when I was younger, I was always trying to hold on to bliss. And it would dance in front of me, just out of reach, teasing me with its beauty, only occasionally letting me immerse myself in it, and even then only long enough to fill me with anguish when it again withdrew. And then I would strengthen my resolve to get it back. To own it. To have it and control it and use it as I wished. I wanted to master bliss.
You evil man.
Not evil. Just self centered instead of Self centered. I was misguided and dishonest about what was of supreme value. But as my love for Pure Being deepened, sometimes bliss would come, and then always it would go, but I started to see that it wasn’t my True Beloved. It could fill me with mind-stopping ecstasy. It could make my body shake with explosions of unspeakable, heart-piercing pleasure until I was consumed by a flood of Divine Fire. But my obsession with this passionate affair with the sensations of bliss kept me from giving myself fully and unconditionally to my True Beloved. I didn’t want Truth. My god was pleasure.
Well if you’re going to pick a false god, that’s probably the one to go for.
So as I realized this, I gradually stopped trying to pull bliss towards me and trying to keep it from leaving. My door to it became always open and my preference for it slowly faded. Even though it felt so convincingly significant and ultimate and unsurpassable, deep down I knew it couldn’t compare with the Real Treasure. As the eighth century Sufi, Reyhana said, “Among all the pleasures of Paradise only union with You do I wish.”
So now bliss is always welcome to come, and always just as welcome to go. It’s not of consequence. And now that I don’t give it so much attention anymore, now that I no longer chase it around, begging it to come to me, it just happens to come visit me even more, unbidden. And now that I don’t take from it, now that there is no pushing or pulling or grasping, the experience of bliss is so much deeper and richer and more complete, and yet so much more tender. Bliss no longer pulls me away from my Beloved. It is simply an inconsequential current that flows through the Ocean of Essence in which I rest. William Blake wrote “He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
And you do that with every feeling? I mean, letting it come and go?
I don’t do anything. But every current is always free to flow through me. Currents of bliss, currents of grief, currents of anger, currents of lust, currents of pain, currents of fear, currents of peace, currents of love, every current. Who am I to try to rearrange the sea? Who am I to tell the waters how to flow? And since these currents meet no resistance, since they can have all the space they want as they pass through, they are gentle and quiet and still, even when they are filled with power and energy and momentum. They’re like a great, wide river, as peaceful as it is powerful. When you are resting your head on the Heart of your Beloved, no winds can lift you away. And so all storms are welcome.
So, let’s move on. As we touched on a couple of days ago, sooner or later, if you are willing to be honest enough, you realize this truth that there is nothing you can do to merge with Pure Being. There are no tricks, no practices, no strategies, nothing at all you can do to finally rest in the peaceful simplicity of Pure Essence.
But what about that process you guided me through a few days ago, with that angry part? I ended up really resting, deeper than I ever have before.
Yes, it gave you a wonderful glimpse. There are endless practices and techniques that can give you a taste. They can be beautiful gifts. But temporarily tasting some degree of Home is not the same as being unshakably settled there.
So, as you realize there’s nothing you can do, you face the truth that as long as you have even the slightest agenda to let go of all your agendas, it’s hopeless! You realize that the slightest exertion of your will to get elsewhere is only reinforcing the bars of your cage. Every effort to open your petals can only make them close tighter. The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Nun, Ly Ngoc Kieu, wrote in the eleventh century “Any thought of release from this life will wrap you only more tightly in its snares.”
And so it finally dawns on you that you have no say in the matter. No control. You have no control over Pure Being. So anything you can control cannot be it! Cannot even touch it! If you can do it, it won’t result in permanently resting in Home. If you can try it, it’s already ensuring your failure. Every step is a step away. So it is completely out of your hands! You are truly powerless!
You’re quite the motivational speaker. I’m certainly motivated to get up and leave.
It may be hard to hear it, but that’s nothing compared to fully letting it in and knowing it. When you let it pierce your heart in a way that shatters it open, there is the space for a spontaneous giving up of all trying to make anything change about this moment. You even stop trying to surrender. Trying to let go. All of that is finished! The surface waves are completely free to be as they are. Once you realize that absolutely no patterns or structures have to change in order for your inner heart to rest, all your patterns are given room to be just as they are, without you trying to help them or stop them. You simply take your hands off them.
