The Infinite Heart
A Journey Into the Teachings of 150 Great
Mystics, Masters, Poets and Saints
WEEK THREE: Wednesday
All right. Let’s pick up where we stopped yesterday. We were talking about the difference between effortfully trying to do compassion, and resting in true, spontaneous compassion. When we are bowed down to Pure Being, letting it have the throne of our life, we become a fountain through which Living Love flows into this world. This Love is simultaneously deeply compassionate and completely accepting of things just as they are. It has no need to change anything. And yet, it effortlessly affects this world in a way that is much more pure and healing and true than anything our small self could’ve done. Kabir said “The devout seeker is he who mingles in his heart the double currents of love and non-attachment, like the mingling of the streams of the Ganges and Jumna.”
When we lay our head in the Heart of Pure Being, what emanates from us is an unconditional okayness that has no requirements of form. And then, whatever is happening in the world, there is a profound letting go and resting deep within. Saint John of the Cross wrote "Disquietude is always vanity, because it serves no good. Yes, even if the whole world were thrown into confusion and all things in it, disquietude on that account would be vanity." So there is never the slightest waiting until something better or easier or more profound happens. We stop trying to fix or improve ourselves and others. And yet, the profound acceptance of things just as they are effortlessly creates the space for something new and alive and spontaneous to wash through what is old, bringing healing and new birth into the layers of form.
So really, living a life centered around this letting go, it isn’t self centered or self indulgent. I mean, it can actually be more helpful than always trying to improve things.
That’s true. Einstein wrote "The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self." No matter how noble your intentions, when you help others from a place of needing to change what is, so that things can be more okay, it’s always tainted. The action may be very helpful on the surface, but the energy beneath it is distorted. It’s one of resisting this moment instead of free falling into it.
But if you’re coming from a place that’s unconditionally okay with what is, couldn’t you still take the same actions? There would just be a different motivation. I mean, you might still feed someone who’s hungry or push someone away from a speeding car, right?
Yes, there’s no problem with helpful actions. But are we doing them out of an overflowing Love that cannot help but express itself through spontaneous action? Or are we doing them to try to relieve pain because pain isn’t okay with us, because getting rid of physical or mental discomfort is more important to us than the Flow of Being?
Well the next time I’m about to push someone away from a speeding car, I’ll stop and think about my true motivations for a while.
Of course, in the moment you do what honestly seems best. Non-action motivated by a fear of untrue motivation has an untrue motivation.
The next time I’m about to push someone away from a speeding car, I’ll stop and try to figure out what the hell you just said. Anyway, like I was saying, somehow it’s good to hear that if you’re focusing your life on becoming more open and more connected to Essence, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selfish.
Yes, but living a “spiritual” life can also be an excuse to hide from the world. To avoid pain. When I was younger, I found it much easier to feel a deep connection with Essence when I was sitting or walking alone, living a simple life. And much harder when I was active in the world and interacting with others. So I created for myself a simple, solitary life in which I spent most of my time alone, living in a secluded mountain cabin. And with almost nothing triggering my defenses and reactions and patterns, I would often be open and soft and undefended, and Essence would flow through me.
But almost invariably, when I would return to the city or spend time with others, I would lose all awareness, all expansion. I would close up again. So during those years, I was still wearing just as much Velcro as always. I was just trying to avoid everyone and everything that might cause some prickly burrs to attach to it. There’s an old saying, "It’s easy to be holy on the top of a mountain." One day it dawned on me, is my life really about feeling expanded? Is that really my master, my greatest treasure? Even if it means pushing away everything and everyone that might interfere? And I realized that any conditional enlightenment is no enlightenment at all.
I finally saw that it wasn’t about how expanded or peaceful I felt and how strong my connection with Essence seemed and how well I was progressing towards my spiritual goal. I let go of all that and let the Truth pierce through me. I bowed down and said, with honesty of heart, "I cannot own You. I can never tame You. I can never have You or use You or control You. I can only serve You. Give myself to You. Surrender to You. You can never, ever be mine. So I am Yours. Even if it means the me I think I am is completely replaced by that which is most True. This mind, this body, this heart, this soul, this form and all that I have been claiming as mine are Yours. Unconditionally."
