I’d rather have the precious bitter sweetness of a full life then sweetness only with detachment
After pushing world away or being a passive watcher, I want to wrap my arms around the world and hold it close to me
Now knowing that all of it is god and I’d been turning away from it seeking it only beyond form!
I felt oh no how I’ve missed out on gods face!!
But this is in a new way, where the world is precious in a new way because it’s all god, this is all gods humanity and it’s so bitter sweetly poignantly beautiful and ugly and I want it all! Nothing left out!
Was trying to transcend it and exclude it !
I was pushing god away!!
I wanted it’s purity
It seems like the universe wasn’t done being me I hadn’t fully given it the chance to experience itself as me and serve others uniquely as me, express as me,
I’d abandoned god! Without knowing it.
I want to engage with gods humanity
And help god on gods human journey
To love itself as human
And so that we can love ourselves more knowing our divinity
I could die in these moments held in this relational field ,.:…:. It feels safe to die not because there’s no one here to die, but because … so much ?
Heart broken open
Into safe vulnerability
And it’s something at once transcendent and deeply immanent
Transimmanent
And then even the littlest things are poignant and I’m fascinated by interested in people and their possibly mundane lives and stories because that too is god
even small talk with taxi driver
to acknowledge their existence
the significance
in awe of our shared existence
in this grand mystery
we've shown up in
at the same time
of simply asking how
someone's day is
Extraordinary God is also these mundane stories that the extraordinary AS the ordinary
I feel my heart is pushing me, compelling me out into the world
Not urging me to retreat within any more
And then there’s this new thing... devotion
Because I revere god everywhere
I can be in relationship with god
Rather than dissolving into it
To become it, it’s formlessness
Being in a relationship with god
In every relationship I’m in!
With people
With glasses of coffee
With dogs on the street
With fallen leaves
I don’t become them
Like in the past
When I was enamored
With my own absence
Now with the presence of self
As included in
The greater context that opens up
The sweeping vastness that is also contained
That is made of things
And the spaces between them
But actually the relationship between the things
That the space between
Allows
That the space and the things
In space arise together
always
For relationship to be
If only space no relate
If only form the same
And almost brings me to my knees
To rejoice!
That we are the universe
In relationship with itself
That it separated, unividuated
So we could delight in this
Intimacy
So that IT could too.
Giving us
Giving itself
This glorious gift
This glorious both/and
Of divine immanence
This isn’t a nonduality
Of only one and not two
It’s of the one
As two
It’s of gods humanity
The universes
I’m so sorry
I didn’t visit you in prison
I didn't know you were there
Every emotion
Is Roaringly
Sacred
I want them all
When I know this
Now there’s something to bow to
To pray to
That is both self and other
Then everywhere I look I see god where
I used to think it couldn’t be further from
Now god saying, hi, I’ve been here all along!
You can see me! Finally. I’ve been waiting so long. I can see me, finally, I’ve been waiting so long.
Rapture in the public bathroom
Not a flat spaciousness of uniformity or placidity only
Gained the freedom of selfless biundlessness without and within
Lost my soul within the space
And saw the selflessness was self-serving in the end
De-humanizing me
I dehumanized you
De-humanizing me
I de-humanized god
And such is an “enlightenment”
That in promising perfection
Demands it from you
Lies of perfection
Rob us of our
Very lives
Rob of us
Seeing the beauty
That is right here in front of us
In the battered and bruised
The flaws are holy too
Whoever says otherwise
I feel sorry for you
I know the pain of
Striving for perfectionist ideals
I know the pain of
Sacrificing the beauty
That comes with willing to be afraid
Of relationship
The pain of trapped
In particularity
But I also know the equal pain
Of being trapped in spaciousness
But the pain of spaciousness was worse
At least in particularness
I have relationship
And the beauty of
Shared experience
Of shared humanity to
Fill my heart
Not just emptiness
To accompany
My selflessness
My absence
There couldn’t possibly be a downside to enlightenment!
You must have done something wrong in
Or… enlightenment ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
To see god everywhere
You must give up
Your perfectionist ideals
Of expecting god
To be perfect
You must give up
Attachment to purity
And be willing to
Look upon gods deformities
And what a blessing!!
