Only Stillness is Reliable

If we really want reliable answers to our spiritual questions, there is only one truly reliable answer and it is the silence at the core of our being.  All other answers come and go, apply and don't apply, work and don't work...but Stillness is the one answer than never wanes.  Thing is, it doesn't satisfy our longing to know, it simply frees up the questions, it simply relieves us of our need to know.
If we look deeply, Stillness is already present behind every question, just waiting for the question to vanish so the Silent Answer may be heard.  We obsess over questions that we think need answers, and when we come to see that all answers are at best partial, that only Silence is reliable, it is then that the true answer from the core of our own being is heard.  Not only is it heard, it resounds!

Eat the Fruit Offered to You

Most of our suffering comes from trying to eat of a fruit that has not been offered to us. More often than not our struggles come from wanting things to be other than they are.  Life has this way of reaching out its hand with an apple and saying 'here'...and in our best two year old voice we say 'no, I want an orange'.  And from our desire to have an orange we'll wage war on the apple, the hand, and the one behind the hand.  If we would just stop, open our hand, taste the apple, we'd see that what we really wanted was an apple.  Instead we spend countless hours, days, years, and spiritual practices demanding an orange until one day we get it-but its not at all what we wanted.  Life always knows better than we ourselves do, and it always gives us what we need most, whether that's a little joy or a little suffering.... Until the day comes when we may find our hands forever turned open to whatever fruit is offered.

Mind is God

After having met enough questions, and seen all the ways that our thinking tries to capture the Absolute nature of our being, I have also realized that very subtly I have seen people get the  message "mind is the enemy".   Let's put the mind at ease~ The mind is not an enemy, thoughts are no enemy, there is indeed no enemy.  If we look very deeply we will see that everything is God....mind is God, body is God, thoughts are God, good feelings are God, bad feelings are God.  If we are going to speak with any degree of clarity we must begin with ALL IS GOD. 

Mountainous Vulnerability

In our culture, vulnerability seems to mean something between weak and pathetic.  And because of our spiritual situation that is a somewhat necessary thing in that we have spent so much energy trying to be invulnerable and invincible that to experience our groundless wide open nature feels very threatening to our sense of self and its sense of security.  Most people are completely unwilling to ever be that naked, that exposed, that seen...but for those rare beings who have had the courage and wisdom to live totally naked and totally groundlessly there is a solid mountainous quality to their being.
It's like being around somebody who has no fear, no reservations, no protection, and willing to be a total fool- a total idiot.  The rich quality of warmth and absolute confidence seem to come through the pores of such a one. The irony is that that mountainous sanity comes from being so deeply intimate with your own groundlessness... if you have nowhere to position yourself, where can you be knocked down?  By having no ground, no identity there's no you...when there's no you, who is it that is going to be harmed?
What seems so vulnerable, so threatened within us is the very thing that at the core is unshakable and indestructible in us.  It simply takes the willingness and humility to have all our ego notions crushed, to have all our ground taken away in order to see that what lies deeply within that vaporous fear is solid existence, Reality itself.

The Myths about Enlightenment

The myths about enlightenment are an epidemic in spirituality.  Spirituality itself is a sort of epidemic that we are seeking to relieve ourselves from.  One of the things that we absolutely refuse to believe is that our notions of enlightenment are elaborate escape hatches from reality.  We want bliss, we want ecstasy, we want a quiet mind, we want to walk on water, but can we want what is right in front of us?  That's the rub that most people in the spiritual game are bent on ignoring~  In search of some relief from suffering we go searching for something more, better, and different than what is right in front of our faces....this is the real cause of all our anger, fear, and anxiety.  We are looking for something that doesn't exist, and we have no clue about what is right in front of us all the time. 
The myths about enlightenment are like a toy store for the mind, holding endless promise as to a better life, a better 'me'...a me that is happy all the time, nice all the time, never sad, never hurt.  This may be true of some comic book superhero, or comic book buddha, but these fantasies are addictions of our ego.  We somehow have enlightenment set up as an endless orgasm.
I have never met anybody who, when truly willing to see what is RIGHT HERE, found it to be not enough.  Right now is what we've always been looking for if we can drop all of our notions about what right now should be.  What is already so is more than enough, question is:  Can you stop fantasizing long enough to see it?  It only takes an instant.

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~