You say you want love

But do you?

You say you want

Someone to love you

But in fact

It’s just the opposite

You want someone

To only give you

A little love

A smidgen

A controllable amount

Not too much

Certainly not enough

To destroy your

Precious outer shell

…

This is only

Ego talking

Don’t believe it

Love won’t crush you

Dear Friend

Only your ego

Your “protection”

Stands to lose here

“Not getting love”

Is its only game

So it keeps telling you

That love comes

From outside

Which is true

In a way…

Outside of ego!

…

What happens

When you break

That crummy funnel

When you end this

Distorted tale of woe?

What happens

When you let

The Universe

Crush you?

…

You

Discover

That

Only

Love

Remains!

I thought we’d be

Together forever

She offered an

Unhappiness that

Would never end

Yet never be

“My” fault

How tempting!

Who could ask for more

Even decades and

Worlds apart

Our sad future

Gloriously

Lay in wait

My ego’s insurance

The ace up its sleeve

This time

However

I caught the ruse

I welcomed my

Unhappiness

Loneliness

And shame

Into myself

Not as special to me

Or even ugly

But as part of my

Human condition

Finally breaking

By God! the

Hidden contract

Cut short

The ego’s

Presumptive

Continuation

And in doing so

Set both the

Anti-Princess

And myself

Rapturously

Free!

They taught you that
The world was real
And that you aren’t

So you created
A system of beliefs
Based around that

You prioritized
The material world
Over your own heart
(And failed miserably
Thank God)

The heart can’t be
Bought with trinkets
Now you know

So take back
Your precious
Attention from
Irrelevant things
Distractions
Desires
Borrowed fears
These were
Never yours

Pull it back
Inside you
Where it belongs
Where it can find
Your true
Unknowable
Unlimited
All-knowing
All-loving
Self

The Real One

You will see that
This world has always been
Unreal
No matter how much
You wanted it to be
Otherwise
You will cry about that
I know
But this revelation
Will answer
All your questions

Funny, isn’t it?
You had to lose the world
To find your Self
Only to discover
The world is
Inside of you
And it was
Only real
Because
You were
Here to
Make it so

There’s a great zen story about a man with a thorn in his hand. He can’t dig it out, so he uses another thorn to remove it. In the end, he throws both thorns away.

It truly is one of life’s great paradoxes that the more we try to undo our thorns, disowning our weaknesses… the more they own us.

So we need to find that other thorn… and that, my friends, is in accepting that anything we’ve been conditioned to believe, the opposite is just as equally true.

Let’s take the thorn of feeling powerless, for example. By having to continually prove to ourselves day after day that we are in total control of every aspect our lives, we actually drain our power. Our need to demonstrate our “invulnerability” comes across as our greatest weakness, our biggest self-delusion. Others see it immediately… and so they push back, trying to teach us that we don’t control them… thus making us acknowledge our powerlessness over and over again.

Or the thorn of loneliness. The more we resist feeling lonely, the more we become codependent on others. This need to constantly attach ourselves… even to people who treat us badly… makes us even lonelier. Is there no escape?

Well, by putting all of our attention on our limited selves – on the first thorn – we are not finding the second one.

The truth is, the little self is a paradox: we are skin and bone, as well as pure consciousness, material as well as Divine. We are SO POWERFUL, so all-encompassing, that we possess all traits, all forms. We are 360 degrees of being, material and spiritual. We run the entire gamut! This means that we have to accept that we both have power… and no power at all. We accept everything at 100%, powerlessness as well as power, limitation as well as infinity, companionship as well as loneliness.

That’s the second thorn.

And when we find it (and we will!)… we can finally take out the first thorn… and throw both away. We free ourselves from our limited self-definitions and can finally, at long last… relax in our unlimitedness.

Ahh, what wonderful relief… this freedom from rationality, this blessed relief from confusion, this return to our inner sanctuary, beyond paradox…

Back to the sanity of Infinity!

Desperately
Searching
YOU seem so close
Lord knows
I’ve looked
Everywhere
Where are YOU?

My body can’t
Catch you
My mind can’t
Describe you
I give up

But oh please
At least
Let me just
F e e l Y O U

Oh!
If that’s
All you want
Dear seeker
I will tell you

Empty your mind
No plans
No desires
No fears
Sit quietly in
Perfect
Unknowning

Let go of
Your story
Your self
Don’t fall asleep!

Perfectly
Empty
Perfectly
Receptive
Your heart
Listening like
Cupped hands

Now
Get ready
Here it comes
The outpouring
The warm grace
The unmoving gift
Always there
So very close
Yet concealed by
Your agitation
Your seeking

Behold the
Miracle!
Stillness
Meeting
Itself
In
Stillness
Too sublime
Too subtle to
Perceive
Any
Other
Way

Who could imagine?
By doing nothing
You’ve reunited
These long-lost
Lovers

And goodness
How the
Heavens
Rejoice
Bathing
You
In
That
LOVE!

I see a lot of judgement these days, friends. It’s certainly not normal to our souls, so it must be something we’ve been programmed to do. Culture is a big culprit. News programs, pundits, comics – people we trust to give us “information” – are constantly judging others, presuming bad motives, ignoring contradicting facts, etc. And so we tend to think that “right and wrong” and “good and bad” thinking is normal. It is not.

Whenever we name what’s “right” and “wrong” in the world, we imagine the good things as being magically within ourselves, whereas all the bad problems are on the outside. Wow, isn’t that convenient? And we think that if we can just get rid of all the bad people, everything would be fine. But that’s fairy tale thinking… doomed to fail. All it results in is a constant state of unhappiness. And we do it to ourselves!

