The Heart of Letting Go

 Love is the heart of letting go. Love is the heart of awakening. Love is the heart of everything. Everything is Love. Where am I now? In love. Where will I be tomorrow? In love. Where was I yesterday? In love. Yet only now exists and now is love. Everything about this moment, this place is radiant love extending in all directions infinitely. Everything we don't think of as love lies within love as love. Love is life. Love is the universe. Every thought, every feeling, every form, anything you can experience. Infinite bliss. Infinitely deep love. Awakening love. 

We think we need to be somewhere else to be ok. We think where we are is insufficient. We judge it and many parts of ourself because of our conditioned consciousness which lives in ignorance of things as they are. We want to escape from what we perceive as limiting to ourself that is here right now. We look to the future and to activities we can do now to end the effects these elements have on us. The truth is that to change these effects we bring ourselves directly to what we perceive and experience as negative feelings rather than avoiding them and reacting with hostility towards what we imagine produces these feelings. Negative feelings are created by immersion in condition consciousness which creates resistance in our bodies and in our hearts. That which is conditioned, limited in imagination, is inherently opposed to part of the universe. When we live from it, we live from a place where our imagined separate being is at war with part of life. Thinking we can have peace by defeating this part of life is a delusion, because in doing so we perpetuate the consciousness that is limited and at war with parts of the world. We may think that it is just one or several things that we need to fix or end to find peace, but these things will keep on coming as long as we are living in the conditioned mind. It requires recognizing the conditioned mind and extracting ourselves from it, or extracting it from ourselves that is the solution. It is the type of consciousness, not the particular object of opposition that keeps us from fulfillment. Love is the reality and the truth we find ourselves in when we step out of the conditioned mind. 

We see where we are as insufficient because we are living from conditioned consciousness. Instead of turning from what is here, we must face what it here. Turning away only perpetuates insufficiency. It only perpetuates limited conditioned being. Which often doesn't feel like being at all. When we recognize that turning away is simply continuing the same fundamentally flawed process we intuitively resist this mechanism. Here we wonder what does bring us fulfillment if this cannot. The only way to find out what does work is to bring out attention to our feelings and ourselves without resisting how we are. We have to look at ourselves and what we see as our problems consciously without judgement so we can be objective in studying how things actually work. Our conditioned consciousness wants us to do things because we think we need to do them this way, when we learn that this thinking is not based off of awareness and understanding and is therefore unwise. Only through conscious attention on ourselves can we learn how we and the world really operate and what actually brings fulfillment and peace. 

To do this we must divert a portion of our awareness to objectively watching what we are doing. Through this we become directly aware of how things work through awareness rather than through thought or belief. The more we do this the more we realize that the way we think we are and the way we think the world is are both not true. This awareness is a step away from conditioned being. Eventually through this practice of mindfulness we realize that who we really are is unconditioned. If conditioned consciousness is inherently based off ignorance, then all conditioned states are not absolutely true. What is absolutely true logically must be unconditioned. This is realized in contemplative thought and in inner vision brought about by mindfulness. As mindfulness deepens we build a body of awareness that is further and further removed from conditioned consciousness until it is completely removed from it and we find ourselves in unconditioned being. Here we realize that our understanding of conditioned consciousness is a conditioned understanding and therefore untrue. That in fact what we perceive and perceived as conditioned consciousness is not conditioned, but also unconditioned. We only thought it was conditioned because conditioned perception is the result of ignorance and is not in fact an actuality, but an imagination. Nothing is in fact conditioned and nothing is in fact conditioned. What is conditioned consciousness is merely a temporary imagination that beings pass through as they awaken. It is a thought and a perspective, but not a real one. 

Thus, if our main strategy is being at war with how we are now and turning away from this, then we are acting from a place that can't bring about the effect we want. It's a place that has no power to do so, because it is an imagination and not a reality. If everything is unconditioned then nothing is any different from anything else. There are no particular conditions to separate anything. What we see as negative is indistinct from what we see as positive and good. If nothing is distinct and separate then when most of our heart is turned away from this moment because we judge it to be insufficient we are not just turning away from what we see as negative, but from all of ourself. Fulfillment can never be found in the future by turning away from the present, or by lingering in the past. It can only be found here now because what is happening now is all that exists. Past and future are conditioned understandings that we turn away from the present towards to find fulfillment. We think they are not now and that will were fulfilled or will be fulfilled then. This is turning away from negativity and immersing ourselves in conditioned consciousness which is inherently at odds with the world and holds our being in limited imagination where it cannot find fulfillment. When we turn away from the present towards past or future, we are turning away from our unconditioned being which is all that we have. We find this being by being here now with it as it is. This is what now is. Now is unconditioned being, which meaning being that is not separate, means being that is whole. Whole means fulfillment. Fulfillment is found here and now because what here and now are is the whole. The happy ending that everyone is looking for, except it will never be an ending, it will only be a now.