I was sitting a few nights ago. We sit in silence every night as a community for 45 minutes. All seeking stopped. It was simple and yet, there was no making sense out of it. I suppose desire was still there but I wasn’t longing. The pain of longing was saturated with the knowing that what I was sitting on was god. Sometimes when this happens I can feel myself fight it.‘No!” I exclaim “I want fireworks!” But there was only that deep peace that comes from being filled with the nectar of the gods. I guess the grass is always greener to the thinking brain! LOL!

In what is silent there is no I and yet there is also I. But it is an I that is friends with the bush outside your window, recognizing that it is the same life within – different branches of the same tree. You and the stars, you and the volcanoes of Hawaii – simply branches of the same tree!

Don’t expect any trumpets when you arrive. Expect the personality to defend itself by feeling bored! Follow your bliss… sure… but also follow you boredom. Until it leads you to your quiet. And in your quiet there is nothing to do and the memory of I simply fades in to nothing until only living love remains.

It is thinking’s job to protect the self – an evolutionary mechanism if you will. It protects us from dying by conditioning us to fear or love certain things causing pleasure or pain. It is an important mechanism of survival for the unconscious human. There are many ways to move beyond thinking.All the spiritual techniques that have been invented are essentially tools for this. Thinking continues to adapt to them – true to its purpose of protecting the self. Sometimes a technique we try brings us to a source of peace. We then spend our lives attempting to recreate this experience when thinking has already adapted and it is preventing the very peace you are seeking by attempting to grasp it and contain it.

Whatever practice we do doesn’t matter. What matters is our ability to shift our awareness and rest in the unknown. This unknown burns like a fire. We need to keep tending the fire in order to produce heat. We do this with our awareness of the unspoken/unspeaking. In meditation this is to rest in the knowing of who you are. The thinking brain protects the self by distracting awareness with fears and desires. Our task is simple. Remain aware of who you are (the pre-verbal experience not a definition) no matter what you are doing and where your attention rests. Have it be like an intuitive voice inside even when your thinking is grasping at heat as if it could contain it – even when your thinking is attempting to define what it is knowing. You need do nothing else. And eventually there will be nobody to even do that once the burning has lit the way.