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Here’s the kicker: the only time we look for what’s “right” or “wrong”… is when we believe there’s something wrong with us!

The true battle in life is to accept the parts of ourselves that we were taught, as innocent young children, were “wrong.” That means that if you were raised to be “selfless,” you have to discover and accept the parts of you that are “selfish.” Getting rid of selfish people is never going to be a solution. Accepting your selfishness is. Likewise, if you think others are “racist,” you need look no further than within your own heart… and accept your own racism. It was never truly yours… it was simply conditioned into you. Accept it in yourself. See how it got there… see the innocence of it, see it with compassion… and you’ll finally be able to accept it in others. You won’t have to search out culprits anymore. That’s how you’ll know. You’ll simply see your past thinking as ignorance… and not evil. Each person’s stance is just as valid as ours… and just like ours, it comes from conditioning outside themselves… and deserves the same amount of patience and respect we must give ourselves to resolve them… patience and respect that perhaps we didn’t get from our parents… but can give to ourselves, today.

Once we allow all the parts of us to be “right”… even the ones we were taught were “wrong,” we won’t even use the words “right” and “wrong” anymore. We’ll see how useless they were, how self-condemning!

“Judging a person does not define who they are. It defines who you are.” —Wayne Dyer

Only by giving up self-judgements, seeing our true beauty — warts and all! — will we ever be able to truly free our hearts… and never judge others again!

“To come to possess Everything, seek to possess Nothing.
To come to be Everything, seek to be Nothing.”
–St. John of the Cross

Let’s stop pretending that a few trinkets will satisfy us, dear friends. We’re always wanting more. Only Everything will be enough for us, but we will never “get it” as an independent self, a “somebody,” a “person.” From the starting point of already being separate, we’ll never find it. Sooner or later we’ll all go back to square one, admit to ourselves that we know nothing – and never needed to! – and drop this illusion of being a separate entity.

There’s no other way to find the Everything we are so desperately seeking.

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” –Leo Tolstoy
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” –Plato

When we come to accept All That Is, all that we see happening around us, as being Just As It Is, we no longer need to understand it, improve it or change it. We stop resisting… which is what keeps us unhappy… always searching for more. Because when we allow the world to be What It Is (without complaint!), only then can we begin to lose this idea of separateness… and come into possession of what we’ve been seeking: more of ourselves.. Finally, we’ll never want MORE of anything. We’ll be satisfied.

Everything will be enough for us!

This means transcending thought. This means transcending understanding. This means transcending language. We simply sit and smile, like a child… and wonder at This Perfect World, playing itself out like a beautiful movie.

Yes, once we allow Everything, we find that We Are Everything.

And none of us will stop until we get there.

The world doesn’t need our moralizing. It doesn’t need us to tell it how it should go, or in which direction. In fact, the world doesn’t care at all about what we think it should do.

The world is a self-correcting mechanism; the crooks become the cops, the cops become the judges. The world takes care of itself.

For a few years now I’ve been an occasional volunteer at the Atlanta mission. It is a sanctuary for the homeless, housing and feeding hundreds of people every day. They have an ingenious system in which individuals are helped back on their feet: they grow up through the ranks, from kitchen help all the way up to administration, taking on more and more responsibility as they progress in their recovery. The end result is a system run entirely by and for the homeless. In other words, it is self-correcting apparatus.

In a way, the world is like a Rubik’s cube built with a mini-computer inside. There’s a video of it on YouTube. You disarrange it, then put it down on the table. It scurries around the table as the sides automatically readjust themselves, one move at a time, and in less than a minute, voila!

So, once we know that the world uses friction and conflict to correct itself – always! – we can finally liberate ourselves from all the worry and fear that keep us imprisoned, trying to correct it. It will never be corrected, but it is always correcting itself. If it needs us, it will use us. Otherwise, it doesn’t need our fretting…

It only wants our TRUST.

That’s the only way we are able to free our minds from chaos and conflict… and begin envisioning a new direction, a completely different future… for humanity.

One day we wake up and see how conditioned we’ve become by believing the madness and the poison of today’s “news.” That’s the day we’ll jump to our feet and declare, in a loud voice:

“You don’t get to control my level of consciousness anymore!”

TV news is gaslighting us continuously. Not just with its content, but moreover with its very modality of thought: it’s only interested in winners and losers, in blame and judgement, in victimization, in constant conflict and division. It doesn’t inform us, it traps us! It polarizes us (by design), confuses us, and leaves us disimpowered, hurt and angry, afraid to think for ourselves. In other words, it makes us easy to manipulate.

This level of consciousness is so limited—so toxic—that it no longer deserves even the smallest amount of our attention. We need to stay above the fray, friends… and shut this level off… for good.

Instead, life is about growth, miracles, unity, and win-win solutions. It’s about cycles, acceptance, inclusion… without boogeymen… a world so much more beautiful than what we’ve been presented that most of us don’t even believe it’s possible anymore. Oh, but it is!

Once WE decide that we will no longer tolerate anything less than civil, cooperative, non-judgemental thinking, working together in a spirit of harmony, we can finally begin to make a real difference in the world. Once we turn our backs on that old, toxic mentality, it loses its power over us. In fact, the world will have no alternative than to turn around and follow us. It’s our attention it’s striving to capture—not just as a consumer, but as a follower—and once we stop allowing it to dictate how we think, culture will change direction… in a heartbeat.

The world is changing… but not superficially, as the news would have us believe. It’s raising its vibration every day to whole new levels. The question is… will we be raising our level of consciousness to keep up with it?

We get to decide for ourselves what level we want to live in, and if we want to lift ourselves, we have to stop allowing others to pull us down to their level. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.”