divine birdsong

People talk to me a lot about God. I enjoy it immensely. It's much like these writings. An attempt to use words for describing what can't be described in words. The word God is a primary pointer to the absolute openness beyond our minds and within our hearts.

There are many words for this openness. Openness is one of them. So is Spirit, Truth, Reality, the Unknown, the Great Mystery, the Source, the Eternal, the Present, the Eternal Present, the One. These are all names for God. Synonyms for God. Pointers.

Like the word God, they all point beyond the realm of words. The response they want from us is a special form of hearing that carries us into the sacred silence within ourselves that words can never touch. Words can point there, but never substitute for it.

That's the point of the words. The point of the words is to point. If we use them that way, we let go of them promptly when the pointing pans out. As soon as it reconnects us to the divine element within us, the words have done their job to completion. Period.

When people talk to me about God, I know they are seeking to reconnect with a deeper truth about life. I know they are feeling disconnected from that truth and the words they use for it are not as important to them as resuming the experience of it.

I never fixate on what words a person uses. To me every word we have is a beautiful pointer to the same sacredness within us, where words are not the prize. Language is birdsong. It's marvelous to hear it. Every twitter is divine, and points beyond itself.

dropping in

My friend shared an expression with me the other day. He called it dropping in. The idea of it is that you drop back into the present whenever you happen to notice that life is sweeping you out of it again. Life will sweep you out of the present all the time.

On one hand, that's not true. Life can never sweep you out of the present for real, because the present is all there is. But staying in touch with the present is another story. Overall we tend to drop out of the present. That's why dropping in restores us.

It's something you can do any time. You simply notice, repeatedly, that you aren't as present to your life as you'd like to be. Your thoughts are elsewhere. You're thinking about the past and the future a great deal and the present is fading from awareness.

That's the time to drop in again. Aha! I'm not in touch with the present experience of my life anymore. You might say something like that, and drop back in. It's a form of mindfulness and meditation. It's the opposite of turning into your thought process.

When you do it, when you drop in and become present again, you steal some thunder from the thought process. You tell it who's boss. For that moment of return to the present anyway. It's like saying to your mind that life is outside it and you want life.

You should try it. The next time you notice yourself thinking a lot, drop in again. Let yourself be present instead. Notice the present experience of your life, the life that is going on outside your mind, the life we all share outside all our minds. Drop in.

letting go

Life is a training ground for how to let go. You may think it's about something else, but after you play those cards out, the thing you always return to is the need to let go, usually of whatever you were trying to get a hold of in the first place.

Let's say you get it. Enjoy it, but try not to get attached. The letting go is only painful if you develop the wrong kind of attachment to what you have. The wrong kind is defined by how unwilling you are to let go when the time comes.

The time always comes for letting go. That's why life is a training ground for it. No other outcome is possible for anything you have because life ends in death, which is itself a very large form of letting go, if you haven't done so already.

Some people have. More people will. They let go of their lives before their bodies force them to by expiring. It's called spiritual death. One simply dies to oneself. That which one can get for one's own sake altogether loses its luster and attraction.

Then you live in a constant state of letting go. You are the equivalent of exhalation. There is not even enough of you left to lament this transformation, and if there is, you simply let go of that sense of yourself also, because you know it isn't real.

The only people who contact reality at its deepest level are the ones who become that reality by letting go of everything else, including themselves. Then they can have anything at all and they don't stick to it. It doesn't stick to them. There's no having.

That reality is where suffering finally ends and lasting happiness and fulfillment become the natural by-product of simply Being. Alignment with that reality is the chief spiritual task of all human life, and it all gets there sooner or later, whether you like it or not.

being enlightened

The two words in the title go very well together. In some ways, they are the entirety of the teaching about the ultimate truth. We might imagine the space between them, that single press of the space bar, as an equals sign. But remember the blank space too.

The blank space is what the first word is all about. The word Being is all about experiencing ourselves as a blank space, permitting the emptiness aspect of us to have our attention and remain blank for a while, even as things come and go within it. That's Being.

The word Enlightened is what we might call a big word. Big words are wonderful, but we have to sustain our understanding that big words are also only words. What makes a word big is how much potential it contains for evoking the wordless truth of Being.

The point of the big words, and really the point of all words, is to evoke the wordless truth of Being. The point is not to get attached to the words themselves, but to use them as stepping stones into the wordless source from which they arise. Go there.

Stay there. Spend some time there. Experience for yourself how mysterious life is, and how wonderful, when we extend our capacity to remain in the wordless source from which all life arises, and into which all life always returns. We are that source.

That source does not arise or return. That source simply and always is. Everything happens within in, on account of it. I do. You do. The trees do. The wind does. The entire content of our inner life does. Everything comes and goes owing to that source.

It can be very hard to believe, after or amid a lifetime of seeking, that the thing you are looking for is not actually a thing in any way, but the invisible thing-less-ness that gives rise to all the rest. The first taste of it is often surprising and strange.

What makes it strange is how different it is to our regular mode of operation. We tend to go after the truth as something you can really go after and get. Then we discover our ability to be in contact with the truth is about not going after and not getting.

The better we are at not seeking, the more truth we make contact with. The better we are not needing to get anything, the more truth makes contact with us. It's a two- way street, and it merges into nothingness. When we favor nothingness, we shine.

We can all favor nothingness, although our minds become uppity about doing so. We can all see our minds assail us with that reaction and remain in the nothingness anyway, telling ourselves it's only the mind, arising and subsiding in the source of Being.

If we want to be enlightened, that's the way. Devotion to the source of Being rather than anything within in it is the way. Abiding in the source of Being is enlightenment. Everything else is distraction from enlightenment, including our minds.

It's because a major paradigm shift is required that being enlightened is so difficult for many people. They don't have a knack for existing in the new way. They don't have a knack for simply existing. It isn't anyone's fault. It's the way it is.

