Unconditional Love

One of the things that I have have found to be so deeply true is that whether we are speaking of romantic love or unconditional spiritual love, what we are really talking about is the willingness and courage to be unconditionally open, fiercely vulnerable, and radically tender with ourselves and others.  The great master Chogyam Trungpa spoke extensively of the 'shaky tenderness' that underlies our whole life situation, and the way to direct our lives toward that tenderness with fearlessness and confidence.  In holding ourselves with utmost vulnerability and openness, we discover that we have the capacity to be Love itself.  We discover our capacity to be 100% available to ourselves, others, and life. 
Love often sounds so sweet, so mushy...but, if we look into the depths of unconditional love we call on our warrior-ship as a way to live our lives totally uninhibited, open, and free.  Our willingness to love includes our willingness to hurt, and if we allow ourselves to find the great courage to not turn away from fear or hurt, we manifest within ourselves the capacity to be buddhas and to approach life from a standpoint of radical, fierce love. 

Awareness Behind Thought

As far as what we need to know in playing the spiritual game, there's only one piece of information needed....behind every thought is Awareness. When we have thoughts it is Awareness that observes the thought~ That is what we truly are, and every thought we think is ultimately like a movie on a screen--- even though the movie seems real, when it's over the blank screen is all that remains.

Relating to Teachers

The relationship between a student and teacher can take a vast array of forms and modes.  Everybody uses a teacher in their own unique way.  Some practice deep devotion, while others use a teacher much like asking for directions.  However a teacher is used, what is of deep importance is that the student unites with the mind of the teacher.  In this way, there is no need to be a sheep, nor is there a need to act like or live as the teacher does.  What is essential is our ability to bring our mind into connection with the vastness of the teacher's mind.  To see as the teacher sees.  It is unnecessary to have the same opinions or preferences as the teacher, but if we cannot unite with his or her essence, we cannot manifest our true nature.  So a teacher is an indispensable tool for seeing our delusion, and seeing the sanity that underlies the teachers apparent life situation.  In some traditions 'guru yoga' is a central practice for surrendering your illusions and awakening wisdom.  Guru yoga doesn't necessarily mean you dress like the teacher, or walk like the teacher, or believe what the teacher tells you to believe...all these things have been tried to no avail.  But in 'guru yoga' you become the teacher, and he or she becomes you.  You realize that underneath the chasm of differences in body, action, and superficial appearances you are exactly the same Mind.  You must be willing to give up your self in order to see what the teacher is pointing you to....and by so doing, you realize that your self was an illusion and that you and the teacher are ultimately the very same Self.

Who Are You Without a Past or Future?

We all have many answers to the question who are you?  Everything that we can think of such as our age, our job, our sex, our name, our values, our experiences, our history, our dreams, etc.  But really none of these answers is truly sufficient to describe who one truly is.  Each of these descriptions is a snapshot.  My question is, who are you wholly?  Who are you without using some description from your past or some idea of your future.  Who, What are you right in this moment?  Who are you when you don't refer to the thoughts in your head to tell you who you are? 
If you suddenly found yourself with amnesia and you had no way of recollecting your past and no way to build a future, what would you be? 
So much of our attention goes into recreating the past and generating a future so that we can maintain the thread of our sense of self.  If we were to simply direct that same energy to what is here, now and always, we would be living our lives truly as an alive radiant Presence. 
Are we willing to give up both our history and legacy as well as our fantasy of the future, and finally see what is eternally true right here?
It is a great challenge to die to the past and die to the future and live as what you always have been underneath the cloak of your history and fantasy.
It is only then that we are really seeing ourselves as we really are, and then that we can be free of the burdens of the past and the burdens of the future.
Without a past or future life could seem confusing, disorienting....but it can also be extraordinarily free and deeply rich.