To see you can stop
Striving for effortlessness only
For a squeky clean
So yes
ThT is the sacrifice
Losing a perfect god
An enlightenment of perfection
If you don’t want to lose your humanity
You don’t want to sacrifice your soul
Your passion
Your verve
Your relationships
Your engagement
Then you’ll have to sacrifice
Enlightenment
As enlightenment has been
Portrayed through the ages
To sacrifice a transcendence
That does not include
Everything
You I’m
Yes you’ll have to sacrifice an Eden
A
You’ll have to give up spiritual
Hedonism
But this is your choice to make
To stay on the outside looking in
Untethered
And perhaps get trapped in the sky
With nothing connecting you to the ground
No you cannot transcend humanity
And to say, is that not the ultimate
Grandiosity?
“I am no longer among the rest of you”
I am not like you, mortal, vulnerable
To
The direct path
Is seeing god right here in front of you
And everywhere
Seeing that god is not elsewhere
Let’s get sober about what this path does and doesn’t do for us, what it has and hasn’t done. There’s no reliability in saying it’s made anyone kinder, more altruistic, humble, ethical and plenty to show the opposite actually.
It shows you can be more unphased by pain
Hurt but disaffected
Untouchable
So what IS the value in these “realizations” beyond being spiritual drugs that make one’s personal experience more pleasant?
Why does the egoless people seem to be the most arrogant?
The most self-satisfied
Self-righteous
It’s the personal self that cares about what is personal that cares about others, and wants to serve them
Don’t we need things to matter more not less? But for the right things to matter?
Is it making people act more lovingly?
Be more inclusive?
Be more inclined to participate in positive change or social justice?
More empathic? Or more callous?
More cynical or more optimistic?
Negativity bias?
More rational or less rational?
More respectful or disrespectful?
More selfless or more self-centered?
The no self path is ironically a self-centered one. People check out from their lives, relationships, families, communities. If you just escape and abandon and transcend, it’s only ever self serving, we become myopically fixated on these escape routes, obsessed, withdrawn, navel-gazing
Preaching inactivity when there’s so much we need to also do to keep humanity going
But if you don’t think your life is worth living why should anyone else’s be?
If you want the cycle of life to end, why wouldn’t you want that for everyone?
They all talk about personal freedom and wellbeing but not about serving others, not about more compassionate action, or caring about what happens to others and figuring out what you can do to serve in some way, it’s all about me and my awakening, me and my enlightenment attainment
When we think about what the world needs most from us to last to survive , what does it require from people?
What will need to value? What will we need to be motivated to do?
What will our priorities need to be?
Interestingly enlightenment wasn’t meant to help sustain life and for a future better world but was focused on escaping it and actually ending it…
After pushing world away or being a passive watcher, I want to wrap my arms around the world and hold it close to me
Now knowing that all of it is god and I’d been turning away from it seeking it only beyond form!
I felt oh no how I’ve missed out on gods face!!
But this is in a new way, where the world is precious in a new way because it’s all god, this is all gods humanity and it’s so bitter sweetly poignantly beautiful and ugly and I want it all! Nothing left out!
Was trying to transcend it and exclude it !
I was pushing god away!!
I wanted it’s purity
It seems like the universe wasn’t done being me I hadn’t fully given it the chance to experience itself as me and serve others uniquely as me, express as me,
I’d abandoned god! Without knowing it.
I want to engage with gods humanity
And help god on gods human journey
To love itself as human
And so that we can love ourselves more knowing our divinity
I could die in these moments held in this relational field ,.:…:. It feels safe to die not because there’s no one here to die, but because … so much ?
Heart broken open
Into safe vulnerability
And it’s something at once transcendent and deeply immanent
Transimmanent
And then even the littlest things are poignant and I’m fascinated by interested in people and their possibly mundane lives and stories because that too is god
even small talk with taxi driver
to acknowledge their existence
the significance
in awe of our shared existence
in this grand mystery
we've shown up in
at the same time
of simply asking how
someone's day is
Extraordinary God is also these mundane stories that the extraordinary AS the ordinary
I feel my heart is pushing me, compelling me out into the world
Not urging me to retreat within any more
And then there’s this new thing... devotion
Because I revere god everywhere
I can be in relationship with god
Rather than dissolving into it
To become it, it’s formlessness
Being in a relationship with god
In every relationship I’m in!
With people
With glasses of coffee
With dogs on the street
With fallen leaves
I don’t become them
Like in the past
When I was enamored
With my own absence
Now with the presence of self
As included in
The greater context that opens up
The sweeping vastness that is also contained
That is made of things
And the spaces between them
But actually the relationship between the things
That the space between
Allows
That the space and the things
In space arise together
always
For relationship to be
If only space no relate
If only form the same
And almost brings me to my knees
To rejoice!
That we are the universe
In relationship with itself
That it separated, unividuated
So we could delight in this
Intimacy
So that IT could too.