It's also less of a problem than it seems when it's difficult. Because the fact is a knack for simply existing is everyone's birthright. It's the most natural thing in the world. Far more natural than how we proceed when we sacrifice existing to existing as something.

Existing as something, as anything, is a massive energy drain. It has to be. When the source of Being separates from itself and insists on emphasizing the separation more than the underlying unity, it has to use energy to persist in that orientation over time.

The main reason for that price tag is that the source of Being cannot really separate from itself at all, since everything traces back to it. If everything is really the source underneath, how can the source become other than itself? It can only pretend to.

Pretending to be other than the source of Being is what humans do. They disregard the most important thing: not to. They consider themselves human beings more than they regard themselves as expressions of the source. It happens in a blink.

Being enlightened is about transforming that habit. We admit we operate from that habit. We don't beat ourselves up about it because that just perpetuates the habit. Instead we admit it and rearrange our priorities. We re-emphasize simply Being.

We may need to do it millions of times. We may need to train ourselves to reorient our sense of who we are from endless mental grasping at things to silent residence in simply existing. But we can do it right now. We always do it right now. That's how.

When our emphasis is on simply existing, for that moment we are fully enlightened. Any one of us. If our emphasis remains there, on simply existing, we remain fully enlightened. It's that easy and that straightforward. It's not shamanic art. It's attention span and values.

Why not try it right now? Would you like to be enlightened. Does being enlightened sound worthy of your interest and time? Simply take off the big word enlightened and step through the smaller word being into the wordless space of existing as you are right now.

While you are doing that, and whenever you do that, you are enlightened. If you do that amid your activities in life, you are deeply enlightened. You are enlightened right now. But you have to value it to sustain it. Watch what takes it away until you don't let it anymore. See those things as the same source as you.

dwelling in nothingness

Ironically, the best way to describe nothingness might be to leave this page blank, but ask those who see it to dwell in its blankness. The pure white space of the page, were it blank, would be an excellent representation of nothingness. Staring at it would be dwelling in it.

This possibility is not altogether different from how zen meditation proceeds. In Zen, unlike many other forms of meditation, we sit in a long hall with our backs to each other, and each of us keeps our eyes open, staring at a bare white wall. Our eyes dwell in nothingness.

Meditations usually last 40 minutes or more. For 40 minutes or more we sit with our eyes dwelling in nothingness, staring at the bare white wall. But not even staring. We loosen the focus of our eyes and let the nothingness remain nothingness, and dwell there.

The reason we value that exercise, and the reason I describe it on this page, is that most of our lives are spent doing the opposite. For the vast majority of our waking lives we tend to fix our eyes on the objects in awareness and dwell in a world defined by them.

A world defined by objects is not a world of nothingness. It's a world of something-ness. All the somethings in that world become the reality of that world. There's nothing wrong with noticing the somethings. Somethings are beautiful. Unless they take over.

When we live in a world dominated by something-based awareness, we give all the somethings an enormous amount of allegiance. We believe in them deeply. We shape our lives in response to them, often in reaction to them. We lose the nothingness part.

That's one reason zen meditation emphasizes nothingness, and asks us to dwell there. It works as a corrective measure against fixation on the objects of awareness. It offers the opportunity to return our attention, over and over, to the space between objects.

Over time we learn to extend our ability to dwell in that space. Objects come and go. Some of them distract us from the nothingness for long periods. Others for short periods. But overall the distracting nature of the object side of awareness diminishes.

We might wonder why this outcome is favorable. We are generally so accustomed to letting the object side of awareness have our attention that we operate from there in regard to the other options, and disparage them as pointless, escapist, or nihilistic.

That's how an awareness trained in objects might dismiss dwelling in nothingness instead. It might morph the word object into an objection. There's an interesting relationship between those words. Their similarity is a revelation about awareness.

Which mode of awareness are we operating in now? Are we objecting? Are we dwelling in an emphasis on the objects of awareness? Are objects such as thoughts and feelings snaring us enough to turn us into their owner? Yes, those are objects too.

The word object in this inquiry has a wider scope now. It refers not only to what you see and what comes in through all your other worldly senses, but also to every thought in your head, every feeling in your psychology, every notion, opinion, belief, objection.

We can let ourselves regard those things, and all things, as objects, and seriously ask ourselves how often we hand ourselves over to them as the essence of who we are, as opposed to being something else that isn't an object at all, as opposed to just being.

That's the big difference between the two modes of awareness. The awareness that puts its emphasis on objects is always becoming someone over them, such as a person, an identity, a solid sense of self. Dwelling in nothingness remains free of that.

It's the freedom side of dwelling in nothingness that gives it value. The reason we are drawn to it, even if habits of knocking it occasionally possess us, is that we yearn for the freedom that comes from dwelling in nothingness. Spiritually, we call it liberation.

Liberation from what? From all the inevitable heartache and unhappiness that arise when we persist in deriving identity among all the somethings in awareness. None of them will hold that tendency well. None will hold it very long. No something can.

The root something is the sense of self we call "I". We are constantly performing upkeep on that little letter if we associate it with each something, with any of the objects of awareness. If we let a thought or feeling or anything amount to "I", it eventually harms us.

Dwelling in nothingness becomes more compelling at that point. The intelligence of it becomes clearer with each disappointment in the world of emphasizing objects. None of them gives us what we want in terms of selfhood, and we let them go easier.

No one can force us to do that. No one wants to. An inquiry like this one is not a coercion, but rather an invitation to reflect on your experiences and hopefully take solace at being recognized for all the times you approach disappointment and feel disoriented by it.

The truth is we are not all the things that pass through awareness. We are the awareness itself, and we purify it greatly by dwelling in nothingness. The more consistently and often we dwell in nothingness regarding identity, the more freedom we move into.

Are we interested in freedom? The degree to which we are will determine to what degree our emphasis shifts from the world of object-based awareness to dwelling in nothingness. The shift occurs naturally. It is the unexpected reward for a sensitive life.