For so long I’ve fought
To convince myself I’m something that I’m not
So much work to push away the hurt
And hold onto what I’ve got
Now I see the truth
This life I’m living was always meant for You
You gently wait, for me to clear a space
There’s not room for two
So I give back this throne
I stole from You so very long ago
Here it is, a place for you to live
You can have this home
May I be replaced, by a tiny ray
Of the Pure Sun, let the burning come
And melt me away
May I be replaced, by a tiny ray
Of the Pure Sun, let the burning, let the burning come!
And melt me away!
Man, that just sounds scary as hell! I know you keep saying what we really are can’t die, and can’t even really be hurt, but if we’re identified with the us that’s dying, that’s got to be hell!
It can be the sweetest, dearest, most precious of hells. It’s such a sweet dying, such a tender, raw, true dissolving of all the false skins you had mistaken for yourself. It breaks your heart completely open. Your heart’s walls are shattered. Finally it has the freedom to expand to its true size. Endless. It’s been said that a heart broken completely open has room within it to tenderly hold the whole world.
I can see how you could use spiritual work as an excuse to hide out. But still, it sounds like if you want to help the world you have to start with yourself. There’s a saying I’ve heard a few times: Begin within. You know, every time you get on an airplane, they tell you that in case there’s a pressure breach you should put an oxygen mask on yourself first, before you try to put one on anyone else. Even if there are children around you. The knee jerk reaction is, that’s really selfish. But it’s like if you don’t focus first on letting yourself get the air you need to see the situation clearly, you might not be conscious enough to help anyone else. You could have the best of intentions, but that doesn’t mean you would be able to actually help them. So it’s not enough to mean well if you can’t see things clearly.
Exactly! The Chinese sage, Mencius, said "Never has a man who has bent himself been able to make others straight."
Yeah. And it seems like if you’re trying to get rid of something because you aren’t okay with it, it’s like you can’t help but replace it with a space or an energy that’s not okay.
That’s exactly it! This is why an open rose, resting in a field, is such a greater gift to this world than a closed one that is working so hard to try to fix things.
So it’s kind of like we’ve been running around, trying to put out all the fires of the world, never realizing that all this time it’s a flame-thrower we’ve had in our hands.
Yes, exactly!
Damn! No wonder this stuff triggers people’s defenses! It keeps turning everything upside down and inside out! I think there might still be a few sacred cows you haven’t knocked over yet. But then again, there’s still time. Anyway, it sounds beautiful and saintly and enlightened and all to just sit around petting butterflies, but how the hell does anything ever get done? I mean, if we stop pushing ourselves to accomplish things and take care of things, if we stop using effort and will, I think most of us are afraid we’d just sit around all the time, not doing anything.
When we first hear of Effortlessness, we tend to think of our mental and physical bodies being dormant and still. But as we touched on yesterday, this has nothing to do with it. You can be running up a mountain and still be resting in Effortlessness.
If I tried to run up a mountain I’d end up resting in peace. Or maybe in pieces.
Or you can be focused on writing a song on your guitar or doing your taxes or finding a solution to some challenging situation.
Taxes? I knew I’d been forgetting something the last decade or so. So it’s like what you were talking about last week, about true laziness as opposed to outer laziness.
Right. Effortlessness is a letting go of all pressure and insistence and tightness in the heart. It is not the same as inactivity. It’s not the stopping of using mental or physical energy. In fact, you may find you have much more energy when you are no longer trying to hold on to some of it while keeping some of it at bay. So when you are no longer trying to oversee all of the energies moving through your mind and body, when you simply allow them to flow, what needs to get done gets done. A purification naturally happens over time, in which all of the distorted energy that is not in line with Pure Being begins to dissipate by itself. The less you are of the world, the more fully you can be in it. Lao-tzu wrote "In the pursuit of learning, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, everyday something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone."
