What do you want, to keep it together with your efforts, your theories and your strategies, or have the Truth sweep your life clean?
If we meet this world unprotected, our heart gets broken over and over and over. This is actually a gift. You let the world touch you, it shatters you open, and it shatters you open, and it shatters you open. And here you are, shining. After our heart is broken open a thousand times and all of the contents emptied out, there's just this shining left.
The truth has eternity on its side. Your illusions have a shelf-life. There’s only so long you can tell yourself lies before you run smack into a cement wall and fall on your head in divine bliss.
Keep nothing for later. Like letting a bird fly out of your hand, the whole being, here! (Outstretches hand.) Anything that you think you have to carry can be given to the fire that’s here. When we’re empty, then something else fills us. Something that holds its head up. Something that is our birthright.
We can forget our adult selves. Just simply forget them. They’re not good for anything, not anything real, just this playing of this serious game where we dress up like big people and try to sound like we know what’s going on. We don’t know what’s going on, none of us do. Just rest here as cluelessness.
The truth that we're talking about here is not one of the ones that we find on a card in Trivial Pursuit. It has nothing to do with a right answer. It has to do with being who we are and exploring what that truly is. It's something that we can only be. And we can talk about it, but talking about it is never as true as simply being it. When you give yourself to it, you become a meal for everybody.
Whenever Love speaks to Love, speaks of Love, an igniting happens. The speaking of it, from it, brings it here to earth, brings it alive in us and builds it an altar here. This is what these hands are for, these eyes are for, this heart is for--a perpetual building of an altar for Love.
When we know and taste ourselves as one being we cannot say "I am that" without saying "You are that."
May we never get going beyond this hello. May we die right here in this eternal hello. May it all end. May our minds squirm and wriggle as they feel us pinned to here--no escape--until they know this deep rest, and just fall over in boredom and bliss into this. Wave the white flag and let themselves be completely gotten.
We’re already, every one of us, whether we can feel it or not, completely each other’s and completely in love. How could it be any other way?
When we know that we ARE home we can have a big old party and invite everything to come. At this party there are no beggars who have to stay outside with their faces pressed up against the window looking in at the warmth and the light inside. They all come. They come whether they talk to themselves, pee on the carpet, steal food. They come.
We don't need to wait for an invitation to be as big as we are. But if you were waiting, here's your invitation.
This is what is asked of us, over and over and over, to offer our empty hands. To let the things we are holding so tightly just drop. To give it all up, everything, that does not exist in this moment here. All that has happened, that we think we somehow need to do something about, all that we think might happen, or we hope will happen, every sweet dream that we cling to. This is like God’s loving strip search, give it all over! Something else wants to live you. And you can feel it.
We can thank these hard-working, seldom-resting, always on alert, over-taxed minds, we can thank them for their hard work on our behalf and kiss their little heads and say, "Nice try sweetheart, trying to stand in for the All, nice try, boy did you really do an amazing job considering. Now let me take the remote away from you sweetheart."
We can try to apply spiritual concepts (it's all One, there's nothing to do) to our unruliness and somehow calm it all down. We think that will get us somewhere peaceful, but it just gets us somewhere dead. Binding and gagging all the ones within us, and there, now we have peace. Go under the attempt for the mind to make it okay, and sit by each one of those. Let them fill you up and burn as you hold their hand. Only love knows what’s to be done or not done. And love moves very differently than the small mind moves.
I used to think that this heart was so small and timid that it needed safety and it needed permission and it needed the conditions to be just so in order to shine maybe one little ray of light out. I didn’t know that I was sitting on, just like you are sitting on, a light brighter than any sun, that needs no permission or safety or special conditions to blaze.
Let this that has always been running your life have you. This complete cliff dive in every moment into “I don’t know.” I don’t know where I am, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am, I don’t know what I’m here for. Let yourself be nothing. Just here. Offered. Ahhhh, what a relief.
We think that we have to be perfect, we have to be right, we have to patch this thing together so there aren’t any holes or leaks or cracks. We are looking in the wrong direction for the perfection, and working so hard to perfect something that’s impossible to perfect. We are not creatures of need or insufficiency! We just have to stop and drink of ourselves - we are already here brimming over.
Every time that we go out to our personality, our quirks, our apparent failings to evaluate, or out to a particular job or a particular love, looking for something, we’re going to uncover the one that’s going out there, which is the one that’s howling. The howling of separation at the core of us. We are going to fail if we look outside and it’s going to hurt. That is the blessed mechanism that drives us back to ourselves. Failed relationship after failed relationship, failed strategy after failed strategy, it’s all saying, "Wrong way, go home!"
When I was a girl sometimes I rode a horse bareback, and I would lay on the horse’s back on my belly with my arms and my legs dangling over while she just walked. So that’s what I invite you to here, is to just give the moment all of your weight, all of your care, everything. Let it carry you.
Give ownership of yourself over to Love. Let Love have you. Let Love have everything. Let yourself sit tall, filled with your own beauty and grandeur. As though you are wearing the crown of Love. I don't care what you were doing, thinking or feeling ten minutes ago, in this moment you can enter the fire. Everything is burned, and you emerge clean. You emerge as Love.
I have come here to tell you how beautiful you are.