(Living for experience versus giving from depth)
Life lived for the sake of experience is a half-life, tense, insecure, lonely, and unfulfilled. Your experience cannot fulfill you because as soon as it comes it is already gone, a thin wisp, the tail end of hope, receding out of reach.
GIVE EVERY THING NOW You are either withholding your love in fear or giving your deepest gifts. Right now, and in every now-moment, you are either closing or opening. You are either stressfully waiting for something—more money, security, affection—or you are living from your deep heart, opening as the entire moment, and giving what you most deeply desire to give, without waiting. If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer. Every moment is the most important moment of your life. No future time is better than now to let down your guard and love.
(Unfolding your heart and living your true destiny)
4 UNFOLD YOUR HEART The way that you live is probably not your true destiny. How would you live if you were fearless, if you lived your life as an expression of your deepest heart? As an act of unrestrained love, you might become a mother, a politician, or a writer. Perhaps you would invent a vaccine, create a business, or perform music. You might become a farmer, a teacher, or an attorney. Love moves each person in a different way.
However, if you add fear to your life—as most people do—then your moments take the shape of your cringe. Anxiety about money clips the artistry of your career. Fear of loss stifles honesty with your lover. Your gut tenses because you don’t really want to be where you are. Fear is the opposite of love. Few men or women live their true destiny. Most follow a trajectory bent by fear. Your true destiny is lived by giving everything and loving open without waiting.
One way or another, you come to face the truth: Everything you acquire is eventually lost. Every body you hold eventually dies. You have been waiting to give your deepest gifts, waiting to love without holding back,
You can start opening fully now. If you feel fear, if you are waiting for more security or comfort, if you are holding back your gifts or closing down your love, then feel your act of closure fully. Feel the tension in your muscles, the clenching of your jaw, the hardening around your heart. Feel fear’s shape, in your muscles, emotions, and life choices. Feel the brightness of the moment constrained by your apprehension. As you feel yourself doing the shape of fear, breathe more fully, in and out.
As you inhale, expand your belly more fully, filling your deep gut with love’s light and energy. Then, as you exhale, offer love outward to all, relaxing your muscles open, feeling out into the colors of the world as you continue breathing. Feel others more deeply. Feel their hearts’ longing and joy as you breathe their aliveness in and out of your heart. As if breathing the light of a dream, breathe the aliveness of the entire moment in and out. Continue opening, feeling all, breathing all, loving open, allowing your actions to unfold as your deepest offering. When fear returns, which it probably will, feel the shape of your closure. Feel your fear, feel everyone’s fear and darkness. Inhale everyone’s fear deep into your open heart and exhale love’s open light as an offering. Relax and feel everyone so openly that you feel as everyone, as their shape, as their fear, as their deep heart’s love. As everyone, open and breathe. As the shape of the entire moment, open and breathe. If closure remains, feel, breathe, and open again, without end.
If you have opted for a life shaped by imagined security, you can feel your true destiny in your heart, waiting to be lived, wanting to open as the offering of your life. As you breathe open and offer your deepest gifts of love, your life can flower afresh. As you slowly open your heart’s cringe, your business may show a new style. Your sexual depth may open to your lover more fully. Anything can happen as your heart unfurls and your moments open wide as love.
Your true destiny may seem far less predictable than the imitation you have spent years holding in place. The choice is yours in every moment. You can hold the shape of a consoling lifestyle for decades. It only costs your life.
(The nature of openness and chronic dissatisfaction)
Most of your life can become the effort to avoid pain, to experience pleasure, and to pretend everything is OK, even though something feels amiss. Your life can still feel incomplete, even in the midst of a fine meal with a smiling lover at the peak of health. Even during the best of times, you may suffer a sense of lack. This dissatisfaction occurs because you are not opening. When you open fully as any moment, you are complete.
Fully open, and as openness, feel. Allow your tongue to open and feel. Allow your fingers to open and feel. Feel the entire surface of your skin open to sensation. Feel your mind open to thoughts. Feel your eyes open to light. Whatever you are feeling—however painful or pleasurable—you can feel it because you are open.