By non-action he’s talking about effortlessness?
Right. And conversely, when your body is still, and sometimes even when your mind is still, there can be a tremendous amount of effort happening inside. There can be a constant pushing away of painful feelings you’ve never been willing to feel and of truths that would interfere with your agendas if you let them in. This type of resistance is happening to some degree all the time in everyone, except for those who are simply falling ever deeper into Effortless Beingness, without regard for how intensely uncomfortable and painful some currents might be.
* * * * * *
You keep making it sound like there’s just incredible pain when we stop resisting and let go. It doesn’t sound very appealing. There is incredible pain in life. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable. But for most of us, the extreme discomfort of pain makes protecting ourselves from it a top priority. More important than letting ourselves be tenderly settled in this moment even when there is great pain. When we are young, our spark of Pure Consciousness gradually becomes more identified with this growing human form that instinctively tries to avoid pain. And as we come to believe that is all we are, we gradually discover that the more resistant we become to sinking into this moment, the less the pain of life is actually felt. The more we close down, the less energy moves through us, and the less discomfort there is. Of course, this strategy also reduces the amount of Pure Joy, and Love and Presence that can flow through us. It blocks us from merging with the exquisite, incomparable beauty of Living Flow.
So it sounds like a trade off. Thick skin numbs you from joy and pain. Like that Pink Floyd song says, "I have become comfortably numb." You know, you can see it with young kids. Some of them are really tough, and they don’t seem to be bothered much by pain, but they also don’t seem to be able to feel as much love and compassion. And others seem a lot more thin-skinned, and their feelings get hurt so deeply and so easily, but they also seem to be able to feel more love.
My niece is like that. She’s really sensitive and the smallest thing really hurts her feelings. You can just feel the pain flowing through her. And she just lets it. But then when she feels love, it fills up the room. A few years ago, when she was three, I told her, "You sure have a lot of love in your heart." And she just nodded her head and looked at me with this clear knowing in her eyes and said "More than you could ever know." And I was just stunned for a minute because I knew what she said was true. She really was in touch with that much love. I guess we all were at first, she’s just letting it stay longer than most. Sooner or later she’s going to decide to put on some tough skin, and who could blame her? It’s a tough world. But I haven’t seen it yet. Somehow, she keeps staying open, even though sometimes it must hurt like hell.
How beautiful an open rose is. How beautiful to be open to the sunshine and the hail. A life of trying to choose pleasure over pain is a life of trying to control all the doors and windows of your castle, trying to open one just enough for pleasure to come in and then close it as soon as pain starts to slip through. You end up exhausted and dissatisfied. And sooner or later, you may even decide it’s easier and safer to keep your castle as closed down as you possibly can.
You can’t let in the butterflies and keep out the mosquitoes.
Exactly.
That’s an ancient Tibetan saying I just made up. So the choice is to either have both or to try to have neither. And most of us are really into avoiding pain and discomfort if we can. And it’s not that we should glorify pain. It has no value of its own. If your leg falls asleep, why not change positions? If you have a headache, why not take an aspirin? There’s nothing wrong with taking care of your body, helping it to be comfortable. But to postpone, even for an instant, sinking into the Infinite Depths of Now in order to increase or prolong pleasure or decrease or get rid of pain, that is making form more important than the Formless. It is making you more important than Pure Being. Pain, as incredibly agonizing as it can be, cannot harm what you truly are. No wound can scar the soul. Pain can only interfere with you resting in your True Nature if you become attached to resisting it and getting rid of it at the expense of simply being in this moment.
I guess that makes sense. So when you are letting yourself surrender into Effortless Presence, everything is completely free to arise and everything is just as free to fall away, including pain, including psychological distortions, including every possible thought and feeling– even those of resistance.
But it seems like if you’re surrendering to what is and you notice that you’re actually resisting something, then you aren’t really surrendering to what is.
