The Pain Truth And Nothing But Pdf

[Cloris Sopha]

Everywave is allowed to arise and dissolve in the vast, unlimited, boundless oceanic space of consciousness that you are, just as all waves are unconditionally allowed to arise and fall in the Ocean, which remains undisturbed, always.

Like the dream of a childhood Christmas long ago, perhaps you will not remember the size or shape or the monetary value of the gifts that life offered, or what the gifts were wrapped in, or who got a bigger or better gift than you. Perhaps you will only remember the love and the longing and the hope with which the gifts were given, and received.

For what you are is what you have always been seeking. You are your perfect partner, your greatest lover, your oldest, dearest and most familiar friend. You are the one you fall asleep with every night, the one you wake up to every morning, the one who cannot leave you, the one you will eventually die with. You are the one who is never divided from yourself, the one who remains when everyone and everything else has gone.

We are constantly invited, in a million different ways, to stay very close to what is actually happening, to stay intimate with life as it plays out in real-time, to remain answer free yet experience-near, to no longer spin experience-distant stories about what may or may not happen, come to premature conclusions or give memorized answers.

Instead of trying to find the answers, can we recognize ourselves as the wide open space of consciousness in which all questions, all doubts, all movements of mind and feeling are deeply allowed to arise and dissolve? Can we remember that we are neither the questioner nor the one with the answers, neither the seeker nor the sought, but the resting place for all of life?

We can pin all our hopes and dreams on tomorrow, we can wait for a future salvation or saviour and pine for an eventual enlightenment or afterlife that may or may not come, but let us not ever forget today, this living day, so immediate, so close, and even closer, this mysterious moment, beyond time, overflowing with life, gently inviting us without words to relax our cleverness and freefall without protection into its sacred and undying heart.

We feel a cosmic hole inside of us, a seemingly empty well that seems like it needs to be filled, and so we try to fill it, with money, with drugs, with sex, with success, with fame, with enlightenment, with knowledge, with all kinds of temporal experiences and states. But everything passes, everything moves, everything is forgotten, even the most blissful spiritual high, even the most shocking life-changing insights, and the hole is still there, hungry as ever, and what to do, what to do? Can anything be done to fill a non-existent hole of unknown size and depth?

There is only the Whole, this vast capacity that you are, this consciousness prior to emptiness and form, filled to the brim with life, and we are That, and we have always been That: so radically Whole that it even allows the feeling of a hole into itself. Even a hole is whole here. Even a sense of lack is given cosmic permission to find rest in this warm embrace of ourselves.

Conflict ends when you stop pretending to have all the answers, when you stop pretending to know, and instead you listen, really listen to the one in front of you, who is secretly yourself, ingeniously disguised.

To meet experience as it unfolds in the softness and vastness of ourselves. To receive its invitations. To always turn towards it. And to meet each other in the same way, to not turn away, even in the midst of our mutual pain. To meet not as separate entities but as consciousness itself. To meet beyond meeting.

Deep acceptance of this moment as it is, is not equal to passivity or world-detachment. It is the source of all creative, intelligent and compassionate action. It is at the root of fearless engagement with life. Rooted in this deep embrace of whatever arises, no longer at war with ourselves, no longer split, we move as life itself, spontaneous, flowing, free, whole, and radical change happens as if by itself. Deep acceptance of things as they are, and radical change, are not-two, however paradoxical that sounds to the rational mind. The absolute sings the song of the relative, and they were never divided in the first place.

True peace does not come from our parents, our partners, our jobs, our worldly achievements, our bank accounts. Mountains of knowledge do not lead to it, and all the mental certainty in the world cannot touch it. Every belief can be doubted, so every ideology and religion, no matter how ancient or clever, leaves us restless.

You are not the one who has thoughts: you are the wide open space in which all thoughts come and go. You are not the sad one or the happy one: you are the unlimited vastness in which joy, bliss, sadness and confusion are deeply allowed to arise and dissolve. You are not the one who is afraid: you are the boundless capacity for fear. You are not the one who lives or the one who dies: you are inseparable from life itself, and therefore cannot experience the loss of life. You are not this one or that one: you are the One, the silent, indefinable ocean of consciousness in which all thoughts, sensations, feelings are eternally held, embraced, and deeply met in unspeakable intimacy. You are the One you have sought for so long.