To encourage it, simply dwell in nothingness now, and whenever you can, especially in regard to all the objects, inner and outer, that claim temporary identification from you. Dwell in the nothingness instead. You can dwell there indefinitely. Try it. Try it again.

The more you do, the more freedom you will discover. Freedom is actually your nature. The nothingness is actually the real you, where the little letter "I" most belongs. When you direct it there repeatedly, you will find you never needed it much anyway, and don't.

Dwell in nothingness and ask yourself where that little letter really is. Is there really an "I" in the ways you used to imagine it? Conduct this inquiry for yourself. Where is the "I" you want so badly? Can you find any real evidence of it? Can you admit it's just a mental habit?

When we dwell in nothingness that deeply, we move into our first mature relationship with all the objects of awareness. Sensory experience, feelings, thoughts, all of these inner motions are more beautiful without investing self in them. They become jewels.

Everything we take to be ourselves is purely ornamental. We are not all those things, although we attempt to find ourselves in them with amazing determination. Their startling diversity is alluring, but you begin to enjoy it without becoming someone over any of it.

Now erase this page from your mind. Wipe it utterly clean. Sit before its blankness with your back to all the other readers in the room and loosen the sharp focus of your eyes and your mind. Let all objects go and be free in this life, dwelling in nothingness.

death and the deathless

We're all going to die. I'm going to die. You're going to die. Everyone you know is going to die. It's a natural process. Death is a natural process. It doesn't favor or discriminate. It follows the inescapable logic of life. That which is born is on its way to death. All of it.

You might consider this news obvious. You might dismiss this news for being obvious in the extreme. You might say well of course to it. Yes, we are all going to die. You might say big deal. You might say you already know. It's not a brilliant insight, right?

But the key word in that response is dismissal. That which is living does not want to accept it will die so it says it already knows. It says the news is not important. It comes up with thousands of reasons why reflecting on it is not worth particular attention, and forgets.

Forgetting death is the only way to proceed with a life that asserts values incongruous to death. Most lives assert values incongruous to death. Most humans lives do. That's why we tend to dismiss death as irrelevant. So we don't have to change our guiding values.

But things die anyway. They die at the end of a human life or while it is proceeding. We've all been there or will. We are trying to hold something lifeless together against impossible odds and one day the odds simply play out and the lifeless thing falls to pieces.

We go into depression about it. We grieve. A terrible sense of loss and uncertainty sets it. The world turns over. We lose something and we malinger in the loss. We make an identity out of losing it. We hold onto what is lost by lamenting it long after it dies.

It's a wonderful thing when we go through this cycle enough times to get used to it, and we will. There's no way around it. So long as we derive our sense of who we are from something that is born, that something is going to die, and we'll die with it. All of it.

But repeated cycles teach us something. They show us the root of the problem. They make us more willing to see the great value in recognizing the death in all things. When we no longer dismiss that obvious quality, we come closer to finding the deathless.

The deathless is that which is never born and therefore never dies. It can't be put into words in any way that makes it obvious. It can't be. Words are born and they die. They come from the mind, which is also born and also dies. The deathless is not there.

The deathless is prior to mind. It is the part of you that mind takes place in. It is the part of you that everything takes place in once you get the hang of it, and live outside your tendency to overlook and dismiss it. That tendency was born and it will die too.

When it does, you begin valuing something more obvious than the death insight was. You move your focus to the obvious thing about yourself that never changes while everything else always does. It becomes a matter of life and death, and you favor life, not death.

That which was never born and never dies is your conscious awareness, your sense of simply being. That part never changes. It is always the same. It is not even individual, but exists on its own in all things, which come and go within it, including you.

I'm not swindling you here. I'm not performing sleight of hand. I'm not playing games with words, but words are games by their nature. What I'm telling you is what you already know if you look into it deeply. You are that which does not change.

Of course, you have to let go of illusions to the contrary to believe me. You want to let go of them, because you want to find what you are. But you also want to hold onto them, because you think they are important. You were trained to. They aren't.

Your name, your beliefs, your opinions, the content of your mind, the sum total of all your life experiences, the endless parade of sensory novelties, all change. The only thing that doesn't is the part in which they occur. The awareness. That's you.

The rest is death. The rest is born and therefore dies. But none of it is you. Like everyone else you may have a tendency to identify yourself with those things, but sufficient attempts at that approach reveal how unsustainable and exhausting it is.

Let yourself rest. Let yourself rest in the truth of your being. Let yourself mean awareness of awareness when you use the word "I". You don't need to chase all the objects in awareness to be yourself. To be yourself, you have to be aware of yourself as awareness.

this is it

The simplest thing I can do right now is remind everyone this is it. This is it. This is your life. This is all life. This moment occurring right now is it. And always will be. No matter how we convince ourselves otherwise. This moment is it. It's nowhere else.

Take some time to enjoy it with me. Be here with it. Be here with this moment, because this moment is it. This moment is your life. This moment is all life. This moment occurring right now is it. And always will be. This moment outside customary notions of time.

Can you feel that about it? Can you touch this moment's timelessness? Can you settle into this moment so willingly that you completely let go of what lies ahead for a while? Be in this moment with me. This moment is your life. This moment is all life. This is it.

All life happens here in this moment. Want life? This is it. It's nowhere else. Life is here. In this moment. This is it. This is your life and all life. Life is here. Life is now. This moment that is occurring right now is life. And always will be. Nowhere else.

Slow down to the speed of these words. Slow down whenever this moment escapes you. This moment is always here, waiting for you. Life is always here. It isn't anywhere else. The rest is in your head. But your head is here too. Be here with your head.

Your thoughts seldom stay here. You don't have to follow them. You don't have to go elsewhere. Elsewhere is a fantasy. You don't have to go. You can stay in this moment. This moment is it. It doesn't need especial craftiness. Do the next simple thing.

the information age

The reason we're having an information age is to move beyond information. It may sound paradoxical, but that's the bottom line. Our spiritual evolution currently requires of us that we move beyond our general habit of deriving identity through information.