You drop all the leashes. And you just resign yourself to not ever getting Home.
Right. The search is over. The struggle is over. You become a warm, soft hearted loser. Once you see that the game is lost, then you can finally sit back and relax. You let yourself fully rest in this incomplete moment, just as it is, without any agenda or hope. And yet, when you completely settle into the incomplete, without the slightest pressure, it begins to become complete. You begin to spontaneously sink deeper and deeper through the surface into that underlying Completeness, with no protection or resistance or reaching or expectation. And then you are being exactly the way Essence is always being. And when you are being in the same way as Essence, you become the same as Essence. The Inner and the outer become one.
Dante wrote “…God’s generosity itself calms our will, and makes us want no more than what we have, and long for nothing else. If we desired any great bliss, we would not be in harmony with Him whose love assigns us to a lower place. The essence of this joy is that we all have given up our personal desires so that our will is merged with God’s own will.”
Man, it sounds like a really fine line. Even if you’re trying to get rid of your agendas in order to fulfill your agenda of Self realization or merging with the Divine, you’re still stuck. If you want to not want, that’s wanting.
Exactly. Eckhart wrote “A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfill the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.” And Jakob Boehme asks, “Where is this naked Ground of the Soul void of all self?… the hidden center, where God dwells and not man?” And he answers, “There where the soul has slain its own will and wills no more any things as from itself.”
Which brings up the burning question, how come some of these people ask a question and then answering it themselves? Isn’t that kind of strange? Yes. Yes it is.
Boehme wrote in dialogue format, between a teacher and a student. This approach has often been used in writings on philosophy and spirituality, to help clarify the subject matter and maybe liven things up a bit. It was common with ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers, some Christian writers and others. You’ve probably heard of the Platonic dialogues.
Unfortunately, these days pretty much all of my dialogues are platonic.
In any case, to continue, Saint John of the Cross tells us “The soul is not empty, so long as the desire for sensible things remains. But the absence of this desire for things produces emptiness and liberty of soul, even where there is an abundance of possessions.” And Kabir put it this way: “God is desireless; how could one with desire attain the Desireless?”
I’m lost. Earlier you said it was fine for desires to come and go. But it sounds like they’re all saying you shouldn’t have any. Didn’t you just quote Eckhart about how even if your only desire is for God, that still keeps you from being Home?
Yes. It’s a matter of semantics. Thoughts of desire can still arise. They are natural and irrelevant by themselves. What is relevant is that they are no longer taken to heart. You no longer grasp onto them with the will of your heart as something you insist on trying to get. So there’s no more insisting on what is desired. The heart no longer exerts its own will for any reason. It always gives way to the will of Pure Being. When a heart is simply calm and settled, indifferent to desires, it is finally poor and empty enough for Essence to flow through it, regardless of what feelings and thoughts arise. The Bhagavad Gita says “Even as all waters flow into the ocean, but the ocean never overflows, even so the sage feels desires, but he is ever one in his infinite peace.”
So it’s fine to feel a deep, clean, spontaneous aching for Home. That can be a beautiful beacon calling you to what’s most true. But as long as your heart would use its will to get Home, as long as it would use pressure and force in order to get anything, it’s trapped in the world of doing. And it has banished itself from Pure Being.
I don’t really see a difference between longing for something and hoping for something.
There is no tightening in the spontaneous flow of longing. But hoping is a very subtle contraction. It is grabbing onto that longing and becoming invested in having what is longed for. When we softly give up hope, there is a clean sorrow, and a melting into more spaciousness. A tightening relaxes.
So you really can’t ever get it as long as you are trying to get it. It really is completely hopeless! I know you keep saying it, but it just goes against everything we’ve always been taught! Work hard, set your mind on your goal, don’t give up, and sooner or later you’ll get there. But you’re saying effort is like a treadmill. You can never get anywhere. Like you said, as long as you’re walking towards the goal, you can never reach it. And if you stop walking towards it in order to reach it, you still can’t reach it, right? So as long as you have hope, it’s hopeless.