Your heart always knows the truth of openness. In every moment of your life, your heart tacitly compares the closed suffering that you are doing to the bliss of your true openness. “This moment can be deeper.” “Our love can be more full.” “My life can be more fulfilling.” Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure. Chronic dissatisfaction is how you sense that you are living this lie. No matter how much pleasure or pain comes your way, dissatisfaction means you are resisting the openness of the moment, the openness who you are, the truth. When you are not open to emotions, people, and situations, then you are denying your most basic nature, the openness who you are.
Do your best to create pleasure and comfort in your life. But to live true, live open. Resist nothing. Feel everything. Breathe everyone’s pain and pleasure in and out of your heart. If you feel a lack in your life, practice living and breathing and feeling open.
Do your best to help others and to improve your own life, knowing that, for the most part, it is quite out of your hands. As you intend, decide, and act to the best of your ability, practice living open. When you feel trapped by life, take it as a sign that you are clenched within the confines of your own “No.” You are refusing some experience, resisting some person, or trying to avoid some feeling. Trapped within this recoil, even your most generous intentions are knotted by fear’s tension.
Are you utterly fulfilled, right now? If so, then you are unmoved by stress, and your life unfolds as openness. But if you are not totally fulfilled, then you feel a strange lack. When this “something missing” motivates you, then you create suffering in the world, for everyone you know, and for yourself. You are probably, to some extent, being moved by this feeling of essential lack: you want more security, more affection, more understanding. Also, to some extent, you are opening as love; your thoughts and actions are spontaneously welling up from your open heart of depth. That is, you are living some percentage of your life as clench and some percentage as gift.
Alive as openness, every part of you and all of your life is fulfilled—fully experienced as love and fully dissolved as love.
Anything you are not willing to experience and open as, you will repeatedly confront. If you are afraid to feel anger, if you are unwilling to love as anger and dissolve open as anger, then you will continually struggle with anger in yourself and others. If you are afraid to feel, love, and open as insecurity, then you will necessitate threats to your security. Your very recoil will sustain the ripples of that which you fear, necessitating a confrontation with whatever you are unwilling to fully feel, be alive as, and open as.
Until you can open as the form of everyone, your depth—love itself—remains unopen. You will remain deeply unfulfilled, and others will be rippled by the clench of your closure. First, you can practice opening as your own shape, whatever it is in the moment: anger, joy, confusion, fear, grief, torpor. After practicing for some time, your openness is, in general, more open than those around you—their clench hurts you more than your own does. Now, you can’t help but to practice opening as their shape. Just as you feel them, you open. If they feel angry, you open as anger. If they feel lustful, you open as lust. You practice fully feeling and opening as every texture you feel. It doesn’t matter if the closure you feel is yours or theirs. Opening is the only response that ceases to perpetuate the clench you feel.
Some moments are easier than others. Sometimes you don’t want to open. You may prefer to chew on closure, to perseverate on possibility, to convolute in emotion. These moments are unfulfilling but habitual. Sometimes it seems you can’t help but writhe in the folds of your own tension.
Perhaps you can dance as openness or meditate as openness, but when someone criticizes your great work or loses desire for you sexually, then you simply refuse to open. Like a pouting child, you refuse to feel every texture of your shame, hurt, and insecurity; you refuse to open as this shape, to feel outward, to feel others, to feel the entire moment, and open as all.
Love, or openness, is the gift you are to others. Your capacity to live as openness conveys your depth of love. When you can wear everyone’s closure as the shape of this moment, and when you can open as these contours of refusal, feeling and opening as all, then no residue of unlove remains. Even if clench is redone, its action of fear is well felt, and openness blooms through its form afresh. Every moment reveals open as love. This is your only fulfillment.
(What you attend to shapes what you become)
Suppose you sit at a computer all day, staring into the screen, pushing around words and numbers. Day after day, your body and mind resonate with cyberspace. You can easily begin to look like the dry domain to which you have been attending: functional, logical, insensate. Your shoulders can become hunched, your head tight, your body vacant. Feeling into a computer day after day can de-vitalize you.
Imagine that you’ve just won a million dollars. Your eyes widen, your face flushes, you dance and scream and whoop, hugging everyone around you. You look like the domain of abundant energy to which you now attend, thanks to your million-dollar moment. Feeling into the huge flow of money invigorates you.