When you notice a pattern of resisting arising, if you immediately fight with it or try to change it then you aren’t accepting what is. Remember Seng-ts’an: "When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion, the quiescence so gained is ever in motion."
And you don’t want that. It would be better to have quiescencelessness.
But if you just let that pattern of resistance be as it is, then the spark of Pure Consciousness that you are is actually simply surrendering to what is. What else could you do? To try to change anything about that pattern is to add another one on top of it. And why would you even try to get rid of a pattern of resistance? To do that would be to have an agenda for things to be different. No patterns can interfere with your resting in the Pure Center. So patterns are allowed to be. Without the slightest counter-pressure holding them together. And so, even though this isn’t your goal, they happen to slowly dissipate.
I like that. It takes all the pressure of off trying to get rid of patterns. You’re saying even when strong patterns of resistance flare up, you can still just let go of the leash.
Exactly. Trying to calm the circling winds can only distract you from resting in the Eye of the storm. The only way the wind can try to stop the wind is to blow against it. And all that can ever do is cause a more turbulent storm.
So the answer, my friend, isn’t blowing in the wind. The answer’s not blowing in the wind. You know, a great and humble man once said, in the early twenty-first century, "The hurricane’s eye is always in the sun." Or something like that.
Of course, you may not always experience that sun. The mud in the river is no longer constantly being forced to the bottom. And the mud that has gathered there over the years is finally free to come up and cloud the water.
But eventually it flows on down stream?
Leaving you with crystal clear water, flowing through an ever-cleaner crystal river bed. But in the early stages, those mud clouds may give your mind experiences of intense darkness and separation and constriction and confusion. But you would have no agenda to change something in order for your mind to feel and experience falling into Pure Essence. Why would your mind need to experience it? You aren’t surrendering to get something for your mind. You are simply falling into Untainted Reality, even if there is never any pay off or benefit. Even if you would feel lost in a pattern of resistance for the rest of your life, never to experience Pure Love or Pure Peace again, you still would not use the slightest force to get rid of that pattern. You wouldn’t resist what is flowing in this moment until something better comes along. In the seventeenth century, Saint Jane Frances De Chantal wrote "O my Lord, I am in a dry land, all dried up and cracked by the violence of the north wind and the cold; but as you see, I ask for nothing more; you will send me both dew and warmth when it pleases you."
So even if you only had to push away Pure Being for an instant, and that would result in a rearranging of your structures in a way that would let you forever have the continuous experience of merging with it, you would never do it. Essence is your Beloved. Whether or not you ever get to experience Essence is not of consequence. What matters is that you always give it all the room it wants to fully flow through you. That you let it have every part of you it wants, even if there would be nothing of you left.
Man, that’s some pretty strong devotion to your Beloved! And I thought it was going overboard to buy flowers twice a year. But back up a minute. I’m still thinking about how when you just let all your patterns really be as they are, they fade away. We spend so much energy trying to change ourselves, and it sounds like that just strengthens the whole thing. Like the corn starch, the harder you push, the more patterns resist. But you’re saying if you just let them be, and give them a little breathing room, then their hardness and resistance dissolve away on their own. Not a bad fringe benefit. But if you’re just letting them be, does that mean you act on them? I mean, what if they’re harmful?
Like we touched on last week, giving patterns the space they need on the inside doesn’t mean you have to give them expression on the outside. The more you are simply resting in Spacious Presence, the more room there is for clouds of mud to rise up without thickening the water. You can let even very strong emotions and impulses and desires be fully present in you without any kind of unhealthy expression. It’s fine to express in ways that aren’t harmful, but you may also find you don’t need to express them at all. Either way, when you finally give emotions all the room they want and let them just be fully present, at first they may become big and strong and noisy and distracting. But gradually, they use up all of their energy. When you are no longer helping to sustain a storm cloud by creating friction against it, it’s finally free to dissolve into the endless sky.
Leashlessness.