What does it mean to derive identity through information? It means believing the content of our thoughts is somehow relevant to the core of who or what we are. It's a common belief. The world we live in today is the faithful expression of doggedly persisting in it.

Wars, greed, over-consumption, global climate crisis, the decimation of other species. All these things arise from deriving identity from the content of thinking. From mind-based identity. If we operate from there, the only possible result is the proliferation of problems.

Why is that? Because mind-based identity is not essentially what we are. Because the essence of what we are is not to be found in the mind, and can't be. The mind cannot apprehend it, and tends to dismiss it for that very reason. Don't identify with that tendency.

In fact, don't identify with any of your thoughts. Distrust them all if they want you to identify with them, or form an identity as a result of them. They are only information. They are not the essence of who you are. No information is or can be. Not your essence.

The information age is our attempt to conjure this insight collectively because our survival is at stake if we don't. Without collective comprehension that the essence of ourselves, our nature, is beyond mind and information, extinction is the only outcome for us.

So we inundate ourselves with information. We make an age of it. We create an Information Age. And once we have, once we take our subservience to information to its furthest limit, we begin to rise above information by seeing it's not primary to identity.

This is a normal sequence of events in the process of consciousness expansion. That which is operating unconsciously (in this case information-based identity) directs something to happen (the Information Age) and thereby unexpectedly bursts its own bubble.

That's how consciousness expands. It thinks it's going one way and it is, but by going there completely, the motivation for going there reveals its limitations and loses its influence. The going there stops. It transforms into operating from somewhere else entirely.

With the Information Age we dive headlong into the collection and dissemination of content. We spread it everywhere. We compile it like mad. We think we are primarily interested in the information itself, but discover that why we would be is precisely the problem.

We are malingering in the paradigm of information-based identity. Humans have been stuck there a very long time. But the price of it is high enough now, after industrialization and the spread of technology, that we have to shift paradigms, or perish to keep it.

The purpose of the Information Age is to reveal and eradicate the prevailing inner obstacle to survival for our species. Our next evolutionary leap is spiritual, and involves the transcendence of mind-based informational identity for the sake of all life.

what is happiness

Believe it or not, even though the thing we want most is happiness, and even though almost all, if not all, our activity in life is about increasing our share of it, the strange fact is we know very little about it. We seldom reflect on it deeply. We seldom have it.

There are many things in life that purport to be happiness, but most of them are something else. We can easily experience ego gratification, pleasure, novelty, joy. But even that last one is not the same as being deeply and lastingly happy, if you want that.

Do you want that? Are you interested in being deeply and lastingly happy? The inquiry into what happiness is begins with that question. It's almost disconcerting how infrequently we ask it point blank of ourselves. Instead we tend to proceed blindly.

Our tendency, it seems to me, is to operate again and again from a conditioned sense of how to reach happiness. A conditioned sense. Meaning: there are ideas about happiness woven into the structure of the world around us and we align with them as our own.

It's perfectly natural to do that. It's a normal wish that maybe we can make it to happiness by following whatever our current inkling happens to be, and to leave it an inkling. We want the inkling to pan out with huge dividends, but in today's world it can't.

I know some of this information sounds harsh. I know a few of these paragraphs may raise some resistance in you that no way, bud, no conditioning here, or that the world doesn't work the way I'm describing, but don't let those objections sour you.

Stick around for a few examples of conditioned approaches to happiness. There are some very basic ones that many people are already seeing through as snake oil. For instance, excessive material wealth, fame, power, the surgical fountain of youth.

All these things will get you something: wealthy, famous, powerful, artificially young. But none of them will bring you deep and lasting happiness. In fact, most of them will disappoint you for not bringing it and then an avalanche of upkeep eats you alive.

If you think there's any real happiness in those starter examples, that's conditioning at work. In you. The world you live in is pitching those ideas at you as paths to real happiness, and you are buying into them deeply as your own. If you believe them.

You don't have to believe them. You won't be able to believe them. Not forever. They don't deliver what they promise to. They don't deliver real happiness. Because they don't, we all find them out as frauds eventually. By getting them, we sicken of them.

Trial and error is a big part of wisdom. We have to chase to stop chasing. We have to learn for ourselves, generally by getting what we thought we wanted, that we don't really want it that much if it doesn't amount to the real happiness we expected from it.

Not everyone needs to go through this process of discovery, but most people do. I did. I do. I do it over and over. I admit that behavior because I want it to lessen. I want to be lastingly happy, not lastingly snapping at the carrot before my nose. Whoa there!

That image of a horse chasing a carrot unearths the next examples of conditioning. The next examples are more subtle than the first batch. The nature of unmasking conditioning is that the layers become more and more subtle and mysterious as you go.

At the next layer in, for those of us interested in genuine happiness, the discussion changes its focus from specific examples to their shared methodology. What matters at this point is not what we're after, but the disposition of being after something at all.

It pays off to remind ourselves at this point, what are we after? We're after genuine happiness. How does genuine happiness work? Is it something you can arrive at by striving after it or is that disposition another level of conditioning, and equally untrue?

The world around us is showing an endless parade of specific things that we're supposed to confuse with happiness and pursue. But underneath the parade, and the reason it continues, is a notion we don't question enough that happiness involves pursuit.

Does it? Is pursuit really the path to happiness? Asking this question of ourselves is absolutely essential if we really mean it that we want to be genuinely happy. We have to be willing to think about how happiness works or we'll misunderstand it and miss it.

It's only conditioning that posits happiness as a pursuable. That's how conditioning perpetuates itself. That's how conditioning stays alive. By passing off the idea to inadvertent believers that in order to be happy there's something you have to do or become.

Amazingly, even those among us who know better tend nevertheless to give up our happiness in the driven pursuit of something. For better or worse, we lapse into letting the thing we are pursuing take the reins over us and coerce us into pursuit mode.

It's a slippery slope. You may think you know better, but once the pursuing begins, it's very easy, owing especially to deep and ubiquitous reinforcement from social conditioning, to mix up your happiness with the thing you are striving to accomplish.