On the other hand, right now, you can feel into the deepest love in your heart. You can remember someone you truly love, or you can simply feel directly into your deep heart, attending to its openness, compassion, and care. You can do this through the day. Even when something upsets you, you can choose to put your attention on your heart, and feel into the domain of love.
Imagine opening your chest so your heart was exposed to the world without protection, glistening, alive, tender. Imagine offering your beating heart as a gift to all, like offering a vibrant, delicate flower to your lover.
When you consistently open as love, you begin to look like love. Your face shines. Your eyes sparkle.
(Unclenching from fear as if in deep sleep)
UNCLENCH AS IF ASLEEP Fear underlies most of your life.
You are afraid of poverty so you work to earn money. You are afraid of loneliness so you try to secure intimacy. You are afraid of relaxing without a future so you think, and think, and think.
After a while, fear feels normal. Shallow breath? Tight jaw? Incessant thinking? Hey, that’s life, it seems. Life seems to be suffering. You are constantly plotting, rehearsing conversations, living in apprehension. Your gut is knotted. Your heart is hardened. Deep sleep is just about the only time you aren’t mulling, cogitating, or dreaming. Deep sleep feels like a dunk into unperturbed bliss, a restoration of easeful depth and seamless openness. And then, as the alarm clock rings, your belly tightens and your mind begins wheeling again.
Waking life is an addition to the depth of sleep’s bliss. In any moment, you can feel into the province of sleep’s deep openness, even now. The silent heart-hum of deep sleep lies beneath the flash of present occurrence, like a deep sea of peace below a hectic churn of waves.
What does happen if you surrender as if in deep sleep, right now? What happens if you allow action and perception to well up from open depth, without effort, spontaneously springing from this source?
All your thinking, emoting, and acting can be felt taking form as part of this vast openness of being, like vortexes forming on the surface of deep water.
Your life is conflicted by surface waves, crisscrossed by opposing tensions, needs, and wants, occasionally smoothed by brief pleasures. You may smile, but death awaits you, deep love eludes you, and the freedom of final victory is unachieved.
Feel your terror of completely letting go, just as you are, right now.
Eventually, however, if you continue to grow, your desire to transform negative emotions into positive ones begins to feel false. Your need to feel good about yourself begins to be a burden. Your need to feel successful, lovable, and unique begins to feel unnecessary, like a scab ready to fall off. Just as you were once motivated to feel good rather than bad, now you are naturally ready to open without any self-image—positive or negative—to protect you from what is.
life is no longer lived as a hope for success and love, but as an unfolding openness. Suppose you feel down about yourself. You feel unworthy. So, you decide to use an affirmation in order to brighten your sense of self: “I deserve love and success. I am a unique, powerful, and worthy person.” Affirmations can work for a while, but eventually, if you continue growing, affirmations can begin to feel thin. Your feeling grows deeper, and under it all, in spite of your efforts, you sense you are still nothing. How can you work with your depression and continue growing? If you are willing to feel exactly what is and open as you are, then your life unfolds as truth. For instance, if you feel you are nothing, then open as nothing, fully.
From your deep heart, feel your want, your need, your urgency to merge, to consume, to be consumed. Lust fully and without stopping short.
Live as love, feeling outward without horizon. Feeling all, breathing all, open exactly as you are. Every moment, no matter how bad or good, is unfolding open. The hope for personal success and positive emotion is most fascinating when you have forgotten, or have yet to discover, the endless opening you are.
(Honoring depth over forcing behavioral change)
HONOR YOUR DEPTH If you want to change your life fundamentally, try going deeper before forcing yourself to behave differently.
At night, your dreams are spun without volition. During the day, you think and act in ways that are often contrary to what you intend. Seemingly random meetings and events can change the course of your entire life. Somehow it all hangs together, but it’s tough to see the pattern that connects all the aspects of your life. No matter how dearly you try to control, your life unfolds as a mystery. Why do you love whom you love, and how long will it last? Do you know exactly what you are going to say before you say it? Why are you thinking your specific thoughts right now, and what will be your very next action? The weather is easier to predict than what you will be thinking, feeling, and doing next week—or even in ten seconds.