You fight with a child all day long. "Hold still! Stop running! Do as I say." Finally, out of wisdom or exhaustion you say "Okay. Go play. Go be as you wish." And the child runs around, playing, being itself, a whirlwind of energy you’re no longer trying to stifle. And then, before long, it comes back to you, crawls onto your lap, and falls asleep.
* * * * * *
Now, your only reason for having a surrendered heart is that you know, with every fiber of your being, that this is what’s most true. And yet, when you’re simply falling endlessly into this Living Moment, your way of being is in complete alignment with the way of being that Boundless Being always has. Your heart is in harmony with the Infinite Heart. And when you are being exactly as Essence is, any barriers, any boundaries, any separation between your being and Pure Being are dissolved. You are completely resting in and dissolving into the Infinite and Absolute Source of Life. You are free-falling Home, back into the Real.
When you completely let go of your life, it is gently caught by the loving arms of God. Iraqi said “Do you want to be ALL? Then go, go and become nothing. You are nothing when you wed the One; But when you truly become nothing, you become everything.” And more than fifteen hundred years before him, Lao-tzu wrote "If you want to become full, become empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.”
A couple of the others said something like that too, didn’t they? It still amazes me that so many people have described this throughout the centuries, and yet so few people today are aware of it. It’s kind of like a lost knowledge that’s being rediscovered.
It was never completely lost, but there has definitely been an ebb and flow. And we’re entering a time of a great rediscovery. Of re-membering the Pure Center of Life. So, when you finally give up trying to have anything, trying to keep anything, trying to be anything, trying to change anything, and trying to stop anything, your Beloved comes to you. Eckhart wrote "You need not seek Him here or there,–
–You need not seek him anywhere. You need not seek him in a house. You need not seek him with a mouse. You need not seek in eggs or ham. You need not seek the great I AM. Hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a Dr. Suess version of the Bible? “You will like this bread and wine. Try and see, it’s quite divine.” Anyway, you were quoting Eckhart?
“You need not seek Him here or there. He is no farther off than the door of the heart. There He stands and waits and waits until He finds you ready to open and let Him in… Your opening and His entering are but one moment.”
So that’s why you said if you really are sincere about surrendering, it happens in an instant. You don’t have to work at it or do practices or anything if you really mean it.
And not just emotional sincerity. That is easy to feel. So many times we have begged God to come into our lives. While holding the door tightly shut. We know that to let the Divine have the space we are occupying is to give up everything we have ever held onto for ourselves. It is the end of us. Kabir said "The touchstone of God cannot fail: The fake never get past it; only he will stand the test who, alive, knows how to die." But when we finally, truly, completely, and unconditionally open the door, in that same moment Pure Being enters. And as we let it fully have all of the spaces we were occupying, and simply rest our head upon the Pure Heart of God, our life increasingly becomes an effortless vessel for Pure Being to fully be in the world. Rumi said "The breath of the flute player, does it belong to the flute?"
I don’t know if this is true, but maybe subconsciously one of the reasons some of us are into awakening is that it kind of seems like you get to somehow conquer or bypass death. Like you get to reach some kind of ultimate eternal life while you’re still alive, and then when you die it’s no big deal. You cheat death. But it really sounds like there’s no way out of it. Everything we think we are, sooner or later it’s all toast. The only question is, do we wait till our lives are over, or do we let go of it all sooner?
Yes, it’s such a sad misperception: So many people tightly hold on to the ownership of their lives until their very last breath, not even giving that to Pure Being.
Mechtild of Magdeburg wrote "Selfless love bears an effortless fruit, working so quietly even the body cannot say how it comes and goes." And Saint Francis de Sales said “God’s Holy Will is the center from which all we do must radiate; all else is mere weariness and excitement." And Saint Paul: "I have learned in whatever state I am there with to be content." And Eckhart: "God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you." Lao-tzu put it this way: "When the ancient masters said, if you want to be given everything, give up everything up, they weren’t using empty phrases. Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself."
