Grapes want to turn into wine.
—Rumi
When making your choice in life, don’t neglect to live.
—Samuel Johnson
When we begin to commit ourselves to integrating the teaching into our lives, we become clearer about how we can consciously choose the ways in which to meet each situation we face. For example, we know that our preoccupation with satisfying the needs of the small self only leads us into trouble. We begin to see that anything in our experience that we can recognize as personal must be tied directly to the satisfaction of ego. This helps us to realign our lives in ways that are deeply impersonal, and as a result, all the life that we begin to touch becomes imbued with the expansiveness of Spirit.
At some point during spiritual work, practitioners recognize that each situation in life, no matter how glorious or horrific, offers an opportunity to Know the deep choices that come from the realignment of our intentions from the shallowness of the small self to depth and Infinite nature of the Big Self. Practitioners recognize that everything in their life, in every way, conspires to put them in a position of absolute, Enlightened potential, depending only on how they choose to respond to whatever arises in their awareness. Practitioners then see that all that is needed is to choose fearlessly to surrender into Awakening at every possible opportunity.
These opportunities for intentional surrender are always ready to meet us if we are ready to commit to meeting them. They show up as everything, in every moment, and when we give them our full attention, a new life awaits—one that is inhabited by a deep peace regardless of whatever circumstance might arise. Choosing to show up consciously helps all of the successes and pain of our past and all the hopes and fears of our future to fall away as insubstantial monuments of an inherently unstable way of living. This falling away doesn’t diminish our glory or our pain, but we suddenly aren’t subject to being caught by these feelings when we make choices from a deeply conscious place. The Big Self doesn’t need the praise nor does it feel the blame from anything or anyone, and this nonattachment enables us to begin to forgive and to take full responsibility for the way we live in each and every moment.
Choosing this way of living means that we enter into a life of an integrated openness where blame and victimization, like all other egoic stories, lose their grip on our experience and fall away from what is real in us. Once this happens, we realize that there can be no Awakening of any authenticity unless we choose to let go of any and all traces of past grievances against all people and all situations. When we become free of blame and forgive, we begin to open ourselves to all beings, just as a mother opens her arms to receive her child.
But along with this openness that starts to inform our every step comes a recognition that we can never rely on anything. Openness and forgiveness show us that ego can’t count on anything except change. As frightening as this may sound to the ego, this realization means that our choices become guides into a surprisingly beautiful realm of total potential, rather than expectations tied to finite outcomes. This realization brings about an equanimity that supports the grace and ease of a deeply felt surrender to the mystery and wonder of all aspects of life.
