The biggest embrace of love you'll ever make is to embrace yourself completely. Then you'll realize you've just embraced the whole universe, and everything and everybody in it.
Instead of striving towards some distant goal that you will never reach, I invite you to stop and ask: How am I avoiding the enlightenment that is already present in each moment? How am I seeing separation where it doesn't exist?
The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.
When someone says, 'I love you,' he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, 'I hate you,' she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views-literally.
One must be willing to stand alone - in the unknown, with no reference to authority or the past or any of one's conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility.
When you rest deeply in the Unknown without trying to escape, your experience becomes very vast. As the experience of the Unknown deepens, your boundaries begin to dissolve. You realize, not just intellectually but on a deep level, that you have no idea who or what you are. A few minutes ago, you knew who you were-you had a history and a personality-but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that.
Many spiritual people are involved in a radical denial of what is happening. They want to transcend it, get rid of it, get out of it, get away from it. There's nothing wrong with that feeling, but the approach doesn't work because it's escapism in spiritual clothing. It's wearing spiritual clothing and spiritual concepts, but it is really no different than a drunk in the gutter who doesn't want to feel the pain anymore. When you abide and accept everything completely and fully, you automatically go beyond.
Feel this moment, see it with a willingness to experience it deeply, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. Emotionally and feelingly be fully present, right here, vulnerable, with your heart. Just be present. Don't live from your conditioned mind, live from unconditional truth.
Right now you can allow yourself to experience a very simple sense of not knowing - not knowing what or who you are, not knowing what this moment is, not knowing anything. If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and mysterious openness dawns within you. Relaxing into not knowing is almost like surrendering into a big, comfortable chair; you just fall into a field of possibility.
If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by
all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the
people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality,
or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put
yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.
Can you imagine if you really let it in that you are not a problem to be solved in any way? Imagine you knew that anything that would tell you otherwise is just a movement of thought in the mind that says "Whatever is, isn't the way it is supposed to be." So the biggest act of compassion starts within. And when the self is no longer seen as a problem, this is called "the peace that passes all understanding."
At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.