How long ago did he write that?
Around twenty-five hundred years ago.
So twenty-five hundred years ago, he was writing about masters that were even ancient to him. This stuff has been around a while.
Amazing, isn’t it? And at least a few centuries before him, the Upanishads stated "Eye cannot see It, tongue cannot utter It, mind cannot grasp It… In this, all ancient masters agree."
I wonder how far back it goes. I mean, fifty thousand years ago, was there some awakened teacher trying to explain all this to a thick-headed Neanderthal? A vastly different situation than the one you find yourself in today. Anyway, I just can’t picture what it would be like to have Essence live through you. I mean, is it like you’re possessed or zombified, and don’t have any control over what you do? Are you even still here? Does some voice tell you what to do all day long? Are you like relaxing all the time and just watching everything happen? How the hell does it work?
It doesn’t work any way that you can imagine. Any idea of it isn’t it. The mind and personality are still around. But they are no longer being mastered by an impure heart. That heart has let itself be tenderly surrendered to Pure Being. To True Innocence. And the mind soon follows its example. Now the mind and heart are willing, joyful servants, with no agendas of their own. The mind still helps decide what to have for breakfast and what to do about this matter or that, but always for its beloved master, never for itself. The early twentieth century poet, W. B. Yeats, wrote:
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.
Such beauty! How lucky we are to live in a time when we can hear the words of so many who have been touched by Living Innocence!
But I still don’t get it. The mind and personality are still here, but somehow we die or we get replaced and Pure Being lives through us. And somehow we still function pretty much like normal.
Yes, what a mystery! Saint Teresa of Avila said "You may think, my daughters, that the soul in this state should be so absorbed that she can occupy herself with nothing. You deceive yourselves. She turns with greater ease and ardor than before to all that which belongs to the service of God, and when these occupations leave her free again, she remains in the enjoyment of that companionship."
But I still don’t understand what it is that really dies.
Let me try it this way. All of the basic structures of your mind and heart and body and soul continue, although they become ever finer, ever cleaner, ever purer, ever more simple and real and good and true. All of the false separations and unnatural boundaries and misidentifications of consciousness gradually dissolve away in a thousand big and small deaths. But all of these are the aftershocks, the settling and refining and opening that occur after the big death.
So what dies in the big death? Remember Jakob Boehme yesterday? “Where is this naked Ground of the Soul void of all self?… the hidden center, where God dwells and not man? There where the soul has slain its own will and wills no more any things as from itself.” What dies is the ownership, the mastership, the insistence of your way. Your importance, your pride, your wants, your belief that you have a value greater than the value of the Boundless Oneness to which you truly belong, that is always waiting to receive you when you are finally willing. In short, what dies is your separate, self-generated, self-directed will. Maybe this is the easiest way to say it: letting go of your grip. And then finding yourself being so tenderly held and carried by the gentle currents of Living Liquid Light.
When a horse and rider spend a lot of time together, they become as one. The horse comes to recognize the smallest gestures, the smallest movements, the most gentle whispers of its master, and responds even before they are completed. The horse is not a mindless zombie. It’s simply content to serve its master as well as it is able. Most of the time, it simply does as its pure heart wishes. It can eat and drink as it wants. Or gallop through a field or frolic with other horses or roll around in the dirt for a good bath. But the moment the master requests anything of the horse, it puts its own shallow desires aside and obliges without hesitation or resentment.
There was a movie I saw years ago– I think it was called "Wild Hearts Are Free" or something like that. It was about a girl who used to ride her horse up a big ramp and then they would jump into a big water tank. The horse would jump in from twenty or thirty feet or more, against every instinct it had, just because she told it to. Now that’s devotion. Or maybe stupidity. I get the two confused.