Exactly. And when you tenderly and intimately let that all the way in, there can be a soft and tender willingness to give up all of your dreams of what you had hoped would one day happen. You can let yourself feel the deep, deep grief of losing the life you had always hoped you could have. An easy, happy life free of pain and suffering. A life in which you would be overflowing with Pure Essence while being in complete control of it and yourself. A life in which you would get to include “One with God” on your resume, so that you would get to sit on a higher, easier, more comfortable throne in this world. A life in which you would tame the stallion of enlightenment and ride it wherever you wished. A life in which you would get to have both God and the world. And now you let in the heart-piercing truth that you cannot have either. All of those dreams are finished. All of those illusions are shattered. You have dared to see how things truly are. And you finally absolutely know that you can never succeed at trying to acquire awakening for yourself. That you can never have your Beloved. God is not for you. You are for God.
I’m not sure I really want to hear that.
But does it feel true?
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t want to run out of excuses.
You don’t have to worry about running out of excuses. As long as you are reaching out for one, there will always be one to grab onto. It’s the reaching that creates them.
That’s good to know. I don’t think I’m really ready for excuselessness.
So, when you finally see that you are completely powerless to get what you most deeply want, and that your life is not meant to be owned by you but to be given by you, then what is there left to do?
Pray for amnesia.
But it’s too late for that. You’ve already taken the red pill. You have already seen the truth. You know that you can no longer try to have your Beloved. Even hoping to rest in the Heart of God is resisting this Pure Moment, which is actually the same as resisting God’s Heart. You have let yourself feel the unspeakable pain of realizing there is truly nothing you can do to have the life you want. You are finished with trying to do in order to get.
You clearly see that the fool’s gold of this world could never really satisfy you, and yet you can do nothing to have Pure Liquid Gold, your True Treasure, your Beloved. So you are finished chasing after rainbows and you are finished chasing after Truth. You are finally done with all chasing, all striving, all hoping, all reaching. Your life has, consciously or not, always been a life of trying to get. First trying to get fool’s gold, then Pure Gold. The object has changed but the grasping has not. And it is the grasping itself that keeps you separated from the way of Pure Isness.
What’s that one quote about not grasping? From that swami guy?
Yes, from Swami Vidyaranya. “That which remains when there is no more grasping is the Self.” So, now the only life you’ve ever really known is finished. You are through with using effort to push anything away or to hold anything together. And so the self that you have spent years pulling together and holding onto and protecting begins to tumble to the ground like a house of cards. Like a sand castle washed away by the rising tide of Truth. The thick ice of your defenses naturally begins to melt away when there is no longer the constant pressure of effort. The false skins you have worn for so long naturally begin to shed once you are no longer sustaining them with the energy of attachment. Again, this isn’t a goal. It just happens.
You allow this free fall into Uncontainable Reality not because it might feel better or because then you can get what you want, but only because you know it is what’s most true. It wouldn’t matter if living this way sent you spiraling into the depths of darkness or into the most quenching love. It would be of no consequence at all. Where you are no longer matters. It’s how you are that does. What matters to you is being endlessly surrendered to the Living Flow of Essence, regardless of how the currents feel.
So, desires will still come into your mind, but you don’t treasure their fulfillment more than you treasure your Beloved. And so you let the Pure Present unfold as it will. Saint Catherine of Genoa said “We must not wish anything other than what happens from moment to moment.” And Francis de Sales tells us “We should ask nothing and refuse nothing, but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us.” And Chuang-tze wrote, in the third century B. C., “By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good or evil to disturb his inward economy, but rather falls in with what happens.”
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Hold on a minute. When I try to picture Effortlessness, I just see someone sitting around, not doing anything, never bothering to get off their lazy butts to go to work or pick up after themselves or cook or clean or– wait, that’s pretty much me. Anyway, like not even bothering to flick the mosquitoes off of them or getting out of the way of a car, or defending themselves if someone starts hitting them. Just never lifting a finger. I don’t think that’s what you mean, but it sounds like it.
To live is to act. When you need a breath, you take one. When you need food, you eat. When you need money, you work. When you have an itch, you scratch it. When someone is hitting you, you protect yourself. All of these actions are natural. They are part of life. Effortlessness has nothing to do with whether the mind is thinking– that’s what it is for. Or whether the body is working hard– that’s what it does.
Well mine doesn’t, but I get the idea.
