Unmani - ‘Die to Love’

‘Die to Love’ is a paradox. Death is Love. Love is Death. This Love is not the conditional and personal love of relating, but the unconditional Love that is right now as this experience. Recognising that you are what is right now, is the death to the Love that you are.

‘Die to Love’ means to die to everything you think you know without hope of reward or achievement. Without any idea of the love you will receive or experience if you do so, but courageously dying now simply because you know that what is hoped for or believed in, is false and illusory. So often we believe that if we do something, we will get somewhere. We try to bargain with life. We hope that if we work hard or inquire deeply enough, we will arrive at the treasure that every seeker hopes for – fulfillment, freedom, love. But life does not accept a superficial bargain. Life only accepts all or nothing. Full immersion – death. While you are trying to get somewhere (even if you pretend you are not), you are still believing illusion to be true. You are still believing that this pretence of a life is real. You are still holding on to the idea that you can be saved by some future experience. Life will not accept a bargain based in fear of reality. While you still prefer the dream of hopes, over real life, that is all you will get.

However, if you are longing and praying for freedom and are willing to sacrifice everything that you believe in for it, then life will no doubt honour that bargain. This is the death that I am referring to. Being willing to sacrifice your whole life and everything you hold sacred for what is real.

I remember making this bargain with life for the first time, (there were several other similar or even more desperate bargains made in the years that followed) when I was a very depressed and suicidal teenager. I clearly remember saying/praying (to Life) that I would be willing to sacrifice my whole life, and every bit of meaning that it held. I didn’t have some clear idea of what I wanted in exchange, I just knew that my experience of life felt false, and I was willing to lose all of it, even if it meant physically dying in the process. A life of pretending to be something or someone that I knew was false, was not worth living for.

This sacrificing everything that is false right now, simply because it is false, leaves a wide open space. Empty. Not needing to fill it with some new false idea or attitude, but sacrificing the falsity of that too… and that too… and that too… Empty… Nothing… And in that nothing, Life is felt. Life is experienced just the way it is. It doesn’t fit into some kind of idea of how it should be. It doesn’t necessarily feel good. Most likely it will feel uncomfortable to not rely on an idea of how to live or be. Maybe fear will be felt. Maybe freedom will be experienced. Maybe thoughts will come back in trying to claim something again. But whatever comes in gets sacrificed on the altar to life. Burnt in the fire of Love.

And this is Love. The continual losing everything you believe in, the continual opening, and cracking, the continual humility of letting go of every position you have defended, admitting feelings you have tried to cover up, even if it hurts. Nothing left to hold on to. Any holding is seen in the light of Love and known to be a false dream. No safety. Nowhere to hide. Love is open reality. Love is seeing what is really here now, and no longer kidding yourself. This is the courageous fire of Love that sees through everything that is not reality.

Love is not a certain experience of feeling loving. Love is surrender to whatever is right now. Feeling the pain, feeling the explosive joy, feeling the shame, feeling the sense of agitation, or irritation, or peace. Love makes no distinction and has no preference. It is all Life. It is all felt and experienced the same no matter what label thought puts to it, Love doesn’t care.

If you think about it, it seems that you have the option as to whether you die to Love in this moment, or choose to put it off for some future moment. But this death is only right now. I did not call my website ‘dying to love’ because it is not about trying to die, wondering how to die, or thinking about one day dying. There is no middle ground of trying to understand how you can do this dying, or imagining that you could do it one day… That is simply buying into the illusion again. Putting it off or trying to figure it out is the only way the mind can deal with it. Don’t deal with it. Don’t bother trying to do it. Trade in all of that effort for the reality of what is experienced right now. To die to what is false is only ever obvious, immediate and choiceless. The choice is only when the mind gets involved and ponders as to whether it is a good day to die or not…

Love is courage - the courage to simply stop.

die to love

Mooji - Be here

There is an empty room,
come fully inside.
There are no stories here.
There is no past or future here.
No relatives.
No names, no forms, time, no self.
Don't be in your head now.
Listen from another place; a holy place deep inside your being.
All the things you once talked about are outside now.
This is a room without walls. No door.
Nothing lives here.
It is not a dead space.
It's your true place and Being.
The mind will try to say something like:
‘You cannot stay here,’ or ‘There is nothing here for you,’
but this voice is also phenomenal, while you are not.
Therefore, touch nothing.
Pay attention only to your unmixed self now,
not the personal sense of self.
Personality is only a garment worn by the Self
for a duration called a lifetime.
The body also is just a garment worn for the time being.
Rare is a human being who comes to this place
which cannot be divided;
that cannot die,
where one is naturally happy,
where there are no beginnings or ends.
It is the most pure—immaculate.
From here ego and world arises as fleeting images,
but the Real does not arise.
It permeates all yet nothing permeates it.
Leave everything.
Be here.

Seung Sahn - Clear mind

"Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky. Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don’t worry about clear mind: it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes, you must not be attached to the coming or the going."

Kwan Um School of Zen

Anthony de Mello - Awareness pt.1 on waking up

  

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

http://awareness.tk/

Layman Pang - Leave it be

The past is already past.
Don't try to regain it.
The present does not stay.
Don't try to touch it.
From moment to moment.
The future has not come;
Don't think about it
Beforehand.
Whatever comes to the eye,
Leave it be.
There are no commandments
To be kept;
There's no filth to be cleansed.
With empty mind really
Penetrated, the dharmas
Have no life.
When you can be like this,
You've completed
The ultimate attainment.

Francis Lucille - You were never in your body

Isn't it hard after that to come back into your body and live daily life?

You were never in your body, so the question of coming back into it
doesn't come up. Your body is in you. You are not in it. Your body
appears to you as a series of sensory perceptions and concepts. It is
in this way that you know you have a body, when you feel it or when
you think of it. These perceptions and these thoughts appear in you,
pure conscious attention. You do not appear in them, contrary to what
your parents, your teachers and nearly the whole of the society you live
in has taught you. In flagrant contradiction to your actual experience,
they have taught you that you are in your body as consciousness, that
consciousness is a function emerging from the brain, an organ of your
body. I suggest that you do not give undue credence to this second-hand
knowledge and that you inquire into the raw data of your own experience.
Remember the recipes for happiness that were given to you by these same
people when you were a child, study hard, get a good job, marry the right
man, etc.? These recipes don't work, otherwise you wouldn't be here
asking these questions. They don't work because they are based on a false
perspective of reality, a perspective that I am suggesting that you put into
question.

http://www.francislucille.com/

Andrew Cohen - *That Most Delicate Place*

painting Katia Dudnik

*That Most Delicate Place*

     There is a place in all of us that has remained innocent, uncorrupted
and untouched by the world.  We have to locate that most delicate place.
It is a very sensitive place, it's where we feel love - where tenderness
and compassion arise, free from self-interest.
     This place is the hole we have to fall into - and disappear in forever.

from "Enlightenment is a Secret"  By Andrew Cohen