But if you continue to grow, then you naturally become less interested in changing the patterns of your life and more devoted to opening and giving your deepest gifts of love, right now.
Change the things you can and accept the things you can’t—and eventually open to feel deeper than the things you can and can’t change. With practice, you can open and offer your deepest gifts regardless of how things are.
Where do you feel your intuition? Where do you open when you love someone deeply—what part of you opens?
Love’s deep openness is your source of true change.
For instance, if you are trying to change the patterns of your diet without feeling deeper, your changes will probably be superficial and clumsy. Many of your eating patterns are based on stress, loneliness, and hurt, as well as routines dictated by your schedule. When you feel deeper, then deeper expressions of love can emerge through your life—and through your style of eating.
Imagine that your lover has jilted you, and now you find yourself stuffing cookies in your mouth. First, locate any tension in your body. Feel the softness of your tongue, neck, and belly. Breathe and open your body. Now feel deep into your heart, into the place where you feel deep love. Even if you don’t feel love right now, feel into the place where you would feel love. Open to feel your deep heart. When you can feel your deep heart, even if your are hurting, allow yourself to let down your defenses, to feel whatever you are feeling fully, with no resistance.
If you want to change the way you eat, practice opening, even while your eating patterns continue. Allow new patterns to emerge, spontaneously, moment by moment, from the openness of your depth. Practice opening with great discipline and allow your life-patterns to emerge spontaneously, from depth, as an open offering of love to all.
Even so, the practice isn’t to fight against the old patterns of eating, but to feel more deeply and then open as that depth, from your heart, through your entire body, and outward to all. If you are not living the life-habits you deeply want to, it may be because you are not yet opening consistently and allowing your deep heart to emerge through your body, moment by moment. Practice feeling, opening, and offering openness outward in every moment, breath by breath. Then, your life unfolds with grace and force, spontaneously patterned by the profound mystery opening out from your depth.
(Opening while failing: accepting the incompleteness of daily life)
12 OPEN WHILE FAILING No matter how hard you try, your potential gifts are greater than what you…
At depth, you are infinite. If you allow yourself to feel who you are fully in this moment, you will find no horizon, no end. Everything you experience and do in your life is like a ripple on…
You feel that your life can be truly significant, potentially full of love and great gifts. But it isn’t playing out that way. It always feels less than you sense it can be. Your career isn’t quite it, your intimate life isn’t what it could be, your heart doesn’t wholly love, and your mind can’t sufficiently articulate your profundity. Your life may feel really good, but…
Even when an unlived depth tickles your surface, there is always a phone call to make, a child who needs help, or something on TV. You don’t have to pay attention to the unquenched callings from your deep heart. It’s more comfortable to relish the tenderness between you and your loved…
Usually, no matter how skillfully you apply yourself day to day, your profession, sexual life, and spiritual reach fall short of the love and virtue you know is possible. Rather than churn in the constant friction of failure’s abrasion, you may choose to glide in the goodness of so-far…
However beautiful your life seems, it is a tad more tawdry than your heart’s grace would have it. This is how it must be, and always is. The truth is that your daily life is but a thin strip of experience barely seeming in the profundity of who you are at depth. Your activities and relationships never capture the grandeur that wants to unfold from your heart into the world. There may be moments of palpable glory, brief openings through which magnificence effulges…
You are more loving than your relationships allow, more brilliant than your career suggests. In your secret depth of being, you are infinite, creative, and boundless—and utterly unable to press your full glory into the world. So you settle for some comfort and assuage your…
When you no longer need to distract yourself in affection and comfort, then you can enjoy your family’s love and your career’s adventure without lying…
Only depth is enough. Through real practice, you can feel open as the depth that you are, rather than remain mollified in goodness or depressed in futility. Life is good, and…
You are not here to transform the world and create love on earth. In truth, you aren’t here. Here is in you. You are openness. Abide as openness, live as love, and…
13 APPRECIATE DISSATISFACTION Dissatisfaction can remind you…
(Dissatisfaction, imperfection, and not waiting for perfection)
In any moment, you can limit yourself to one part of the open moment that is available to you, or you can practice to open and feel all with less bounds. Now and any time, you can open and feel your outer world of sight and sound, your inner world of thoughts and emotions, and also the deep, seamless, fullness of sleep’s ever-present bliss. You can feel open as the entire moment, and then open as feeling itself, feeling open without any bounds, even as daily life continues.