No mental or physical structures have any conditions they must meet in order for you as a spark of Pure Consciousness to rest in Effortless Beingness. Form doesn’t need to look any particular way in order for it to overflow with Formlessness. But if you as a spark of Consciousness are attached to any form enough to try to keep it feeling a certain way, or to keep it from feeling another way, then that attachment itself prevents the free flow of Being through your form.
But that just sounds so heartless. I mean, what do you do when someone you care about is really sick or going through a really hard time? You don’t even give it a second thought? You don’t want anything to change about this moment even if they’re really suffering? That sounds so cold and detached.
Often, what is in this Living Moment is a heart that is breaking ever more deeply open with pain and compassion and love. Detachment is the small mind coldly pushing away anything that could cause it pain. Non-attachment is the heart breaking open so completely that everything can freely flow through it, without preference. Then there is no need to grasp or push away anything. All is welcome to enter and just as welcome to leave. This is non-attachment. A heart this shattered open can no longer resist the pull of the Purest Love. To resist anything happening in this moment is to push away Pure Love until some better moment comes along. That is forsaking your Beloved for a lesser treasure. When Pure Love is your true Master, you would never value any other treasure, any other desire, any other agenda enough to push away Pure Love, even for a moment.
But you don’t ever pray for someone else, or send them energy or whatever?
I don’t do anything. I simply rest in the Heart of Reality. When someone is on my mind and in my heart, when they are in great suffering and desperate for Grace, I still simply rest in the Heart of the Pure Center. All I ever do is just rest. What an easy job! I simply lay back and float on the Sweet, Living Water of the Source, and let it carry me where it will. The mind may work, the body may work, but I am always at rest. In the Eye of the storm. No other treasure is worth lifting my head from the Heart of my Beloved. And yet somehow, everything gets done. Somehow, Love flows. Somehow, action is taken. What a mystery! Sometimes my complex mind tries to figure out how this can be possible. But I’m far too lazy and simple to join it.
I know this isn’t what you mean, but it almost sounds like you’re saying you’re too lazy to bother to pray for someone.
When someone is in our heart, while we are completely resting in the Heart of God, do they also find themselves somehow comforted, somehow gentled, somehow more inside of Love, somehow more in the Presence of Living Essence? I wouldn’t know anything about that at all. It’s none of my business. I just know where my head loves to rest. Right here. In this Infinite, Nectarous, Living Moment. Where the Divine Heart is always ready to receive us. And I simply know how completely true it is to lay my head in this Heart. Not in some dramatic, explosive, lightning flash way. But in a quiet, simple, still, very sweet way. How astounding, that the truest way for us to be is also the most incomparably lovely!
So my only concern is being faithful to the Purest Truth I know. Falling into Formless Beingness ever more deeply, never choosing another lover above the One True Beloved. And this happens so effortlessly once we give our life to Pure Being that even this is not truly a concern. Imagine! A life without concern! And not from a place of cold, armored detachment. But from a no-place of being so shattered open, so dissolved, so emptied, that the boundaries between our heart and the One Heart dissolve away. And then all that remains is love loving Love. In that Love, there is room for everything! Just as it is. In this Living Moment.
But what about having a little concern and compassion for other people?
When we let go of all agendas, and let the Flow of Being move through us, there is a natural compassion towards all beings that spontaneously arises. There is an effortless, direct seeing of each being as a spark of Essence that deep down only longs to re-member their True Nature, to rest again in the Heart of God and to let their form be used by Essence to live and express and flow in this world.
Sounds like the gaze of the Heart.
Right. True Seeing. There is no agenda to have this compassion and there’s no attempt to hold on to it. It just arises and flows through us in a clean, pure, simple way. And with it there is often a natural flow of response. Spontaneous action without agenda. Movement unattached to outcome. So even though we are agendaless servants, there is still a flow of compassion and action that moves through us that cannot help but contribute to the Homecoming of other beings and to the free flow of Pure Essence into this world.
So it’s not like when you surrender all your agendas, you don’t ever do anything and you don’t care about the pain and suffering in the world.
There may be a period in which we dare to let go of our own agendas even though we don’t feel anything yet taking their place. And during this time, we may not feel the slightest interest in anything of this world. But rather than covering that barren indifference with a forced, inauthentic facade of obligatory compassion, if we can allow ourselves to fully keep falling through whatever is, even if there isn’t the slightest love or compassion there, then eventually a spontaneous love and compassion arises that is much more authentic and pure and powerful and healing than anything the personality could have managed to create.
