My friends, it is just not that hard.
The peace, serenity that we seek, that we know is our birthright, it is the opposite of effort. Stop looking for God, stop trying to learn about spirituality, stop meditating, stop going to church. Just let go; relax into your own being – everything is right here.
This isn’t poetry. I’m not trying to be elusive or provocative when I say that we are the same Being, and that we share that with the trees, the chairs, and the air, and that it is because there is only one of us here. This is just the clearest language pointing to the total plain truth of it. it is not ‘as if’ we are one. It is not that ‘we are connected as individuals’. All individuality is merely a conception; a fiction of thought. You do not need to understand this. I tried. I tried to understand this for decades, and finally I have come to see that my greatest understanding is that I don’t need to understand, because I simply am the thing I’m trying to understand. You don’t need to understand, because you are it already. Just be. Who is the one that believes it needs to understand?
And here is the other thing: don’t try to experience it either. You are already experiencing it. the blaring trumpets of God are sounding right now, or else they never are, believe me. You are right now experiencing the fullness of God. I know this because there is no way that you can not be experiencing the fullness of God, because it is your very Self – this living, aware moment. Just let go of trying to make it different.
That is all that is required. How ironic. Just stop trying to be anything other than you are, and stop trying to make the world anything other than it is. Just for a moment. Why don’t we do that? Because without effort, we cease to be. It is not just like death. It is death. Death of all that you know. But what have we known, besides vanity, reaching, and stress? We do not know love or joy really, we just are them, when all resistance is set aside.
Let go of all that you can let go of. This is not about the intelligence of your mind. This is about the wisdom that is the atomic glue, the ubiquitous awareness that is the stuff that makes the stuff we believe our world to be made of. Nothing here is made of anything but ideas. The universe is not a thing but a thought; a dream in the mind of God. And when we wake up, the universe does not exactly disappear, but it ceases to be a universe. When we wake up as God – meaning simply when we see reality as it really is – we come to know that all that we previously saw as separate or external, is all quite truly and literally our own self.
This is actually your experience right now, if you were to get super real about it. Without your ideas, how do you know this world is not a dream? If this is a dream, would you even know? In a night dream, you knock on the table, stamp your foot, pinch yourself and say, see? But none of it is happening anywhere but inside you.
The same is true here. Dreams are a hint, a thread left by the ourselves, by Ariadne. Sleep is a hint too. We voluntarily die every day – and we love it. Find the part of you that remains in dreamless sleep. Who were you before the conceptual self was born? Was there awareness before the ego? Who or what will be left when the body dies? The same thing that is left in deep sleep. You – in your natural state. Mind – without movement.
Listen: you don’t need training or time to see this. You certainly don’t need anyone else’s teachings or advice, unless it helps you to see that you don’t’ need it. does it still need to be pointed out that religion never had anything, anything at all, to do with God or your own salvation? A church has no more to do with your connection to God than a piece of toast. Anything connects you, because everything already does.
There is no disconnection that we need to heal or fix. I used to believe that. But I was wrong. Everything is already perfectly whole, and nothing at all could change that. Not death, not sin, not any so-called shameful thing. You are already perfectly, innocently, sacredly whole, and only an idea says any different. And so, the only healing that ever needs to happen, if we could even call it healing, is a re-understanding, a shifting of mind. This is what we call forgiveness: to see things as they are, and not as we projected them.
I don’t know what comes next for us. Nothing needs to come next. I have fallen into the abyss of this moment and I have thrown away my future because I just don’t need one anymore. Today is sufficient. Ah yes, Jesus, this moment is always sufficient, isn’t it?
You see, none of this is new. How could any of this be new?
Take a breath. Relax. Let go of yourself. Just be the awareness of this present moment. That isn’t something that we simply do, it is what we are. I’m just trying to get you to practice being your self, instead of trying so hard to be the fictional person that you think you need to be, that you may not even realize you are stuck in.
The average person doesn’t even recognize that most, if not all of what they consider “to be me” is merely their own set of defence mechanisms against the empty open space of reality. Genetics, family attachment patterns, conditioning all shape the person, which is merely a set of patterns that attempt to create security, and subsequent identification and therefore protection of those patterns. In therapy, at least a small percentage of the population starts to see that those patterns are not essential, and can possibly shift. But in my experience, most people go through life never learning that these patterns – what you call you ‘personality’ – are anything less than set in stone, and can be questioned.
Arguably every thought has an ‘I’ in it, and every effort comes from a place of ego and vanity – of simply trying to create security of self. And this is just another way of saying – trying not to die. That is why true humility is rare. True humility recognizes that there is no self to protect or secure a future for.
Can you see that everything I’m saying here is aligned with the so-called ‘great mystic wisdom’ of all the different traditions? From Buddha to Blake to Rilke to Jesus and John Lennon. We are one. It is not just some poetic, pretty concept. It is the hard, physical, actual truth. Let’s please throw out the word spirituality (maybe chuck it in the same bin as ‘religion’). The word spirituality is so inherently divisive. It implies that there is something that is not spiritual, and that is just ridiculous. As if there could be anything going on here, in any way, that was not spiritual? That’s like trying to talk about the ocean without acknowledging the water.
Man, if I had a wooden door to nail these ideas to, I would. But this has already been posted all over town.
I and the Father are one. That statement is not just for one human being to say. It is the truth of all of us. Jesus just saw things clearly – and that was quite the miracle. Isn’t that amazing, that we praise and worship and build societies around a single person who just saw things the way that they are? That is why I love that the Buddha said, ‘when I attained absolute enlightenment, I attained nothing’. Enlightenment is just seeing reality for what it is. Big deal. Enlightenment is just the beginning of the world as it really is.
All of us not only can see reality as it is, but we already do so. We just don’t recognize it. (So, therefore, I do understand, it is like we do not see reality). We think it must look different from this, this, or this.
Don’t ask me if I’m enlightened, or if you are, or if he or she is. That’s like asking if the tree knows it is a tree. Never mind that. if you like the shade of my branches, come sit here.
Friends, lay down your tools. Sit back into this quiet, empty moment that holds everything intimately close. What you are is love, peace, beauty and truth. It is what you are underneath it all.
It is pure relief.
