Against the backdrop of eternal love and pure awareness, our lives play out.

 

Most of us never stop long enough to contemplate this truth because we believe so strongly in our identity as a person with a body and a mind.

 

And even if we come to some sort of realization that we are not just this body/mind, fewer still are willing to give up their identity and all the attachments that go with that.

 

We say we want freedom, but only if we can still be a special “me”, only if we don’t have to let go of our ideas about money, success, relationships, family, work, or health.

 

The “only if” syndrome is the voice of the ego who believes that freedom is its ultimate death.

 

Where does the ego live?

 

In the mind.

 

It’s only the mind that must become quiet, and that is not such a difficult state to reach when we can be gently pointed back towards our hearts.

 

At first it feels long and tiring (to the ego) and we begin to notice just how much our socially conditioned mind is running on auto-pilot. Just ask anyone who is new to meditation.

 

But after a while, (and some inevitable inner cleansing storms) we begin to realize that it feels warmer and more welcoming to live within the heart. It feels peaceful, quiet, and harmonious, and when we are there, we may begin to realize that this peaceful, inner quietness is really our natural, most authentic state, and that perhaps all the outer busy-ness of the material world, all that is not permanent (including our emotions, attachments, beliefs, thoughts) is not what’s real and lasting after all.

 

It serves us to contemplate the question, “What never changes?”

 

The changeless is who we are.

 

We wake up each morning, live our daily lives, and go to sleep against the backdrop of the changeless, all the while praying and longing for some kind of inner peace and harmony, not realizing that what we are longing for is closer to us than our very breath.

 

We feel separated from”home” and yet our entire existence unfolds within the very space of “home”.

 

The only thing that makes us believe we are separate is the conditioned mind, and the conditioned mind is simply untruths passed on which we believe in so strongly and which has created eons of duality and suffering.

 

The conditioned mind ends when we get quiet inside and stay quiet.

 

Then, at first, if we can simply keep our attention on the eternal, benevolent, detached, silent Self behind which everything is constantly coming and going, knowing fully in our hearts that we are that changeless Self, then grace begins to move into our lives.

 

After a while, our attention quietly merges with pure awareness, and we discover the endless peace of being in this world, but not of it.

 

Such is our real purpose for being here.

 

Such is the evolution of humanity at this time.

 

With love,

Heather xo