To be willing to simply let yourself fall into something that may be uncomfortable, painful, or even terrifying, just because you know that is what your beloved master would have you do, that is complete devotion. Unconditional surrender. This Master that we surrender to is our True Nature. Our Essence. The Pure Center of our being. The more we let go of all grasping onto our own desires and simply become joyful servants of our Beloved, the more we become our True Self. Until eventually we’re no longer at all identified with the forms of our body and mind and soul, but are simply Pure Consciousness, flowing through those forms. And then, the boundaries between the servant and the Master dissolve away. The Master pours itself into the servant. The servant dissolves away into the Master. Pure Being flows into form, and form willingly surrenders what it has gained and dissolves away again into Formlessness.
Eckhart wrote "The soul is of equal capacity with God. As God is boundless in giving, so the soul is boundless in receiving. And as God is almighty in His work, so the soul is an abyss of receptivity. And so she is formed anew with God and in God." It is a magnificent dance of yin and yang, a perfect rhythm of rising and falling, giving and receiving, leading and following. The horse and the rider become one Being. A beautiful centaur, an effortless synthesis of Master and servant, living as One Flow.
A centaur is part horse, part human?
Right. Every movement of a centaur is so graceful, so beautiful and so completely effortless. The legs of a centaur never have to wait for instructions from their master to know what to do. They never struggle with which road their master would have them take. There isn’t the slightest separation. This doesn’t mean the legs are the master. They’re just legs. Just structures the master uses to move through the world. And yet, they have let their master merge into them so fully that that they could not possibly go anywhere the master would not have them go. They cannot make a wrong turn. They can still stumble, and they can still be wounded, and one day they will no longer be able to walk. But they have no burden of trying to correctly heed the master’s bidding. That happens every moment, naturally. The master’s bidding and their doing are but one single action. One flow. Lao-tzu said that one living in harmony with the Tao “doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being.”
When we think of a tamed horse, we tend to see it as having surrendered its spirit of freedom. But a centaur is a horse that has completely surrendered to and become one with the Living Spirit of Freedom. Because it has completely surrendered its own will, the untamable will of Pure Love flows through it. Not the sentimental, emotional, conditional, attached, wanting love we are most familiar with. But Pure, Raw, Wild, Untamable, Living, Pulsing, Overflowing, Burning Love. No one can catch this Love. No one can ride it. No one can control it or tame it or own it or use it or trick it or steal it. But when we simply let ourselves be shattered open by the Pure Flow of Boundless Being, then this Untamable Love rides us. This Burning Love melts us. This Pulsing Love lives us. Until the distinctions melt away, and we merge into Infinite Beingness, becoming a centaur that effortlessly radiates the tender presence of Untainted Love into this world, with every step it takes.
But what’s so bad about just being a horse? They’re beautiful and graceful and big-hearted.
There are many good-hearted horses in this world. Trying to help other horses or the world in general. But usually, their lives are their own. They are their own masters. It is considered a great thing among horses to be the master of your life. But when a rare centaur is seen, there is no question, this most humble of servants is the greatest of beasts. Only the centaur perfectly unites the worlds of servant and Master. The world of form and the Formless. The world of doing and Being. It alone allows that which is endlessly creating Life to come fully be among its creations. It alone allows Pure Being to fully Live its Pureness in our world. It alone embodies the perfect mystical marriage of Flow and form.
A centaur is such a gift to this world. Its sturdy legs keep it balanced on Mother Earth, while its arms are free to catch the fruit of Living Nectar that endlessly falls from the Tree of Life. This delicious, quenching, radiant fruit is always falling towards us. But it’s so delicate, so light, that the moment it touches the dense ground it dissolves away into the earth. And the moment it touches our hard, greedy hands it dissolves away into the air. Only the centaur’s delicate and gentle hands, always open to this moment in surrender, can effortlessly catch this precious fruit. So much falls into its hands, it can’t help but share it with the others who have gathered to drink in Pure Nectar.