But your happiness isn't there. That's not where you'll find it. Our happiness in this life is not bound up in what we can make happen and what more we can become. Our happiness in this life has nothing to do with emphasizing circumstances in any way.

On the contrary, the emphasis on circumstance is the surest way to perpetuate unhappiness in this life. It may sound counter-intuitive, but that's only from mixing up intuition with a history of conditioning. Be careful you don't call conditioning intuition.

When you don't call it intuition, you see for yourself that nothing you've ever done from your conditioning in today's world has amounted to the happiness you wish for, which is precisely why you're still doing those things, and always will until you expire.

You may even see, and I certainly hope you do, that your expiration, and by expiring I mean relenting in the happiness pursuit mode, is a sign of a true new intelligence dawning within you, that giving up the pursuit mode is your birth into real life.

The outcome of that birth is a new understanding of happiness. I call it a first understanding of happiness because all previous notions were misleading and wrong. But the understanding that comes after expiring from pursuit mode is the real thing.

At that point we are ready to see how happiness works. We're ready to understand it is not a pursuit, but a presence, that brings it about. We have to be present to be happy, and the more consistently present we are, the more happiness too.

In retrospect pursuit mode becomes funny because we see it could never have worked. We see that pursuing fosters a psychological orientation toward the future that is exactly the opposite of abiding deeply in the present, our new angle on happiness.

These insights are how we overcome the continuing momentum of former conditioning. They surface spontaneously to remind us we can never go back. We can never return to the old way of framing happiness. Each attempt to fails more quickly.

So here we are in the present, the only place where happiness is. Here we are in the present with a new understanding that happiness exists only here, as do we. Here we are with the sole requirement of not pursuing, not if we want to be lastingly happy.

Do you want to be lastingly happy? Join me here in the present experience of your life. Let it serve as your home. Never abandon it for anything. And every time you do, let yourself stop once you realize, over and over, that life carried you into pursuit mode.

We all have the grace and intelligence to reflect on our lives. We all have the right to and the sacred responsibility to. Think long and hard if you need to about the things you are chasing and why. If the reason is happiness, ask yourself has it worked.

experiencing being

All spiritual teachings are aiming at one basic truth. It's really the only basic truth. That's why we call it a basic truth. Because it's the only one. Everything else is another way of saying it. The way I am going to say it now is another way of saying it. Another way of saying it is the only way it can be said because the basic truth is beyond words. It's before them actually.

The basic truth is you are nothing other than Being. I use a capital "B" in this instance because I want to communicate weight for a moment. By Being I mean the experience of existing. You are having it right now. Or rather, the experience of it is there for you to have right now, and always, but you may not be tuned into it very much. Your attention may be elsewhere.

That's how we tend to live our lives. We tend to take the experience of Being for granted while we go about other business, such as pursuing our goals, meeting the requirements of our bodies, and generally thinking our lives away. There's nothing wrong with those things in the abstract, I suppose, but on the whole they tend to eclipse our sense of experiencing Being.

That's a high price to pay for them. Worthwhile spiritual teaching reminds us that price is too high. It reminds us what we already know, but can't remember very easily, not yet anyway: that we are not primarily the busy person in pursuit of goals and fulfillment, but rather something personless that is prior to that perspective, animating and supporting it. We are its Being.

Can you forget all the words for a moment and tune into the experience of it with me? That's what counts. That's why you're reading this passage in the first place, whether you know it or not. That's why you're here, and on Earth. Even if you got here by serendipity instead of conscious intention, the fact is you got here for exactly this moment when the teaching changes from words into.....

Did you let it? Did you recline into the void at the end of the last paragraph, a place outside your mind and the chatter of words, a silent blank space? That's the experience of Being. Did you have it? Go ahead and let yourself. If you are, great. Keep at it. Never stop. If you're not, not a problem. Start from now. Whenever you lose the experience of Being or realize you don't have it, give up your reluctance and return to it now. It is always open for business.

Here's one way in: letting go. Try it now. Don't worry about any of your regular concerns. Temporarily suspend the demands of your mind and move its noise to the background. Now take a deep breath and release it. The outgoing breath carries away everything you no longer need. You no longer need any of it. It is sufficient just to be here, breathing. It is deeply satisfying. Enjoy it.

Keep at it for a while. Keep doing it as you go about other things. Don't trade it for other things. Try not to take it for granted to the point of forgetting its primary importance. Nothing else matters without it. Notice how unhappy you get when you let other things matter more than it does. Notice how lost and disconnected you feel, how fragmented and unhappy. See whenever you've become too solid and lost your vital sense of experiencing Being.

I'm not making these things up. Connect the dots for yourself. The picture always comes out the same, and here's how it looks. All your problems and unhappiness, and all the suffering that ever was, is, or shall be, in your life and everyone else's, is the result of one thing. There's only one basic truth. Don't overlook, neglect, or murder the experience of Being, not if you want to be happy and fulfilled. You won't find those things apart from it. You can't.

about worrying

Let's talk about worrying. Let's talk about its pros and its cons. Frankly, I can't think of any pros, but that's because I'm very aware of the cons. The point of this inquiry is to make you aware of the cons also. Then you can reassess the pros, and truly benefit from them.

The big down side of worrying is that while you're doing it you have to be worried. Your garden variety worrier is very good at dismissing this fact as a truism. That kind of dismissal is the same as saying the point is so true that it no longer bears any significance. Huh?

I'd like to suggest it does bear significance. If you have a tendency to worry, or you worry much at all, you are losing that many hours of your life to that state of being. Imagine you could see your entire life as a pie chart and worry figures in as a big, greedy slice.

The other slices are fun, love, work, play, and whatever else you are up to in this brief affair we call living. But there's the worry slice bullying all the others to the side. Each one of them shrinks as the worry slice grows. That's how the pie chart and your life works.

