Love Is at the Heart

What Really Matters

I’ve been working in recent months on three major projects that are all pushing me to clarify my essential message, what I feel really matters, what is authentic and true in my own firsthand experience, and what is most deeply calling to me now. At times, this has been unsettling, when things I’ve felt certain about suddenly no longer seem certain, or when what is calling me feels scary, or when all I can feel is darkness and confusion.

What is it that I most want to express or convey?

Here are some responses that poured out:

The wonder of the apparently ordinary—the wonder of being alive, even with all the pain and suffering that life includes. The sacred is everywhere. The beauty, the love, the joy, the sacredness is in the presence. Awareness is unconditional love, beholding and illuminating everything, allowing everything, clinging to nothing.

All there is, is this one bottomless moment Here-Now. There are two essential realizations about this truth that must be in balance, both equally liberating, equally important: (1) Don’t miss it! Be here now! (2) You can’t miss it. There is only Here-Now, whatever form it takes.

You can’t get it wrong. Everything belongs.

Shifting from thinking into sensing opens us to the felt sense of presence, enables seeing through the thought-sense of separation and encapsulation and realizing the emptiness, impermanence, evanescence, non-substantiality, spaciousness, and ungraspable nature of everything that appears. Sensing is a way of opening to presence itself, to awareness, to the core of our being, to this that is the common factor in every different experience and what remains when all experiencing ends.

Discovering and being the openness, spaciousness, and aliveness of presence.

Seeing the illusory nature and powerlessness of the apparent author-thinker-chooser-doer. Discovering the power of presence-awareness.

Questioning all our limited identities. Questioning all beliefs. Always being ready to see something new. Holding to nothing.

Waking up from the fixating, grasping, concretizing tendencies of mind. Abiding nowhere / holding on to nothing.

Not getting stuck on one side of a conceptual divide (e.g., self / no self; something to do / nothing to do; free will / determinism; mind / matter). Not mistaking any of these maps for the actual (ungraspable, inconceivable, unresolvable) territory itself. 

Reality appears as holographic and fractal with multiple dimensions or ways it can be seen. Both conventional and absolute perspectives have their place. Non-duality transcends and includes duality. Recognizing seamless boundless impersonal unicity doesn’t mean denying our human beingness in all its unique particularity and vulnerability. Seamlessness and diversity, oneness and multiplicity are both true. We are both ocean and wave. This living actuality is not one, not two.

We are ultimately utterly clueless about what this all is or how it all got here or what it means. All ideas and beliefs, both scientific and metaphysical, can be doubted and may potentially someday be overturned. Ideas are maps or ways of seeing that can be useful if held lightly. But as they say in Zen, not knowing is most intimate.

In holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom and relief. We don’t need to know what this is or how it all got here or whether it all boils down to quarks or consciousness. All we can ever know with undoubtable certainty is the undeniable fact of being here now as aware presence and present experiencing (sometimes referred to as I Am and This Is.) The labels we can doubt. Explanations we can doubt. But the direct knowing of being here now is undeniable.

This undoubtable beingness, this indivisible aware presence is easy to apparently overlook because thoughts, ideas and storylines have a kind of hypnotic power and can so easily capture the attention, especially the central thought-sense-mirage of the separate, independent “me”.

But, in fact, this simple beingness is the jewel beyond all price, the light and the dark to which we must surrender and into which we must dissolve. This is God, the Heart, the Unknowable, pure Love. We must become this Love.

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—these are some raw notes that have flowed out in response to those questions: What is it that I most want to express or convey, what do I feel really matters, what is authentic and true in my own firsthand experience, and what is most deeply calling me now? Some of it is well-worn and familiar ground, things I’ve said many times before, and some of it—that final paragraph—feels new and vulnerable and not fully formed. I may never have dared to say some of it before. The last paragraph feels a bit like stepping out of the boat and walking on water. 

And because the thought of walking on water feels risky, there was a temptation to edit or remove that final paragraph about God and the Heart and Love, at the very least to remove the word “must” or the word “become.” To stay in the boat. But it emerged with all those words, rather like a koan, coming from the heart, describing what I might at this moment call the soul’s journey, becoming this Love. Those are not phrases or words I’m used to using, nor are they ones I feel moved right now to explain. But I will say that what is being evoked here is not entirely unfamiliar ground, as the following excerpts from my second book, Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is, might suggest:

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from a chapter called “Devotion” in my book Awake in the Heartland: 

Who is it we spend our entire life loving? — Kabir

I dreamed once that the Guru instructed me to bring sweets to the satsang dinner. Dessert was my assignment. Dessert is the useless course, the ecstatic course that nourishes the heart but not the body. It is like the extravagant feast in that wonderful Danish movie, Babette’s Feast. Dessert is the course I spurn, like Babette’s puritans, in my pursuit of holiness and perfection. It is the delicious course my mother delights in so completely, the favorite of children. It is the metaphoric antidote to my fixation of doing everything right: that which is wanted, but which one should not have. I was not happy when the Guru told me that my assignment was dessert. Every righteous fiber recoiled. I wanted to bring broccoli or salad. But beneath the recoil, there was some sweet desire to completely lose control, to be engulfed in dessert. One of my fears has always been that if I lost my grip, I’d turn into some mindless bhakti type swooning in devotion. Utterly useless, foolish, without shame. Fully in love, completely mad.

Is it possible to be a mindless swooning bhakti devoted to the rain, the traffic, the wind in the leaves, the utter simplicity of bare awareness? 

—from Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

Another except from my book Awake in the Heartland, about a retreat I went on in the 90s with a wild guru named Ngeton:

We did movement/energy work to get us out of our heads and into our bodies. We did devotional singing to open the heart. We did eye gazing, where you sit face to face with a partner and gaze into their eyes without looking away; you can laugh or cry—anything is okay, as long as you don’t look away. There was a lot of love, a lot of ecstasy, a lot of laughter on this retreat.

At one point, I was wearing a bindi on my forehead (one of those little dots) and ecstatically singing Hare Krishna. It used to be my worst fear that I’d end up in a group like this, wearing a bindi on my forehead, singing bhajans, sitting in ecstasy at the feet of some guru surrounded by a bunch of obsequious devotees. The very thought of such a scene would have made me shudder with revulsion. But oh, to be perfectly honest, I would also have been secretly fascinated, wishing in some dark and forbidden part of me that I could allow myself such a wild indulgence as this. And now, my worst fear had been realized, and I was so happy!

Finally, none of it makes sense. There’s just sensation. Just what is. Just the absolutely beautiful, crazy, unknowable, ungraspable mystery that produces the giraffe, the camel, the zebra, the elephant, the orchid, the neon colored tropical fish, the dolphin, the shark, Toni Packer, Da Free John, Ngeton, Mother Teresa, Rajneesh, Gangaji, Billy Graham, Ramana Maharshi, Oral Roberts, Joko Beck, Papaji, and the Pope—all in the same Universe. One can only laugh. Sing bhajans. And be amazed.

—from Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

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So, that’s it for now. Thank you all for being here. May we all find that amazement, that wild, care-free joy and love in the simplicity of what is, just as it is, right here, right now.