The centaur– What a precious, Grace-filled being! One that every one of us can become! Yet most of us remain as donkeys, trotting around, trying to find some way to get to the fruit we see and smell in the tree above us, and trying to paw it up from the ground. We’ll try anything to get it, as long as we don’t have to give up being the master of our important donkey lives. After all, we have important donkey things to do, and if we let go of our control, they may not get done. We might even say and do strange things, and then all the other donkeys would think we are foolish. We might even stop being a donkey all together, and what a loss that would be! Both to ourselves and to the donkey community at large.
A donkey is a terrible thing to waste.
So we would rather go hungry as our own master than be the most contented servant eating only the Living Fruit of Pure Essence. But how could there ever be a greater honor, a more humbling privilege, than to have the True Master of Life use our bodies to ride wherever it wishes? What greater purpose could a life ever be given up for than that? What more could a donkey ask?
So basically, anything less is living life half-assed.
Actually, yes. A donkey is a precious creature of God, just as a caterpillar is. But to hold on to being either one for one’s entire life, that is such an unfortunate misunderstanding! It’s such a needless disregard for the natural course of things! A seed must die for a flower to be born! But what a beautiful death! And even though a seed holds no hope of somehow surviving its complete undoing, and even though it has no understanding of that which is completely breaking it apart and replacing it, it doesn’t create the slightest resistance. It says yes. Even to its own destruction. And then, to its complete surprise, it miraculously finds itself becoming a living, breathing, blooming flower, drinking in the Sun.
I guess most of us think this seed is all we are, and we fight like hell to keep it from cracking open.
But deep down, we KNOW the Rightness of letting ourselves break apart. And we know the Pure Goodness that will then come into the world through us. But we also know it doesn’t belong to us. We belong to it. And we are not eager to pay the price.
Do you know the great secret of the butterfly? Do you know the true sacrifice it makes? We see the butterfly and long for its freedom. For it can go wherever it wishes. But this is the secret. It cannot. A butterfly has no control over where it flies at all! This is its sacrifice. It can only go where its wings take it! A butterfly is only a ground worm that trusts enough to rest between the wings of God.
Worms that insist on trying to grow their own wings their own way, at best they only become moths. Destined to eat old clothes. Their only hope of union is for their bodies to be ruthlessly devoured by the Flame of Truth. And then they can no longer live in this world. Only the worm that completely and unconditionally surrenders its own will can be trusted to rest between Divine Wings while still in this world. And once it is given that greatest privilege, it is completely fulfilled. Absolutely quenched. It has no need to eat old clothes. It has no desire to go into the flame. It has no real desire at all.
But its little wormy mind might still have some desires, right?
Right. But it is still content to simply rest between beautiful wings, that are lighter and brighter and more shimmering than the sunshine on which they float. It simply enjoys the ride, while it is being guided wherever the Wings of Truth would have it go.
This process of becoming a centaur, becoming a butterfly, happens over time, and only to those who completely let go of all trying to shape this moment or future ones into their own agenda. It happens only to those who love what is Most Real so much that they are willing to pay any price to allow its free flow through them. There would never be any cost that would be too high, for there is nothing they value more than Truth. It is free to dissolve away anything, even to take from them their very lives if it wishes.
Anything that can be taken from you isn’t pure enough to value more than the Most Real. Anything you can lose isn’t pure enough to be worth giving up Pure Being for. Remember Bawa Muhaiyaddeen: "Other than Alla, the pure Treasure, everything else will be dissolved. Alla is the only treasure which cannot be destroyed." And Simone Weil said "It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind: that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good." And remember Bhai Sahib: "Only the Perfect can satisfy us."
This ever-deepening love for and surrender to the Perfect, the Real, the one True Treasure, gradually happens of itself as we begin to just let ourselves stop resisting this moment, and simply lay our head exactly where we are. Even if the water becomes thick with mud. Even if we feel consumed by waves of pain and darkness. As we let our heart become settled and surrendered in spite of what’s happening on the surface, we begin to sink through it, into the Still and Loving Ocean that nourishes us with the Living Breath of Pure Being. Until that Breath and our breath are the same. Tomorrow then.