You are openness, enjoying the undisturbed depth of sleep’s bliss as well as the everyday adventures of inner and outer life. And right now, you can open as all of you, from blissful depth to agitated surface.
So you search for deeper love in your relationships and more freedom in your lifestyle, but it never adds up to the open fullness that you secretly know is your true home. You try to arrange yourself and the world so your suffering diminishes, but always there is the continual stress of hoping for more success or love.
Everything in this world dies. No arrangement lasts. Your fancy car will get scratched, your body will become diseased, your lover will betray you or vanish. Dissatisfaction is healthy; you are sensitive to the truth—you are suffering as things change and disappear.
14 DON’T WAIT FOR PERFECTION You can be wide open and diseased at the same time.
No matter how sick you are in body or mind, you can still open. Disease may ravage your body and drugs may cloud your mind, and you can still open. Deep openness can encompass all states of body and mind. Physical and psychological
Like a muscular tic or a snotty nose, your emotional responses are natural effects of your history—perhaps uncomfortable, running their course largely beyond your immediate control. Nevertheless, you can offer your love, laughter, and openness even as you sniffle, panic, or shriek. Right now, unique as you are in body and mind, you can practice opening fully.
Every kind of sexual style and twist can be found in the biographies of saints and spiritual teachers. Your openness can be real and profound, and still your bodymind ripples on, patterning itself according to past influence and present habit.
Have you ever done something you wished you had done differently? If so, you can learn from your mistakes and try to do better next time. If the patterns of your bodymind cause undue suffering, in your life or in the lives of others, you can work to transform these patterns, heal them as much as possible, and grow more fully into a balanced, integrated, and healthy person. But this growth is not the same as spiritual openness and depth. A balanced, healthy individual may serve to create positive changes in the world and yet be unwilling to open and feel fully. On the other hand, someone may be wide open and feeling all, yet appear to be a raving lunatic, lustful, and drug-addicted. Such a person may, in fact, be crazy, lustful, and drug-addicted—and yet be open so deeply their heart feels more than you can know and their love extends to you without bounds.
Feel the place in you that wants to give love and be fully received in love, no matter how messed up you are. Locate your desire for love, for openness, for freedom, even if it is tiny. In the midst of your drunken stupor or wild ire, reconnect with this speck of openness.
(Doing love through the body and daily habits)
15 DO LOVE THROUGH YOUR BODY Feeling who you are is the first step; living true to your identity is next. Your identity is who you feel you are. If you feel you are a corporate executive, you will act very differently than if you feel you are infinite light. Who you feel yourself as is your identity. Spiritual growth involves deepening your identity, feeling more deeply who you are.
This realization is half of your spiritual practice. The other half is to live true to your newly realized identity, in spite of old habits to the contrary. You can now practice to do love. When you walk, how can you let go of your old habits of tension and move as an expression of the love you feel you are at depth? At your job, how can you work as the love you truly are? What changes do you need to make in your daily life-rituals so that love can radiate through your every breath, action, and relationship?
They discover they are love, for instance, and still spend hours gossiping or watching TV. They self-justify by thinking they can be love while also lazing around, and this is true. But if they were really sensitive and honest with themselves, they would feel that certain behaviors conduct love more than others do. Singing with a relaxed throat is more conducive to expressing love than singing with a tense throat, although you can love and also be tense.
Now that you have opened more deeply, you can feel how such gossip creates a subtle closure, a tension in yourself and in the friends you are speaking with.
You can notice how your diet affects the openness in yourself and others. True, you can be open as love and eat anything. Nevertheless, certain foods may contribute to a subtle closure in your body, emotions, and mind, and therefore instigate closure in your relationships.
You can practice living as the deepest openness that you know you are. One enemy of this practice is laziness, or the misconception that knowing you are love is sufficient. Knowing or feeling the deep openness who you are is fairly easy; living as this openness, and serving all others to live as this love, in every moment through all appearances, is where the art is.
practice the art of doing love through whatever medium appears. When you notice your mind wandering to a sexual fantasy, consciously guide the imagery toward love’s fullness, so that all the characters in the fantasy are heartfully served by your sexual gifts and opened as love’s unbound ecstasy. If you find yourself lonely, raiding the refrigerator at night, suck the fullness of the moment deep into your heart with each swallow, and allow each mouthful’s joy to radiate outward, breathing your secret pleasure as a gift freely offered from your heart through your whole body to all. In this way, every place that comes and goes also opens as love fully offered.
