Grief, unresisted, is grace. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt anymore, it doesn't mean it doesn't rip your heart out....In great grief, there's an incredible love in it. In love there's a tinge of bitter. In true love. My teacher used to say 'all love is bittersweet'. All things experienced fully, reveal their opposite.
It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.
Self-inquiry is a spiritually induced form of wintertime. It's not about looking for a right answer so much as stripping away and letting you see what is not necessary, what you can do without, what you are without your leaves.
True love has nothing to do with liking someone, agreeing with him or her or being compatible. It is a love of unity, a love of seeing God wearing all the masks, and recognising itself in them all. With this love you can feel the walls of opposition come down naturally in the acknowledgement of deep connection. Not only do the walls of opposition fall, but love is felt for every human being and for life itself.
One Zen master said, The whole universe is my true personality. This is a very wonderful saying... If you want to see what you truly are, open the window, and everything you see is in fact the expression of your inner reality. Can you embrace all of it?
In silence a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind.
As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.
Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That's the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart.
This moment in which you experience stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
The realization of Truth and Reality can never be created by the mind ... it always comes as a gift of grace. Inquiry clears away misperceptions and illusions, making one available to the movements of grace.
True sincerity reveals a powerful form of clarity and discernment that is necessary in order to perceive yourself honestly without flinching or being held captive by your conditioned mind's judgments and defensiveness.