I’m getting this image of trying to cover a barren tree with fake leaves in the middle of winter because you don’t like how empty it looks. If you can just let it be how it is, then when spring comes it will be more beautiful and alive than you ever could’ve made it.
Yes, exactly! A tree must let go of everything it holds so that what is most new and vibrant and real has the space to flow outward from deep within. And so with us. But so few of us are willing to just let ourselves feel the cold, naked emptiness of winter. We grasp onto the leaves of moments that are already dead, and try to keep them from falling away. But dead leaves cannot truly satisfy us. They can only keep new ones from growing. And so we become trapped in an endless winter that we deny exists. We pretend it’s summer while we work so hard to keep all the dead leaves around us from falling to the ground. And then the natural cycle of death and rebirth, the Pulse of Life, becomes stifled. But when we let ourselves fully rest in the raw, tender, exposed emptiness of winter, regardless of how uncomfortable or painful it might be, then we allow the space for spring to come. And then, even in the cold and wind and darkness of winter, we are so much more alive than we ever were in our fake, forced summers, no matter how many dead leaves we were clinging to.
For some reason, that really hits home. I mean, I can feel something in me that really knows what you’re saying is true. That the most painful real winter is worth more than a thousand fake summers. That there’s more life in true dying than there is in false living. And it’s like I’m just starting to catch a glimpse of how many fake leaves I really have.
Beautiful, friend. And when we begin to see that, rather than judging ourselves or trying to pluck off all those false leaves and pull up real ones, we can simply let the painful truth of how we have been living completely pierce our heart. That piercing gently allows the fake leaves to fall. That piercing is the dawn of true spring.
* * * * * *
So, most compassion we have for others is actually motivated by a well disguised selfishness. It arises from our discomfort with the pain we feel inside when we see others suffering. Energy arises within us to relieve their suffering, yet it comes from a space of not being okay with what is. On a deeper, usually unconscious level, we’re actually trying to relieve the discomfort we feel, by removing that which triggers it. And so while the actions we take may seem to be compassionate and may be helpful on the surface, the energy beneath those actions is largely of contracting and resisting and refusing to fully sink into what is. It’s trying to rearrange things more to our liking so that we can feel okay again.
That sounds really harsh. But I’m not sure I disagree with it.
It’s understandable that this is how we are. And it isn’t something we can use force to change. But as we begin to let our hearts rest even while those patterns are happening, we become more and more okay with pain, whether it’s within ourselves or within others. And then we no longer have a shallow and self-centered motivation to get rid of other people’s pain so that we can feel more comfortable and less contracted inside. As this begins to happen, we relax more and more into what is. We become completely at home right where we are, never resisting what is present due to the discomfort or pressure or anguish it might create. We rest in the exact moment we are in, even if there is pain and suffering happening within us or within others. And then there is the space inside us for the Flow of Being to move through. This Flow responds through us to the present situation, not from a place of need or desire, but from a place of overflowing fullness of Heart. From a place of Unconditional Love. Soft, Agendaless Presence. True Compassion.
When we remain tenderly open, regardless of what we are experiencing, we let ourselves take in not only our own waves of pain, but the pain of others. We never close down and push it away with defenses. And because we are so open, that pain doesn’t have any place to stick within us. It flows in, we feel it, and then it flows out. It isn’t a problem. It only hurts. But because we fully take it in, because it’s free to go anywhere within us, it naturally falls into the deepest depths of our being, where it becomes transformed into the sweet nectar of Pure Love. This is true alchemy. The alchemy of the heart. Everything that is fully let in is effortlessly turned to Pure Liquid Gold. So when we are armorless and agendaless, when we are simply resting inside, completely open, we become instruments of true alchemy. We naturally breathe in whatever pain might be present around us, and we breathe out tender, Nectarous Pure Love. We become living lungs for a polluted world. Turning heaviness and darkness into Liquid Sunshine. This is the beginning of the healing of hell.
Does that mean you would be in terrible pain all the time?
