No Understanding Needed

To be who you Truly are requires that you understand nothing. All understanding is related to some object or some phenomenon. Learning and understanding can, of course, be tremendously useful, but to find out who you are understanding only gets in the way.
To understand something, there must be an understander. So, to understand one's self requires a someone to understand. This makes two. But clearly there is only one self here, right?

Silence itself reveals you to your Self. It gives a moment of rest to the endless machinations of understanding, and transmits the true power within oneself. A power that empties out all understanding, all notion, all ideas, and leaves one available to live a life filled with happiness, peace, and gratitude. Until the quest to understand is dropped, and I mean fully and completely dropped, we toil in our endeavor to find what can only be found in Silence. When we allow Silence to be the only thing present, it is quite clear that no understanding is needed at all.

Happiness Can't Be Found

How would one go about finding what is only and always already present in one's self naturally?

Practicing Emptiness

Practice, in the spiritual sense, is always one of letting go. There is no real practice of acquiring, changing, or anything like that. Growth in the spiritual realm is about loss, rather than expansion. The more we build our empire and foundation on "me" the greater the fall. On the other hand, our original pure nature requires no change at all. So the practice becomes one of emptying out all identifications, conceptions, experiences, purposes, and ideas to make room for That which is not contained within any of these. When the maturation of consciousness is in place, all things fall away easily and of their own accord. Until that ripening, there is a struggle to attain some pleasurable experience or get rid of some painful experience. To truly practice in a useful way is to just Be Still...to let the endless search for peace settle into the splendor of this Moment- right now. Here, no practice is required, Here, you just be as you already are.

You Get to Feel What You Feel

One of the most profound and profoundly simple things that my teacher said was, "you get to feel what you feel" .
You see, we spend so much energy analyzing, judging, and interpreting our emotions to determine if we should feel that way, or if we're right, or if it's spiritual to feel that way.... but the attention is so tied up in that cycle---which is suffering--- that we don't actually allow ourselves to feel what we actually feel. Instead, we come to some judgment about the feeling.
The great surprise comes when we actually allow ourselves to feel what we feel. So, in a moment of anger, sadness, hurt we directly feel the feeling... and that feeling has something very beautiful inside it. When we actually allow ourselves to feel what is already being felt then the emotion doesn't carry such a charge, it doesn't attach itself to our attention and cause us to spiral into suffering about it.
People often ask me, "what do I do with my anger, jealousy, resentment...and I always say just feel it for a moment. That's what we actually want anyway, that's where our attention is. The emotion has arisen in order to be embraced...not analyzed.
We often believe that what we're feeling must either be right or wrong, that we should feel it or should not feel it. The possibility in each moment is to not move toward any story of right or wrong, but simply allow.
And allow.
And allow.
But this is quite different than justifying the feeling. Rather than feed the story around the feeling you just feel it directly, and then it is taken care of by itself, then it is seen to be Grace.
Allowing what is here to be Here is simple Grace.

The Dharma Point

Coming upon the dharma point is an essential moment in one's awakening. In yoga it is sometimes called samadhi, in zen it's called satori. The point is, there comes a moment of reckoning so profound that it forever changes the way we operate. It's not that we try and try and try and eventually achieve this point...it's that when we finally exhaust all our efforts that this moment spontaneously implodes all of our notions of reality.
Awakening is a time bomb, setting out on the journey for it only leaves a limited amount of time before the real destruction hits. It is usually when we least expect it that this thing called Truth rises up and claims our life. This is the dharma point.
This is not to say that this moment permanently erases all traces of our conditioning or patterned ways of behaving, rather it is the first real moment of our lives, or it is our birth out of the unreal, and an acceptance of the real that has always been Here.
The Dharma Point is seen to be all there is...it is time, and timelessness...it is life regardless of birth or death.

What Never Happened

We all go through the journey of awakening so that we will one day end up "there". We believe very firmly that enlightenment will result, that happiness will be there waiting for us at the magical pot of gold.
The paradox of it all is that if we do actually awaken to our true nature, there comes with it this incredible laughter at even the idea of enlightenment. What one realizes is that enlightenment was never anywhere else, it was never missing. And what's even more of a blast is that the whole spiritual journey turns out to be a wild goose chase. Not only was there never anything to be discovered, there wasn't anyone to discover anything...it never happened!
The realization is that ignorance, delusion, suffering were never actually real because they were always based on "me". Me, too, was never there.
Coming upon the Truth isn't a matter of a "me" becoming enlightened....rather, it's a matter of the direct recognition that"me" was never lost, and never found.
A lot of what's out there in spirituality is teaching to find your true Self, the high self, the soul... but the one problem we all keep running into is that we can't find it. And when we really believe we've found it, it changes so completely that we think we've lost it. This is not the Truth. The Truth, the Self is not gained or lost, it's there in the joy and in the suffering...our true Nature is there throughout. It takes most people a very long time to realize this, and to discover that there's nowhere to arrive, nothing to know, nothing to become....nothing to happen, nothing that ever happened.
So, when we stop trying to get somehwere, and allow our efforts to dissolve into silence, we realize that Here is where one has always been. It's not even a matter of being present as much as it is Being Presence . And, in the end, all ideas contrary to this simply fall away like leaves from a non-existent tree.