Awakening is Not Self-Help

Let me clear the air on this mistaken idea~
Spiritual awakening has absolutely nothing to do with self-help, or self-esteem, or 'working on your self' as such.  The reason being is that if spiritual awakening is authentic and true it is about realizing that the self that you would 'help' or 'esteem' or 'work on' is an illusion.  And, not only is it an illusion it is the illusion from which all other illusions are created.  Spiritual awakening really has at its core a destruction of all these types of self-improvement projects, and a basic discovery of what one actually is, when the layer of self is removed.  This is not to say that there is no room for self-esteem or self-help within the scope of life, it is simply to say that if you're interested in the discovery of truth, you can't simultaneously be interested in building self-esteem or you go somewhat mad....
What spiritual awakening reveals is that what lies at the core of our being needs no improvement, no help, and has absolutely no need to be held in high esteem.  In fact, if anything, spiritual awakening puts our high esteem on a chopping block, and leaves us totally powerless to improve ourselves--so that we may wake up and see that what we are needs no change, needs no fixing. 
You could say that spiritual awakening becomes quite deep when we give up all the self focused striving, and begin to see that awakening is not about having a better 'me'.
Ironically, the self that we've been trying to fix is made whole in the radical discovery of what it actually is. 

Pathless Path

One of the most common questions that I hear come out of spiritual seekers is How.  How do I wake up?  How do I realize what I am?  How do I live the enlightened life?
One of the things that we are very much aware of but very much unwilling to see is that there really is no how.  We don't have some convenient formula or prescription for what awakening looks like, acts like, or even feels like.  And as soon s we adopt a particular concept of what it looks like, we have set the ground for another disillusionment, which comes when we realize that our concept of enlightenment doesn't fufill this deep need to live it. 
So what I often suggest is that we take the pathless path, the road that has no landmarks, signs, or pointers other than the immediacy of our experience as it is.  This pathless nature of the path often leaves minds very confused and bewildered as we jump from one concept to the next, one idea to the next.  If we just stop relying on our ideas and concepts and we give up this need for a prescription and how-to manual, what we begin to realize is that the path is living through us, not the other way around.  In other words, we have no control over the path, because it has always been in control.  If we try to control it, It eats us up....if we allow it to take over we are left with the Heart of the Truth.  The fiery immediacy of this pathless path will shows all that Is, not because we do it right, or get it somehow...but because that is just what it does.

The Spiritual Ego

Those of us who travel in spiritual circles are all familiar with the ego, and its ways to limit, debilitate, and cower us.  But very few of us are aware of the 'spiritual ego' which takes over after we believe ourselves to be enlightened, special, or in some way different than anything else.  This is where most people in the spiritual world just end up half-baked, thinking that they've achieved something profound. 
What they fail to recognize is that this new 'awakened' identity is just another version of the same old thing....just a more enlightened ego.  This is that camp out spot where people genuinely believe that they are manifesting Truth, living from Love, and are very Intuitive---but it is actually the place where the ego has constructed a very elaborate, very spiritual sense of self.
I meet people who say oh yes yes yes I know who I truly am, I get that, I've been there already....I am free of suffering, I am free of my past.  All the while working very hard to prove this to everybody else, to demonstrate that they have somehow escaped being like you and me. 
Let us just look and see what we are actually telling ourselves, and let us examine the way in which we corrupt our own deepest nature by making our self into some glorious new thing.  Let us see the arrogance, the fear, the denial that reasserts itself at this stage.  Let us move beyond any idea of ourselves, others, or Truth into that nakedly raw place where nothing can be known, where nothing can be achieved, and where any identity we create is essentially false.
Let us see that the True Nature of all has no specialness to it, because it is that which all beings are equally.... then we will see that this Truth of our self doesn't not make us special, it destroys any notion of being special.
This leaves us being TRULY special~

Spiritual Materialism in Our Time

We are living in a time when great Masters are seldom heard, while all manner of people bearing the 'spiritual look' are venerated.  Just as in all the other arenas of life, we worship appearances and fancy titles, rather than the simplicity of the Truth within the Heart.  We read books and hear stories about these beings who walk on water and dress in robes, or have special powers and we think somehow that truth is found there...
Without knowing ourselves or our own mind we want to follow the next exciting opportunity---maybe this one will lead somewhere, but after so many empty promises...after relying on Buddha's word, or Jesus' word, or Ramana's word we must finally discover for our self what is actually true.
That is the beginning of real spirituality, and the end of our materialistic relationship with life.