The pie chart metaphor is handy because it shows us where our values are. We might pay a lot of lip service to our preferred values, and wish to embody them, but our actual values, the ones we devoted real time to over the years, are the pie's biggest slices.

That's hard news. That's tough love. We have to look at our actions and see they are the only actual expression of our values. We have to admit that all the rest is talk. Talk-ity talk. Blah blah blah. Yap yap yap. I love you. I didn't mean to. Et cetera.

Worrying is not only talk. Worrying is primarily action. When you worry, you have to spend your time at it. You devote your time to it. You invest in it. You bake up that pie of your life and make worrying a bigger and bigger slice with each episode.

The psychological meaning of these reminders is that the more you worry, the more time of your life you give over to states of stress and darkness. You actually dwell in unhappiness in order to worry. Does that sound like a fair trade to you?

When life asks you if you'd like to be happy or worry, which one do you choose? It's that simple. You can tell yourself you are worrying in order to be happy, but the plain fact is you are worrying and therefore you are not happy. Period.

It's a question of living in the present or the future. Which one is more real? If you think the future is more real, you'll squander your happiness in the present for it. If you think the present is more real, you won't. Truism: the present is more real.

The present is the only thing that's ever real. It's always been the present and always will. Your whole life happens in the present and nowhere else. It's the same for all life. That's what makes it a truism. But significant as hell for being happy.

Let's face it. All the things we are trying to control by worrying about the future are really peanuts compared to the things we can't control. We want to be safe, comfortable, healthy, warm, what have you, and death comes for us regardless.

Be those things now. They're available to you if you stop worrying about them. And they won't be in the future if you don't stop worrying about them. When you get there, when the future comes, any unresolved habit of worrying will continue.

Can't you see it? People spend their whole lives worried about something, believing this and that something needs to occur, and the habit of living that way in the present, always fixated on the future, dominates that future when it finally arrives.

We get where we thought we were trying to and we don't enjoy it at all. Why? Because the main relationship we developed toward the present experience of living is to disregard the present experience of living out of concern for the future.

How can that relationship to the present possibly change overnight when we get where we thought we were going? It can't. It won't. You're lying to yourself if you disagree. Don't put an emphasis on future circumstances. Emphasize the gift of now.

When you emphasize the gift of now, you discover an unexpected secret about it: it likes to take care of you. If you really dwell there, in the present experience of your life, although now and again you will face hard things, life will also provide for you.

That's the unexpected secret. That's what worry can't see. Life will take care of you, in many cases better than you can by worrying, if only you trust it to. Plus, you get the brilliant perk from that approach that trust is your regular state of being.

I dare say, that regular state of being actually creates the trustworthy outcome . I dare say, the worried state of being creates the worrisome outcome. It's all, in great measure, self-fulfilling prophecy. That sounds like mysticism, which isn't a dirty word.

The mystical truth is the plain truth. The plainest truth of all is the most mystical truth. The truism is a great mystical revelation. Learn to heed it. If you worry, you're worried, and you'll prove that you should have been. You prove what you want to.

If you want to prove you can trust, you will. You can. Set out to prove it and it will come true simply from your devotion to it. Then all the things you used to worry about will become needless on the one hand and sound comic planning on the other.

inclusiveness

These days the word inclusiveness is a buzz word for proper outward behavior. We like to set up discrete environments safe enough in their shared agenda that everyone involved can practice inclusiveness toward everyone else. There's nothing wrong with this arrangement. It's actually a fine model for how the world might some day work.

The thing is, the world will never work that way unless we practice inclusiveness inwardly first. It doesn't matter how much you honor outer inclusiveness, and it doesn't matter how much you accept your neighbor, if you're relying on an outward rule as your moral compass. That's only the starting point. You have to internalize the rule for yourself. It has to go inward.

That's how rules become freedom and transcendence of the need for rules. That's how the outward behavior of inclusiveness becomes true inclusiveness without any buzz around the word itself, without any self-congratulating hype that inclusiveness is going on. Are we aiming for the real thing here or are we indulging our vanity?

Let's start with the latter possibility for the sake of demonstrating the former, shall we? Let's say we are, for better or worse, on one or two occasions, indulging ourselves, that we overly like it how inclusive we are. Let's say we're vain. Good gravy! Can it really be true? Are we able to admit that sometimes our openness is narcissistic?

It may not be that way on every occasion. Of course it isn't. And it may not be that way, in total, when narcissism creeps into the mix at all. But let's go ahead and admit that narcissism creeps in now and then, to some small degree, on some rare occasion, and at those times we take a secret hint of pride in our lovely reflection as agents of morally-savory inclusiveness.

If you can do that, if you can admit it, especially as the twinge of narcissism is occurring, but also any time afterwards, even now, then you are no longer practicing outward rule-bound inclusiveness, but real inclusiveness, the internalized kind. You are going from a follower of rules to a free spirit and a lover of wisdom. You are practicing what you preach. You are walking the talk.

For real inclusiveness to occur you have to begin with yourself. You have to turn the spiritual eye inward and acceptingly observe everything that eye sees. The more you let it see, the wider you open it, the more inclusive you are. Period. So include everything. Look right and left, near and far. Leave no inner stone unturned.

On this page I have noted narcissistic lapses as an example of something you might dislike seeing when you look inward, but narcissistic lapses are only the tip of the iceberg. You have to keep that spiritual eye open and aware as the entire parade of unwanted and disowned inner material goes by. That is, if you aspire to be inclusive. Do you? You do, right?

What might that inner eye see? Frankly, it will need to see everything. There won't be anything it doesn't see if you really keep it open. How could there be? Your humanity derives from the same bedrock as everyone's, and everything anyone can think or feel, ever, the good and the bad, the bad and the bad, the bad and the worst, it's all your inheritance too. In full. Every bit of it. Every single bit. No exceptions. Inclusiveness. Yes!

