Openness Gives More Space - 1st February 2018

So if our acceptance or openness is just a strategy but it comes from a place of committed identity, then you will find that it seems like a big struggle. For example, to remain open as long as you consider yourself to be this mortal body, then try as you might, you might say the greatest words about being open to death, but the fear of this end will not seem to leave you. Once you see that you are beyond time, you're beyond birth and death, once you see for yourselves your own reality, then true openness can come. And as openness comes, it gives you more space to come to the deeper recognition of what you are. In this way, it is a very virtuous circle which is contrary to the vicious circle of the mind.

Because you buy the story from the mind about your identity, then the next will even seem more attractive, and then we seem to get into this vicious cycle of belief in our limitations. But one moment of recognition, a moment of taking the Master's invitation to see just what is unconditionally empty of all qualities and concepts, you escape this vicious circle of the mind. You come to your effortless spaciousness. And for a while, it can seem like this game goes on between your spacious being and your mind. It can seem like there is a tussle. In fact, many stories have been written metaphorically about this tussle. The Mahabharata, the great Indian story, is actually speaking of this tussle between limitation, attachment, and desire versus your unlimitedness, your spaciousness, and timelessness.

And for a while, like Arjuna, all of us have cried and said, 'But how will I be fine without these attachments? If I drop my desire, I drop my feverishness, please tell me that I will be fine.' Actually, the Lord comes and says that not only will you be fine, you will meet your own greater reality. This has always been the truth for what you are. You have never been the limited one. There is no such thing actually as a limited self; it is just an idea, a busy idea. And that is extremely good news. Why is it good news? Because no matter what beliefs you had, right now in this moment, you are empty. All our belief system vanishes in the light of your own presence in this very moment.

The salesman of your limited identity has to come and try to sell it back to you moment after moment after moment. All that has gone in this field, what is here and now? What is independent of time and space? Where is the unchanging one? If there is an unchanging one, it must be here. If that also comes and goes, then it could not be the unchanging one. So if there is God, if there is the Atma, if there is truth, it is already here. And actually, it is all that is here.