It is letting go...

Too many people abdicate responsibility for themselves. Too many people in spirituality want someone to tell them what to do....If we get caught in this habit, we can stay in sort of spiritual infancy.  At a certain point we need to grow up, we need to look inside ourselves for our spiritual guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don't want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren't working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional.  But sometimes, as human beings, we don't want to know what's not convenient. So we pretend not to know. What is most important is to come out of pretending.  There is a time and place for everything.  There's a time to make effort and be disciplined.  There is a time to let go and realize you cannot do it alone, that it is up to grace, that efforting and struggling and striving play no part.

But understand one thing; the trajectory of our spiritual lives---no matter what our path...the trajectory of our spiritual lives and of all spiritual awakening is toward total surrender.  Ultimately that's the name of the spiritual game. Everything we do spiritually is leading us to a spontaneous state of surrender---to letting go. That is where it all leads, no matter what the path is, no matter what the practice is. Once you know that, you notice that each step along the way is the next opportunity to surrender...ultimately the whole of spirituality boils down to letting go of the illusion of the separate self, letting go of the way we think the world is and the way we think it should be.

We need willingness to lose our world. That willingness is the surrender; that willingness is the letting go.  And each of us has to find what that letting go means for us, what we need to let go of. Whether it's difficult or easy doesn't matter in the slightest. It is the letting go that is ultimately important.

Another dream that never happened...

As one old Zen master said, it's like a job well done. At the end of the day, you just go home.  At a certain point...it's as if everything is put down. Freedom is put down.  It is necessary to be free of our need for freedom, from enlightenment from our need for enlightenment...at a certain point all fabrications dissolve and disappear...We come to realize  that even our greatest realizations, our greatest moments of "aha," are actually dreams within the infinity of the unborn...we realize even one's great awakening was just another dream that never happened....It's described in the Buddhist scriptures as gone, gone beyond, completely gone.

Ultimate Nature of Reality.

The Ultimate nature of reality is indiscriminate; reality is what is.  The truest sign of an awakened heart is it is an indiscriminate lover of what is. This means it loves everything, because it sees everything as itself. Once the unconditional love starts to open up within us, it is the way reality expresses itself. Reality being in love with itself expresses itself through an awakened heart.

Meaning and Purpose

With the remnants of the egoic structure still in place, it's sometimes easy to get caught in a state of meaningless and purposeless. From an awakened point of view, to say there's no meaning and no purpose is tremendously positive.  And it is positive because one has something better than meaning or purpose. One has awakened as the very essence of existence itself. What could have more meaning than that? What could have more purpose than that?