What is Dharma?

Good question...

Ultimately we can never come to any satisfactory conclusion about what Dharma is. It is beyond and yet simpler than any conclusion or explanation. It is not some mysterious, esoteric thing..it is simply This, Now, Here.

True Perfection

True perfection is not the perfecting of your actions, the purifying of the body/mind, and not the attainment of any special state. True perfection is already here, it is the ground on which all of your actions, perfect and imperfect, take place. It is the very nature of your Self. The perfect nature of Self is not some fancy way of talking about the grandiose enlightened being that seems to hide somewhere inside us that you feel you must find. Instead, it is the whole consciousness that we overlook moment after moment when we set out in search of this perfect Self. Really, let that sink in. When you are no longer seeking to discover this enlightened Self, what is your essential nature?
The real aim of our search is passed up every time we search. Ironic. That's what makes the direct teachings that you find in Zen and Advaita so powerful, as they stop you right where you are, don't allow any wiggle room, and place right into direct contact with what has been overlooked. It's like being at home, trying to figure out how to get home, getting in your car and driving around looking for home.... all along you were there. One of the things that is immediately obvious when you see this is, "Oh yeah! I was here all along" and "Why was I looking all over for this?"
Maybe what that search does is it finally brings us to that Dharma Point, that Reality Moment, where we give up looking and we just Are. We just rest. The work is over there's no more to do or see or learn and what becomes very clear is that all that worked amounted to very little. Of course it gave great experiences and wonderful lessons, but it never brought llasting peace. Lasting peace is who you are, it is what is always here.

Q: If it's already here, why don't I know it or feel it.

Precisely because you've set out to find this Truth in your knowledge and in your feelings, or experiences is the manner in which you have overlooked yourSelf. We aren't capable of knowing or feeling Presence, because to know it or feel it is to objectify and therefore limit it. We have great experiences where we know that we have touched Presence, but it is right away imprinted as a memory, feeling, etc. Truly, Presence is what made the memory, the feeling, the experience possible. It is Grace that touched our experience. Discovering that Grace is here now, in this moment, is the only lasting realization. This means that every ache, pain, and annoyance as well as every bliss, joy, and ecstasy have been infused with Grace, with Presence. Experience it for yourself.
The expereience of your Self reveals the perfection of your Self.

Trust Your Self

Trusting yourself releases the grip of energy called doubt and frees one up to be in harmony with things as they are. It is not that we trust hstory, or our thinking, or our feelings, but we trust silence..we trust peace. And trusting one's self means trusting in peace and in silence so that whatever has carried the energy of doubt and mistrust can dissolve itself cleanly and make space for Love. Trust of one's self is love for oneself, and love for oneself is love for all.

No Ego, No Problem

Especially amongst spiritual seekers, this quest to transcend the ego is an ongoing battle. Ever notice? Somehow that slippery little devil continues to arise time and time again. And, the more we struggle to be done with it, the more it seems to rear its ugly head, right? I talk with people who say things like "that's just my ego" or "if I could just get past my ego". And I always have to laugh and usually my question to those kinds of comments is "where is this ego you're talking about?" For most individuals that's where the picture turns fuzzy and there's silence. The very interesting discovery that one makes when investigating the ego is that there really is no place to find it, no characteristic that defines it, and no real substance to it at all. So why do so many believe in it, and set out to get beyond it? There are many reasons, but at the most fundamental level we created an imaginary self through our thinking, through our experience and this fictitious self is believed to be truly existing. But, I am here to tell you it is not. The created notion of a self is what we're always trying to transcend, but we can never transcend it because it's nowhere to be found. In addition to chasing this ghost called ego we also have to create another ghost called "me" whose job it is to get beyond its alterior identity and into the Enlightened state. Well, what we come to see, eventually, after perhaps eons of searching, struggling, clawing, scraping is that this whole endeavor to transcend has been absolutely fruitless. It's at this point that we finally begin to mature. When we finally begin to see that this effort to destroy has not worked, we are empowered to discover the truth of the matter. And the truth is, that no matter how hard we try we can never kill off the ego, and in surrendering to that essential truth there is a relaxation of the drive to change, or to get more, or to be better and there arises the possibiity to see ourselves as we are, flawed...unenlightened...mistaken, and to be humbled so deeply that our vision becomes very very clear. And our vision being clear is synonymous with seeing that in truth there is no ego, not one to transcend and not one to do the transcending. There is no self and Self...there is only One Self in which no separate self resides. You realize that the Self in you is the Self in other, and the Self in the trees, and air, and trash and in all the good things and all the bad things. Uh-oh!
When we begin to see that all is One Essence, we're going to have a very hard time coming up with things to get rid of and things to transcend. When there's nothing left to get rid of, we are ready to allow our whole being to unfold in harmony-ego and all! Having no problem with anything is the way of non-resistance. With no resistance to anything, really fully non-resistant, we are free. And freedom is what we have sought all along. When we truly welcome the entirety of our experience, that which we have sought to eliminate finds its place inside our life. With no problem, there's no ego to be fixed. And from THAT view, everything is taken care of.