Go fish

 To know what mud is like, stick your face in it. If you want to eat a fish, go fish!!! To wake up to what is here you have to look for it. You have to experience it for yourself to know what it is. You must act. You must make a choice so that you can have an experience which you will learn from. This means you cannot remain where you are comfortable all of the time. You have to take a risk so that you may know who you really are, so that you can live. We can be so afraid of stepping into the unknown. We can be so comfortable in our own bubble. We have to meet life halfway. Until we take a step, it will not come out to meet us. We have to ask ourselves what we really want from life, and what we are prepared to do to make this happen. At the bottom of whatever answers arise in our minds is the desire to be a free human being. To be awake and alive in this moment. To be present, and have the courage to follow our own path, that is etched in the depths of our being and cannot be named. We wish to fearlessly pursue this in every moment of our life. We will never be happy with settling for anything but this: being our courageous own self. If we wish to gain everything from life, we have to give everything we have to it. We cannot hold back. We have to risk everything, put it all on the table. When we find our dream and our true nature, we will gain the courage and the determination to do so. We finally see something worth living for, worth risking everything for, and we are tired of settling for less. 

The truth is that deep down we know who we are and what we want. We are just afraid for whatever reason to embrace this. It has been buried away and forgotten. As long as it remains so, it will make us ill, confused, and lost in life. Our true self is alive and awake within us. We have to awaken to it, by choosing to face who we really are in this moment, by radically accepting this present moment, and refusing to be blinded by fear and foolishness. Our life will not wait for us. We have to catch up to it and find it, wherever it has gone off to. We have to give up the life that keeps us from being wide awake, so we can have the life we have always wanted. We must be fearless, and uncompromising. So much is ready to get in the way, to take over our mind and heart. We must defy it at all costs, because to lose ourselves in it, is to fall into darkness and forget that there was ever something worth living for. It’s like grabbing a hot coal and holding onto it. The coal supplies us with our vital life force, we are utterly disabled without it. Even if it burns us, it is better to be burned and awake, that numb and comfortable in sleep. This is the only way forward!! To avoid this, is to avoid awakening and living altogether. It is to remain an animal living in a daze in the field. To be a human being is the greatest thing we can possess in this universe. A human being is wide awake to their existence and the existence of the universe. They have the ability to consciously live and act within it. Humans have the power to turn towards Wisdom, the Dharma, to let go of ignorance. We can step outside of karma and be fully enlightened beings. I think the burning heart desire within each one of us is striving to be fully awake in this moment. To be free of ignorance and to be valiantly committed to liberating all beings from suffering. We each have unique ways of doing this. This life lives within us right now. The truth is that this is who we are right now. Even when we do not see it. We are perfectly awake, perfectly alive, exactly as we are. There is nothing we can gain or change about the way we are. There is no conditioned self, no conditioned mind. We simply are as we are and this is it. The conditioned mind is a passing dream. The emptiness of Buddha-consciousness stands alone with no other. Life evolves before us and all around us. We are One with this ever-changing consciousness. The world of form is an expression of the infinite. With all of it’s laws and layers, it is empty and formless. The world of form is infinity. Infinity and the world of form are inseparable, they are One. Infinity continually empties itself into the dream of creation, as is it continually remembering itself as infinity. Although it may remember itself, it remains ceaselessly awake and fully itself. Regardless of how far it descends into the dream of creation, it never loses one bit of itself. It remains free and fully awake, fully itself. The self that awakens within creation, the Dharma, is truly no-self, without self, and unconditioned consciousness. All things are One and equal in Buddha consciousness, because all things are each perfect expressions of the infinite. They are all the same perfect expression of the infinite. Each thing within the Universe contains the whole universe within it, as each thing is the entire Universe. The part and the whole are the same, you cannot distinguish between one and the other, between anything and any other thing. It is all the same, One. One cannot be held by the conditioned self, it cannot be seen by the conditioned self. It is seen and known by the Buddha whom has awakened in it, as it. It is the perfect Unity or non-duality of all things, of form and formlessness. It is still and quiet, and completely open. It is unaffected by the ever-changing world of form. This is true even as it resides directly within it, being fully immersed in it.

Christ awakens within form, yet it does not know what it really is. Christ awakens to the formlessness of it’s condition and realizes that Christ and all things are truly without self. It lets go of it’s Christ nature and dissolves into pure emptiness. From emptiness the Buddha awakens and the radical non-duality of existence becomes apparent for the first time. Christ is the answer to the limitations imposed by conditioned form. It is the way out, to be free of suffering this bondage. Yet Christ is not truly Christ, but Spirit, which is formless and perfectly transcendent. When conditioned mind is completely dropped in the Pure Emptiness of Spirit, the Buddha awakens. The world begins to arise again and it is seen that it is no other than the Buddha itself in a multitude of varying forms. The multitude is indivisible from It that perceives the Multitude. There is no duality between what is seen and what is seeing. There is no duality anywhere at all. It is beyond intellectual comprehension, it is something that must be experienced first hand. Yet at the same time, it is all that is experienced, because it is all that is real.