(Jealousy as a sign of waiting)
16 BE REMINDED BY JEALOUSY Jealousy points to your false hopes of fulfillment. If you think money will make you happy, then you will be jealous of wealthy people. If you think sex will fulfill you, then you will be jealous of passionate lovers. Whenever you believe that something or someone, some insight or some experience will truly make you happy, you are wrong. Only opening as you are is true happiness. You suffer jealousy when you forget this.
Jealousy is the sting of false hope. Even when you get that for which you are jealous—a beautiful girlfriend, fame, a man who truly loves you, great success—nothing essential changes. You are open or closed, various experiences come and go, everything gained is threatened by loss, and nothing is quite as fulfilling as your jealousy promises. Many people have less…
Bliss is the nature of deep openness. Nothing other than openness—not money, knowledge, or relationship—truly increases or decreases your bliss. This is easy to understand. Still, you are probably jealous of certain people. You want what they have. This feeling of jealousy is a useful sign. Feel it fully. Part of you hates them for having what you don’t. Part of you justifies that you are better off without it. Part of you feels inferior for not having it. Part of you tries to feel superior by not needing it. This complex wad…
This sense of waiting, as if the future might offer you something more fulfilling than this moment, is the essence of jealous suffering. Your heart and body clench with stress as you refuse to open now. Jealousy is a sign that you are waiting. Suppose you are jealous because your friend has five million dollars in the bank. Feel your jealousy with precision. Is it hot or cold? Red or black? Sharp or dull? Do you feel…
You are waiting for a future event—having more money—to make you feel sufficiently secure to open. You are waiting, actively refusing to open as unbound consciousness and love right now. You believe that if you only had what your friend has—more money— then…
Keep searching for that thing until the search is exhausted, until your life feels meaningless, until you have tried and tried and you still feel unfulfilled by what you have or haven’t acquired.
Your relief, your fulfillment in any moment, is as unbounded as your openness.
You are either feeling all while giving your deepest gifts of love or you are waiting. Jealousy is the stress of being reminded that you are waiting.
(Every desire reveals your true nature)
17 EXPRESS WHO YOU REALLY ARE Every desire reveals your true nature. Every day you want to do many things, from hugging your lover to earning money. Why? What feeling underlies all your hopes and dreams? This feeling is the tension between who you really are and who you assume yourself to be.
So you scheme and dream to experience in your relationship what, in truth, you already are. You want to enjoy financial security because, in truth, you are abundance, although you assume only effort will provide a feeling of ease. You enjoy dangerous sports because in every moment you are at the edge of death—the ultimate edge of winning or losing—and yet your assumed security makes you seek risks. You want to eat chocolate because, deep in your heart, you are blissful fullness, though you often close to its pleasure and so seek its taste.
Through your daily round, you seek to approximate the truth of who you are that you have lost touch with. This drama of approximation is the story of your life. You never quite succeed like you hope to. You never quite get the love you really want. And so you either try harder or give up trying. In either case, you are missing the point of existence. The open expression of who you really are is the only thing that will free you from the stress of feeling incomplete. In truth, you are what you want. The farther you wander from who you truly are, the more you crave the qualities you miss.
Divorced from your home of unlimited openness, you seek to expand the sphere of your power, the size of your portfolio, the borders of your country. Desiring the freedom of inherent ease, you try to discharge stress through masturbation, conversation, and secret habits of release. You miss the simplicity of being, so you seek it in the warmth of a heroin rush, a fluffy bed, or a ritual cup of coffee.
To surrender so completely to be who you are is terrifying—your self-image instantly vanishes. Yet it is the only way to live that is real. Otherwise, in every moment of missing who you truly are, you create a self-image that isn’t the real thing. You feel a lack. This tension of deficiency can wind into an intense twist of desire. Eventually, you can become quite warped.
