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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3358, Saturday, November 22, 2008, Editor: Mark
Meditation is needed
Only when the mind is distracted
By false imagining.
Knowing this,
I am here.
Without joy or sorrow,
Grasping at nothing, spurning nothing,
O Master, I am here.
-Ashtavakra Gita 12:3-4, from The Heart of Awareness: A
Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita, by Thomas Byrom, 1990,
posted to AdvaitaToZen
When you stay in your True Self
you do not need to look after yourself.
A power will rise which is moving the earth,
which is causing the sun to shine,
which is giving the moon its brilliance.
When you are attuned to that power
you will have nothing to do,
everything will be beautiful.
That power will look after you
in a way which you cannot manage.
-Papaji, posted to SufiMystic
These blessed opportunities to notice that we're not in charge
just keep coming, don't they? So the invitation of truth is total
submission. Not just bending a little bit, but actually becoming
broken. If we're lucky, we get broken. And the opportunities are
all around us to submit. To give up trying to best, trying to
win. To give up trying to push anything away. Just here.
- Jeannie Zandi
And yet, love is what we crave. There is often a love/hate
relationship with the idea of love, most likely stemming from our
experiences as children where we loved helplessly. We projected
love out onto our loved ones - our mothers, fathers, brothers, or
sisters - and at some point found our loved ones to be
unreliable. We confused their actions with love and concluded
that love was not trustworthy.
People are definitely not trustworthy, because in general, they
are very busy protecting their story of who they think they are.
Since they are mostly involved in their story, they can only give
a certain amount of love before they start wondering, 'Well, when
do I get mine?' And since love has been identified as being
connected with another person, this sets up a whole continuation
of distrust around love. But love is not a person. Love is the
individual, collective, and universal soul. Love is God. Love is
truth. Love is beauty. Love is peace. Love is self. To know
yourself, to surrender to the truh of yourself, is to surrender
to love.
Many people are aware of their resistance, and they want to
surrender, but they don't know how. The only actual barrier to
surrender is in not seeing the underlying story you are telling
yourself about the danger of surrendering everything to love. And
the degree to which you hold back surrendering everything to love
is the degree to which you suffer. The degree to which you try to
maintain the story about who you think you are is the degree to
which you feel isolated from love. Until you realize, 'I want
truth, which is love, more than anything,' you will experience
yourself as separate from love. Love is the constant. Love is not
an aspect of truth. Truth, God, and self are aspects of love.
What is the worst that could happen if you surrender to love?
What we seem to fear the most is the broken heart. Yet the very
unwillingness for the heart to be broken is the broken heart. The
tragedy and the irony is that in order to avoid a broken heart,
people lie in a state of broken-heartedness. In the willingness
to have the heart be broken a million, trillion, zillion times,
true love is revealed.
Let the whole world break your heart every instant of the
remainder of your life. Then this life can be lived in service to
love. It does not mean you stay in abusive relationships. It
means only to stay true to that which is always true to you, and
that is love. Anything else is a story. If the story is never
investigated, your whole life is lived on the assumption that the
story is real, and that your heart, your soul, and your love need
to be protected. But that assumption is actually a denial of your
heart, your soul, your love. It is the denial of self-love.
The great good news is that love is free and it has not gone
anywhere. In all of these aeons that you have been hiding from
love, love is still here, it is still open, it is still waiting
for your commitment, still waiting for you to say, 'Yes, I give
my life to the truth of love. I vow to letlove live this life as
it will, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.'
Through honest self-investigation, it is possible to see why you
may not be surrendering to love, and to see that you actually
have the choice to surrender. It is a way to let the unconscious
storylines become conscious, the unknown become known. Ask
yourself this question: Why is it dangerous to surrender to love?
Not why is it right to surrender to love, or why is it good to
surrender to love, but why is it dangerous to surrender to love?
Let your individual consciousness drop down into the source of
consciousness, into the space where all of the reasons and
justifications for resisting surrender are seen simply as
stories, as something made up that you can very easily let go of.
Allow all of the stories, all of the defences, be seen for what
they are. Are any of these stories worth keeping? What is the
cost to your life?
The love that you search for everywhere is already present within
you. It may be evoke by any number of people or events. A
mountain can evoke this love. A sunset can evoke this love. But
finally, you must realize that you are this love. The source of
all love is within you.
Gangaji,from The Diamond In Your Pocket,
The Heart is petal soft in its essence, so tender. Let yourself
be soft, because the other thing is too old and brittle to haul
around any longer. Let yourself be made new by your willingness
to be here raw, open, nothing, floating in the unknown sea of the
Heart, the portal of the Beloved. This is where earth and Heaven
come together, and where we are meant to be broken open, over and
over.
- Jeannie Zandi