Giving us
Giving itself
This glorious gift
This glorious both/and
Of divine immanence
This isn’t a nonduality
Of only one and not two
It’s of the one
As two
It’s of gods humanity
The universes
I’m so sorry
I didn’t visit you in prison
I didn't know you were there
Every emotion
Is Roaringly
Sacred
I want them all
When I know this
Now there’s something to bow to
To pray to
That is both self and other
Then everywhere I look I see god where
I used to think it couldn’t be further from
Now god saying, hi, I’ve been here all along!
You can see me! Finally. I’ve been waiting so long. I can see me, finally, I’ve been waiting so long.
Rapture in the public bathroom
Not a flat spaciousness of uniformity or placidity only
Gained the freedom of selfless biundlessness without and within
Lost my soul within the space
And saw the selflessness was self-serving in the end
De-humanizing me
I dehumanized you
De-humanizing me
I de-humanized god
And such is an “enlightenment”
That in promising perfection
Demands it from you
Lies of perfection
Rob us of our
Very lives
Rob of us
Seeing the beauty
That is right here in front of us
In the battered and bruised
The flaws are holy too
Whoever says otherwise
I feel sorry for you
I know the pain of
Striving for perfectionist ideals
I know the pain of
Sacrificing the beauty
That comes with willing to be afraid
Of relationship
The pain of trapped
In particularity
But I also know the equal pain
Of being trapped in spaciousness
But the pain of spaciousness was worse
At least in particularness
I have relationship
And the beauty of
Shared experience
Of shared humanity to
Fill my heart
Not just emptiness
To accompany
My selflessness
My absence
There couldn’t possibly be a downside to enlightenment!
You must have done something wrong in
Or… enlightenment ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
To see god everywhere
You must give up
Your perfectionist ideals
Of expecting god
To be perfect
You must give up
Attachment to purity
And be willing to
Look upon gods deformities
And what a blessing!!
To see you can stop
Striving for effortlessness only
For a squeky clean
So yes
ThT is the sacrifice
Losing a perfect god
An enlightenment of perfection
If you don’t want to lose your humanity
You don’t want to sacrifice your soul
Your passion
Your verve
Your relationships
Your engagement
Then you’ll have to sacrifice
Enlightenment
As enlightenment has been
Portrayed through the ages
To sacrifice a transcendence
That does not include
Everything
You I’m
Yes you’ll have to sacrifice an Eden
A
You’ll have to give up spiritual
Hedonism
But this is your choice to make
To stay on the outside looking in
Untethered
And perhaps get trapped in the sky
With nothing connecting you to the ground
No you cannot transcend humanity
And to say, is that not the ultimate
Grandiosity?
“I am no longer among the rest of you”
I am not like you, mortal, vulnerable
To
The direct path
Is seeing god right here in front of you
And everywhere
Seeing that god is not elsewhere
Let’s get sober about what this path does and doesn’t do for us, what it has and hasn’t done. There’s no reliability in saying it’s made anyone kinder, more altruistic, humble, ethical and plenty to show the opposite actually.
It shows you can be more unphased by pain
Hurt but disaffected
Untouchable
So what IS the value in these “realizations” beyond being spiritual drugs that make one’s personal experience more pleasant?
Why does the egoless people seem to be the most arrogant?
The most self-satisfied
Self-righteous
It’s the personal self that cares about what is personal that cares about others, and wants to serve them
Don’t we need things to matter more not less? But for the right things to matter?
Is it making people act more lovingly?
Be more inclusive?
Be more inclined to participate in positive change or social justice?
More empathic? Or more callous?
More cynical or more optimistic?
Negativity bias?
More rational or less rational?
More respectful or disrespectful?
More selfless or more self-centered?
The no self path is ironically a self-centered one. People check out from their lives, relationships, families, communities. If you just escape and abandon and transcend, it’s only ever self serving, we become myopically fixated on these escape routes, obsessed, withdrawn, navel-gazing
Preaching inactivity when there’s so much we need to also do to keep humanity going
But if you don’t think your life is worth living why should anyone else’s be?
If you want the cycle of life to end, why wouldn’t you want that for everyone?
They all talk about personal freedom and wellbeing but not about serving others, not about more compassionate action, or caring about what happens to others and figuring out what you can do to serve in some way, it’s all about me and my awakening, me and my enlightenment attainment
When we think about what the world needs most from us to last to survive , what does it require from people?
What will need to value? What will we need to be motivated to do?
What will our priorities need to be?
Interestingly enlightenment wasn’t meant to help sustain life and for a future better world but was focused on escaping it and actually ending it…