Not terrible pain. It’s an ever-present, sweet, tender, heart-opening pain. And to the same extent, an ever-present, sweet, tender, heart-opening joy. Sometimes they feel exactly the same. They both melt your heart ever more open. The Eighteenth century Sufi, Khwaja Mir Dard, said “Misery and joy have the same shape in this world: You may call the rose an open heart or a broken heart.” So sometimes there are more intense waves of pain or joy, but they don’t feel as big and overpowering as they once might have. When you are a young child and you skin your knee, it’s an awful, frightening, excruciating thing.
For five minutes.
There’s such drama in those five minutes. Such intense pain, and then such wonderful relief as a kiss or a Band Aid magically makes you all better. When you’re an adult, the exact same scrape just doesn’t feel as big or dramatic or painful. It’s just sensations. You know those sensations of pain can’t actually threaten or harm who you really are.
So, this Pure Flow of Love that moves outward from our Clear Center into the world has no agenda to change anything at all. And yet, it is so healing, so nurturing, so loving, and so Real that all those around who let it flow through them cannot help but feel a profound resonance deep within, as their own Essence begins to awaken and respond.
Like closed roses near an open rose. It reminds them of a greater possibility.
Right. Our complete, unconditional acceptance of this moment not only causes our own petals to fall wide open, but also helps those around to experience a greater degree of openness. They may have a powerful recognition, deep within, that they too are meant to be an open rose, drinking in the sun, sharing their overflowing Fragrance and Nectar with all the world. They may begin to realize that no matter how long a rose lives or how big or bright it becomes, if it never opens, it hasn’t truly fulfilled its greatest potential or its deepest purpose.
And along with this recognition comes the awareness of the price they must first pay in order to be an open rose. That price is everything they value, everything they hope for, and everything they have become. They must die unto themselves, and let Pure Flow live through them. This remembrance, even if it is on an unconscious level, can be very threatening. And so, while some people respond by just falling open, at least for a while, drinking in the Pure Nectar at the Center of their being, others react by closing their petals even tighter than before. They instinctively feel that all they have valued is in danger of falling part. Because it is. And there are even some who react so strongly, they not only try to protect themselves, they try to stop what they perceive as a terrible poison from spreading to others. When your greatest treasure is one that can be destroyed, you will do all you can to protect it.
Like when they crucified Jesus. And who knows how many others have been killed because what they were saying was too threatening.
The sixteenth century Indian Sikh teacher, Arjun, said “God is in your heart, yet you search for Him in the wilderness.” He was burned to death because he refused to change his beliefs. And the thirteenth century Christian mystic, Marguerite Porete, said “Beloved, what do you want of me? I contain all that was, and all that is, and shall be, I am filled with the all. Take of me all you please– If you want all of myself, I’ll not say no. I am Love, who am filled with the all.” She was burned at the stake in Paris for blasphemy. So many have been killed for their unwavering, uncontainable and uncompromising love for the Most Real. Including several we’ve heard from during these talks. But when an open rose dies, it doesn’t shrivel up into untruth. It simply melts into All That Is. And long after all of its petals have dissolved back into the earth, its fragrance continues to float through all the world.
The tenth century Sufi master, Mansur al-Hallaj, was tortured and killed for saying there was no one left in his body but God. That all that remained within him was the Truth, the Real. One of those who loved him wrote afterwards, “al-Hallaj is spread throughout space in blissful joy, all pervading and sparkling with light. You tried to silence him, but his words are whispered even by the autumn winds… You cut off his head to wipe the smile from his face, but his bell-like laughter spreads from shore to shore, and his laughing eyes twinkle in the clear blue sky.”
There is such Living Beauty in those words. Such piercing sweetness… It shatters my heart to say them… Oh, my friend, how many masks have been forced into the fire, burned to ashes? And yet, the Eternal Face always survives. And dances in the flames. Unscathed and unharmed. You can never shatter wine. When you burn away Pure Water, you only set it free. But these words are too heavy to fully express Pure Lightness.
There are no words for this Beauty
There are no words for this Love
There are no words for this Stillness
How could they ever begin to be enough
There are no words for the Greatness
Of the gift of being alive
There are no words
for what is Living inside
Only Silence can speak Perfect Truth. Kabir said “Don’t ask me to speak any more– The story of Love can never be told.”
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