Of course, there are things you won't like to see. There are things you will try to see without entitlement to them. There are things you will repeatedly run away from. There are things you will blame on other people. However you respond becomes the next call to true inclusiveness. Did you blame someone for something? Now include that sometimes you blame.

That's how true inclusiveness works. If, in the example of blaming others, you practice true inclusiveness, seeing and accepting about yourself that you're that human, that you lapse into the blame game in spite of yourself, at least now and then, like everyone else, the most wonderful thing happens: you don't lapse that way as often. Your inclusiveness spontaneously externalizes.

Afterwards someone might do something truly blameworthy to you and you won't feel as much resentment or affront on account of it. You may not feel any. Maybe never again. Why? Because you own your own capacity and tendency to behave the same way as the blamer. You have included that tendency, first internally, and now somewhat effortlessly on the outside as well. That part takes care of itself, and graces you. You don't need a rule for it.

But only if you commit yourself to the inner work of true inclusiveness, only if you turn the spiritual eye inward whenever you need to, as often as you can, and try your best not to blanch at the view. I tell you from direct experience your response to hard material inside you will become the opposite of blanching. It will turn into satisfaction and you won't hate it so much that your inner world presents regular, sometimes repeated inconveniences in the name of true inclusiveness. You'll grow to like those inconveniences as growth moments. You'll participate in them more and more promptly until you never put them off, not to elude them anyway.

This transformation won't occur overnight, but it will occur—overnight. You won't change right away, but you will change—right away. On the outside you might continue to practice inclusiveness as you have been, or as you wanted to all along, but it won't be a practice anymore. You won't be practicing in the sense of getting ready for the real thing. You'll be the real thing. Your inclusiveness will be second nature. As long as you turn inward with it. If you do, it will grow on the outside without the need for buzzing about it, fanfare, particular effort, or rules.

the world mirror

Today I'm going to give you an opportunity. It's an opportunity that never stops giving. It's the most generous spiritual teaching in the world. It is the world. The world is the teaching. Not the world as an external situation, but the world as a mirror. Of you.

Whenever you notice something in the world, you are getting a reflection of yourself. That's precisely why you noticed it. You could have noticed absolutely anything, but you singled out one thing and you gave it attention. The one thing is always you.

More precisely, the one thing is always something unresolved in you. That's why you noticed it. That's why it compels you and commands your attention. You are looking in the mirror at something you need to work out in yourself. You projected it outside.

Do I need to pause here momentarily to explain that human beings are projectors and the world is their projection screen? Will that metaphor help? Does it clarify that the world's true essence is a simple pristine blankness? That the human mind is showing home movies? That mine is and yours is?

Those questions might appear too simplistic to some people. But I ask those people to look in the mirror of that evaluation. If you see too simplistic, you are seeing yourself. You could have seen many other things. But that's the thing you singled out.

Why? Because you have something to work out in regard to that quality. You do. Not the person you're pointing at about it. Not me. You. You have an unresolved issue about oversimplification and that's why you stopped there to fuss over it.

You could have stopped anywhere, or not stopped at all. You could have been into the idea. You could have been open to it. But if you balked at it, your balking is your reflection. The same is true if you loved it. Your loving is your reflection. It's always you.

For a while you may resist this teaching because a lot of what you notice in the world is how cruel and precarious it is. I don't blame you. It's difficult to look in that mirror and admit that you singled out those aspects because they operate in you.

It's even harder to look in that mirror if you tend to be critical of what you see. For instance, if you call people stupid now and then, if you blame them for your problems, if you pass judgment and think you know better. Better than what? Reflection!

But let's say you click with the opportunity side of things. Let's say, perhaps after the normal amount of denial and avoidance, you arrive at acceptance that the world is a mirror and you'd benefit from giving it a good honest look. How do you do it?

The good news is you can't not do it. It's all that you do. It's everything you see. The world mirror bears that title for a very good reason. The entire world is the mirror. There is nothing outside it. You can't side-step your reflection. Don't try.

Not trying is step one. Do not try to side-step your reflection. See it for what it is. See it as reflection. See what you see is yourself. You may not know what to do with it in that context, but permitting that context is step one. Repeat it many times.

Step one is enormous. It's where illusion gives way to truth. It's where wandering becomes homecoming. It's where spirituality becomes fact, not fancy. It's where all the gold waits, for anyone willing to embrace the tricky word "mine" in "gold mine".

What you observe about the world is yours. It's your reflection. It's material inside of you that you need to spend time with, investigate, look into, take responsibility for, own. Those are the subsequent steps after recognizing the world mirror.

When you do them, when you do them over and over, with each thing you see, the things you notice about the world will evolve and change, because you did. Otherwise, you'll see the same old things and a thick crust of cynicism will form.

Let your cynicism be a starting point. Are you cynical? Is everything always the same? Is that how you regard the world? If so, let the world mirror help you. It's trying to tell you that you are always the same, that you aren't changing for the better.

Now reckon with that reflection. Do the subsequent steps. Spend time with the trait, whatever it is. Peel open its layers. Look inside of it. Get to know what's at stake for you, about you, both positively and negatively. Only you can do it. No one else.

It's time to decide. Are you going to persist in your belief that the world is external, for you to observe at a distance with introspective immunity, or are you going to see your observations for what they are, perfect reflections from the world mirror?

I invite you to benefit from the second approach. It does what the first approach never can: it makes the world completely dependable. You can count on it absolutely. It is always reflecting exactly what you need to know for your next cycle of growth.

making problems

The sole purpose of the human being is to make problems. I know I'll put a few readers off with that remark, but maybe they'll come to share the humor of it with me instead of seeing it as, well, a problem. It's all a matter of how you take the news.

The reason I suggest the human being's sole purpose is to make problems is that once the human being stops making problems, the human being disappears. This odd turn of events is something you have to experience to confirm, and you can.

It's really quite simple. All you have to do is admit that everything is already perfect, that you and the world are already perfect. If it's hard for you to see things that way, that's the human being part of you doing its primary job: making problems.