Craving the depth that you miss, you may find yourself engaging in crime, lying, self-abuse, and terrorizing others—or perhaps just sitting in front of the TV and eating cookies. No matter how extreme or mediocre your misplaced efforts become, you can always open as your source.
What you want is who you are. Open as you are without hesitation.
First you are selfish, then you try to help others, then you open and live as love.
After years of working to serve others, you begin to burn out. The resistance to your love seems relentless. You give and give and so what? Sometimes it seems that people don’t even want to grow or learn to help themselves. Your attempt to help others, even your own children, often creates further problems that you can’t foresee. After years of enthusiastic service you begin to notice you are getting tired and people are stuck in the same old patterns and the world continues to churn like a big machine of virtually imperturbable momentum.
Even the most selfless, loving, and powerful people in the history of humanity—religious and political visionaries, for instance—have barely made a dent in the strife of the world, and have often initiated movements that inadvertently resulted in immeasurable death and destruction.
You can eventually realize that whether or not this world gets better, your purpose is to open as love.
The only true way to live is open. To collapse in despair—or to inflate yourself with hope—is to separate yourself from open depth.
At first, your concern is limited to your personal comfort, relationships, and achievements. Then your life begins to feel small, so you enlarge your scope of concern. You offer your energy to serve others. Eventually, your efforts to help others and better the planet feel trivial in the face of the world’s chug-a-lug immensity. At this point, you either retreat back to your personal cave of small comforts or continue to serve others as you fight burn-out and convince yourself that you are doing the “right thing.” Or, you realize each moment’s openness. Even when you are stopped dead in your tracks in your efforts to give love—perhaps the recipient of your help spits in your face or the government blocks your altruistic labors—the moment is still wide open. No edges hedge this moment. No boundaries limit your opening as love. Even when you feel frustrated, angry, or defeated, the indisputable truth is that this moment, including you, is open without bounds. You are infinity, briefly texturing as frustration, anger, or the feeling of defeat.
(Opening as love even toward those you hate)
Everyone that you hate, from your mother-in-law to a serial murderer, is, at heart, you. Closing your heart to theirs means pinching away from who you are. This act of pinching creates the sense of inner stress and unfinished yearning that most people suffer. Every moment that you enact the lie of difference, you reinforce distress in your heart.
If you can stay open and feel everyone fully, even those who actively disgust you, then love endures.
You can try not to judge others, but even that is based on a judgment: “People who are non-judgmental are better than people who judge.” The fact is, feeling good or bad in response to others is natural and inevitable. The trouble starts when you allow your emotional response and mental judgments to result in heart-closure and separation.
20 UNDO ALL EFFORT In every moment of real practice, your effort undoes the need for effort.
You want so badly to be accepted as you are. You want to feel worthy, acknowledged, and loved. These desires to be seen and felt as worthy are symptoms of your closure. The self-reflexive tension you call “me” is trying to sustain itself. Your emotional sustenance is grounded in this need to be mirrored, to know that you are seen, felt, and loved. In truth, in depth, you are the openness of love. But as a separate “me,” you are the refusal of this openness. You are the tension of self-sustenance, fidgeting to touch yourself, masturbating, filling your mouth with food, thinking about yourself, self-concerned. Even your desire to grow spiritually is self-concern. Everything you do acts to sustain the felt sense that you are a separate self, hopefully on the road to greater love and freedom.
The second phase begins when you can feel, moment by moment, that you are actively closing. Every thought, feeling, and action is reinforcing your sense of separateness. You are doing unlove. In fact, “me” is the very act of unlove. “Me-ing” is the process of holding back, protecting yourself, hoping to be cherished, hoping to grow open, thinking to yourself, strategizing for your success. You are utterly self-involved. Everything you do is an effort to sustain this sense of me that is hopefully loved, loving, and successful.
Truly, you are terrified of being open. You want to be a little bit open in order to feel comfortable and safe, but total openness—without any “me” you can point to—is terrifying.
If your husband is wasting his life, frittering away his time in trivial pursuits, distracted by TV and lost causes, your heart will shout its love: “I can’t stand when you are like this! You are a great man! I want to feel your fullest gifts!” The urgency of your demand for his fullest potential is unmistakable.