To dream, yes, to dream! And yet, to hold those dreams in a sweet, feather-light embrace, knowing they are loved even when they cannot sustain themselves, even when they crumble and turn to dust. To dream, yes, to dream! But to recognise yourself as the silent, restful background of dreams and their failure, to know yourself as the awakeness that loves to dream even though it is always awake. So dream, hope, change and seek change, fight for those who do not have a voice! And yet know that you are Home, always, and that even in the midst of the rubble of dashed hopes and plans and failed dreams, in the lostness you have always feared, in the absence of a future, I will call your name, I will find you in the darkness, I will take your hand, I will show you a love the likes of which you never could have dreamed.

One drop of sadness contains all the sadness of humanity. To taste this sadness without making

it personal or pushing it away, is to awaken to the kind of compassion out of which universes are

born.

Who you really are is like the white background behind this text. Mostly ignored and neglected, unable to be grasped, ever-present, and not particularly interesting to the seeker. But absolutely essential, so that these words are able to appear here. And the white background embraces all of these words unconditionally. It cannot say no. It allows all of life into itself. Any word, any character, any squiggle, is allowed to appear here. Thank you, white background, for your many years of dedicated, uncomplaining service. Words come and go, but You remain.

Every day is our crucifixion and our death and our conception and our birth and our resurrection, and what a gift and a miracle it is to be alive and to experience this ridiculously beautiful and beautifully ridiculous mystery, this paradox of existence and non-existence that never ever ever needs to be solved, only lived. Awe and wonder, awe and wonder.

True silence is not the opposite of noise. True silence, the silence that you are, the all-pervading stillness at the heart of life itself, is not at war with anything, just as the ocean is not at war with any of its waves.

Without reference to the past, without quoting your favourite teachers or books or external authority, without words or language, without thought, without memory, in this moment, exactly where you are, what do you know for sure?

Does the writer write? Does the singer sing? Does the painter paint? Does the dancer dance? Does the actor act? Does the listener listen? Does the speaker speak? Does the meditator meditate? Does the breather breathe?

Thoughts appear and disappear, but who thinks them? Sounds come and go, but who hears them? Feelings arise and pass, but who feels them? Does the dancer dance? Does the actor act? Does the singer sing? Or is there simply intimacy with all experience?

Life is here to break your heart over and over again until you realise that heartbreak is life too. And then your heart can no longer be broken. Or fixed. And you stand naked in front of life, moment by moment, knowing that whatever happens is totally okay even in the midst of perfect devastation, which, of course, is devastating perfection. This is freedom beyond the speaking of it.

You do not, you cannot, exist as a separate entity for me. And that is precisely why I can love you so completely, so fearlessly, exactly as you are, without expectation. Whoever said love and death were two?

Nobody gets healed. Nobody heals anybody else. Healing does not happen in time. Healing (wholeness) is already present, in the midst of everything you are trying to heal yourself from, just as the ocean is already present in and as every wave. A wave is healed even in its failed attempt to reach the ocean. Beyond the story, you are already healed. And you just forget, sometimes. Which is part of the healing too.

Creation, destruction, the preciousness and fragility of life, the non-existence of the separate self, the illusion of time and space, the mystery of love and the mystery of death, the intimacy of human experience and the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And all of this in a cup of tea! The miracle of the ordinary.

We long for total intimacy as much as we fear it. We long to be stripped of our stories, our defences, all those projections which keep us (apparently) at a distance. And then to meet each other, to really meet, face to face, space to space, with nothing to fear anymore, and nothing to lose. That is love and that is death. And yet this longing is already fulfilled. You are its fulfilment. Now.

We try so hard to be open to life, to open up to every experience, only to discover who we really are: Being, already fully open to life, already fully open to every experience. In a way, these four words summarise the entire spiritual search, and the end of that search: Being Open To Life

3a8082e126