If, on the other hand, you can access that perspective, if you can temporarily entertain the idea that the wisdom of life knows better than you do, and that maybe that wisdom is always moving all things in the best possible direction, you begin to disappear.

Disappear is a strong word. I like it because it's a strong word. But I understand if the human being part of you is objecting to it as too strong a word. That would mean the human being part of you is doing its job: making problems. Objecting.

Where is the human being part of you if you suspend that function for a moment? What if you don't object? What if you don't have a problem? What if you don't make any? Where is the human being part of you if you suspend that function forever? It's gone.

Imagine yourself sitting perfectly still. Imagine the world going about its hectic and fathomless business and regardless of what you see, you remain perfectly still, not only on the outside, but on the inside, where it actually counts. Imagine it.

You can do it. You can bring that state of tranquility into the life you are leading right now, right here, starting from the very next breath. If you want to be at peace and to promote peace in the world, that's the only way. By being that peace.

Do you think the world will become peaceful without each of us individually being peace? How can that result be possible? We've already tried it the other way. We've already tried everyone thinking they're right and campaigning against wrong.

It doesn't work. It perpetuates the very mind set it wants to eliminate: right v. wrong. If you ever think you're right, you're the same as the one you make wrong. If you ever think someone's wrong, you're the same, you're wrong too. It doesn't work.

Yet that's the human purpose in a nutshell: making problems. Never does that purpose play out more effectively than when it is able to mask itself as its opposite. Never are we making more problems than when we are making solutions.

But what else can human beings do? They can admit to themselves that they're sole purpose is to make problems. They can catch themselves doing it pretty much all the time, whenever they decide the world needs their improvements.

They can also learn to laugh that their sole purpose is absurd. They can laugh at the absurdity of it every time the purpose takes hold. I'm making problems again. You can say that to yourself in the middle of doing it. You can laugh.

Then you can try something else. Try accepting things as they are for a moment. Try feeling perfectly all right. Really feel it. Then operate from there. Exclusively. If you have anything to give, what could be more helpful than that? Not another solution.

the extra layer

There are many layers to the thinking and feeling process. We all know it to some extent. We all know that underneath the surface of a thought or feeling there is something else there too, but we don't always know what.

I'd like to turn things over for a moment and look at the process the other way around. I'd like to say that not underneath the feeling or thought, but superimposed over it there is something else there too, and we benefit from reckoning with it.

I'll also suggest that most of us don't reckon with it, but rather succumb to it. I'll set up a little duality for the length of this inquiry that reckoning and succumbing are opposite poles in how you might relate to the subject at hand: yourself.

Yourself is the extra layer. When a thought or feeling occurs, it comes with an additional piece over and above the raw experience of feeling or thinking. The additional piece happens very quickly, so quickly we seldom see it as additional. Try to now.

You can have a sensation, an emotion, or a thought without adding a senser, emoter, or thinker to any of them. They don't need an owner. All they require is complete acceptance of them as they occur. The owner is a form of resistance to them.

As I said, it all happens quickly, the thought occurs and before you know what's going on, the thought has successfully manufactured a sense of ownership and full belief in a self who is the agent, the one thinking. The thought produces that illusion.

It's a great revelation the first time you permit yourself to see this process for what it is: the extra layer. You become a witness of it for a while. You see that thoughts and feelings are going on and you don't need to become anyone on account of them.

You see they come and go whether you believe in yourself in relation to them or not. You see that believing in yourself in relation to them is succumbing, while suspending belief in yourself in relation to them is reckoning, and reckoning works better.

Why does reckoning work better? Because reckoning is acceptance. The thought or feeling comes and it wants you to believe in a self in relation to it. You don't do that, but rather you watch the thought, or feel the feeling, and they pass with that treatment.

If, on the other hand, you become the self they want, the thought or feeling persists until that self weakens and lets go. Until then, the thought or feeling rules your world view and your behavior, especially if you pretend or insist it doesn't.

Imagine what that means if the thought or feeling is negative or unpleasant. Imagine it's anger or judgment. If you become the self that is dormant in those passing experiences, they don't pass quickly at all, but malinger. You hate and judge.

If you don't become the self that is dormant in those passing experiences, they do pass quickly. The unpleasant vibration of anger is going on and you permit it to, but you don't lapse into the self it tries to create. You just feel it and let it be.

A lot of this information is counter-intuitive. You'd think becoming someone over a feeling or thought is the best way to relate to it most deeply, but the opposite is true. It's the means of avoiding it, not feeling it. It's adding an extra layer.

Your thoughts and feelings don't need an owner. They certainly want one and they push every button to manufacture one. It seems to be part of their life function to materialize an owner and hold onto it tightly. In fact, that's how they survive.

But you don't have to sustain them against your better interests. Your job isn't to martyr yourself to your feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Your job is to find your way back to the source of what you are and learn to abide there.

If you want that job, if that spiritual calling resonates for you, you'll hear what I'm saying in this inquiry and hopefully use it to see for yourself. You'll stop becoming someone just because a hard thought or feeling is occurring. Or a cherished one.

You'll reckon with that notion of self, the one that arises in relation to all the passing blips on the radar screen of your inner world. You'll see the blips as blips, not as you. You won't succumb to them in that way anymore. You won't add the extra layer.

The rest will take care of itself. You have to believe me on that one. If you stop adding the extra layer, you create a special kind of empty space in which the truth of who you are arises and blossoms without any further effort on your part.

Your job is not to make effort at that point, but rather to nurture the empty space. That's your job starting now. Nurture the empty space. Let thoughts and feelings come and go inside it and don't slow their passage by becoming their owner.

Feel the feelings, feel the sensations, but don't become their owner, the one who is feeling them. Think the thoughts, but don't become their champion, the one who is having them. They don't need a champion or owner. They just want one for survival.

Now what do you want? If you want to abide in the deepest truth of who you are, which isn't a who, you have to start questioning all the who's. If you'd rather be a who, you'll do that until your attitude changes. Whose attitude? Exactly!