Reality is always true to itself. When you're in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law.
Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects. Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes. As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive contractions and identifications. It returns to its natural non-state of Presence.
No matter what identity we cling to, it takes great courage to step out of the old masks we wear and the old scripts that we live by, and open ourselves to the mysterious inner core of our being.
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.
The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do.
Retreat is a response to the call of the heart-that call which beckons us toward reality, to the truth of our being, to that which is truly sane, really real and liberating ... When a group of people come together as a response to that kind of inward call, it creates a very powerful environment, where truth is held in the highest esteem and the reality of our being responds to that deepest intention.
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?
You can't lose what you serve. That's the secret. What you serve, you can't lose. What you don't serve and what you try to hold onto, you can't hold onto. It's always slipping out of your fingers.
If we look at the world around us, we see that we are conditioned to not listen deeply. Because isn't that what silence is? It's a listening, a deep wordless listening.
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.
Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know.