Proof

If you look for proof of truth, you find Nothing,
If you look for nothing, you find Truth.

Unimaginable Love

In speaking with people about Love as the nature of Truth, I often encounter misunderstanding of what is actually being pointed to.  Because our conditioned and romanticized depiction of Love is centered around emotion and pleasure, it becomes very difficult for many of us to detach from that original view.  There is an open space in which Love is actually more than we can imagine, more than we can associate with as a feeling or thought.  This unimaginable Love is unconditioned, unregulated, unbound--we must come to it totally naked of any preconceived notion of Love.
This Love is sweet, but not sweetness...it is ecstatic, but not ecstasy...it is Truth, but not truthfulness.
Love is the Source, and the Source is ungraspable-
We can, however, recognize this Love as our own beingness.  In this way, love will not be known by how it looks, or feels, or even how it acts-it is deeper and more primary than that.
Love is, Love is...any thing we try to tag at the end of that makes Love into an idea.
Love just Is.

Don't Believe the Lie

Anything that tells you that you are not whole and complete is untrue and we can right away ignore that information.  What we can't ignore is the call, the longing that tells us that we are not in harmony with our Oneness, our True Nature.  That call, that scream is the voice of the Self calling us to awaken all the sleeping energies within ourselves and to emerge in Love.
It is not a call to change, to do something, to achieve anything.  Rather, it is a call to shift from "me-ness" and our limited view to the view of entirety, of the One.  The shift is toward opening, softening, relaxing and letting go of the constant striving.  It is a shift from being so involved in our story to letting everything dissolve in peace. 
Mind will always say "I'm not whole" because the very nature of our thinking is partiality, division, interpretation, and analysis.  Our thinking does not and cannot understand Oneness.  In order for the mind to understand Oneness, it would have to be outside of Oneness looking in...that simply cannot be when we recognize that Oneness includes everything and has no boundaries.
Ultimately,  the basic ground of our mind is Oneness, and as that essential truth is realized the need to try to understand or comprehend our wholeness is seen as futile.  Mind eventually sees that it and Oneness are the sameand with that comes an enormous peace and ease of being.
This eventuality that I'm talking about is not necessarily in time...it's not a matter of when, how, or why but simply a matter of Is.  Oneness is Here right now.  When the mind is available to recognize this, the eventuality is seen to be ever-present.
There is a very subtle difference between the call that draws us into our wholeness, and the thinking that would tell us we are not whole.  We can only see this through direct experience.  Only after we have failed to find what the Heart has been calling us to do we finally realize that it isn't 'out there' to be found.
Both longing and searching can come with pain, and both can carry enormous energy.  However (and ultimately)  we have this choice to stop believing anything at all and drop completely into Oneness right now.  Don't wait another instant!

Non-Duality is very Natural

Non-Duality means non-duality.  It's funny how, through our manic searching and desperate attempts for control we can very easily imagine separateness in our lives.  We have this in-built tendency to create very subtle conditions for Truth.  We may understand intellectually that everything is One, but through our experience we always conjure up exceptions to that.  In this way we tend to try to exclude what we don't want, or create some condition that prevents someone or something else from being whole.  But, non-duality means non-duality...just because a person may not know all the spiritual languages, or be able to astrally project themselves doesn't mean that they aren't just as much the One as anything else.
In our truly natural state, which is just right now, there is nothing excluded from the totality of existence.  But the mind would believe otherwise, the mind would organize and interpret experiences down to the nth degree, hoping to somehow get a grasp on the eternal and unbound~ but it can't be done!

Non-duality is the relaxation of the mind to the essential truth that there is nothing to fix, nowhere to go, nothing to become...

Non-duality is the basic nature of our Being, that aspect of our Being that includes everything.  The aspect of of our Being that isn't concerned with analyzing reality, or making assumptions based on false evidence.
Non-duality is the direct experience of your own Self, and the recognition that your own Self is in its essence no different that anything else.