When we let an unattached intention of peace for self and others inform our actions, we naturally and effortlessly become helpful. On the other hand, letting our actions come from a place other than one of nonattachment is the work of ego. This activity will inevitably show up as some form of unconsciousness that feeds on both itself and on the unconscious activity of others. This kind of activity is the root of greed, hatred, and delusion. Despite what we perceive as our best intentions, any self-serving thought is a divided thought, split between a self and something else. Division that manifests as activity will enhance our contraction and generate tangled lives.

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To find, know, and possess the Divine existence, consciousness and nature and to live in it for the Divine is our true aim and the one perfection to which we must aspire.

—Aurobindo

The most important thing is to find out what the most important thing is.

—Shunryu Suzuki

What is it that truly drives us?

Uncovering the radically honest answer to this question and then committing our thoughts and actions to its realization means that we can live from wholesome intention. Of course, there can be confusion surrounding this type of inquiry, but if we allow our intentional questioning to penetrate deeply enough into our experience, we can uncover all that we will ever need to continue along the Path to Awakening. The important part is uncovering what we really want.

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Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers and keep the balance true.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

In the heaven which receives most of His light have I been; and have seen things which whoso descends from there has neither knowledge nor power to recount.

—Dante Alighieri

The map is not the territory.

—Alfred Korzybski

When we can truly see the incompleteness of our basic sense of separation from things, we have a chance to uncover the great unity offered through a life lived consciously. But in order to make our realization helpful and our practice relevant, we must learn to allow the splendor of the Big Self to dissolve the small self’s limitations. Doing so, we can become increasingly clear about how we must engage the world. But just because our perspective has shifted in major ways doesn’t mean that problems won’t arise.

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Living in the world after we have seen the view from the summit is something we cultivate carefully. It is both an integration of the timeless into the boundary of time and an integration of the Absolute with all that is limited.

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As we learn to stop moving, we come to the realization that there is a largely unfamiliar part of us that has never and will never move at all. Re-familiarizing ourselves with this space is an amazing, often tear-filled homecoming into grace. The mystery is that we are individually and collectively each quite homesick for this place of grace, and that homesickness shows itself all of the time. Most often it happens when our individual egos experience a feeling that something is wrong, that something is somehow either lacking or too much, or of a deep anxiety about our circumstances. Sometimes we even feel excruciating psychological or physical pain. This makes us feel either a need or a compulsion to reconnect with grace. Whatever the case, if in meditation we follow these egoic senses to their origins and we constantly uncover “who,” or better yet “what,” exactly is feeling them, we will put ourselves on the Path that leads us directly into a home where we are forever able to live as an expression of grace.

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In tonight’s talk, Michael talks about the importance of getting a teacher, a teaching, and a group of spiritual friends. He also goes into how attempts at killing the ego wipes out the potential for Awakening. So then how do we measure our experience against those among us who are Awakened? This and issues like spiritual skepticism, groups of spiritual friends, and intention are also covered.

As heady as all of these words might strike us, pointing to Infinity is fairly simple. In fact, everything is Infinity, so there is no way to avoid it. Knowing this deeply, all things change to reflect our realization, and we begin to inhabit a different place of being. Just sitting still ignites a mysterious process. It’s not unlike water of stillness being poured on the dry sponge of the contracted, always moving small self. The more stillness, the more the small self expands its form into an uncontracted Big Self. Once this expansion begins to occur, we become more intensely aware of everything that arises in life. In fact, the whole world can open us up to an intense fire of Freedom. As we soak our contracted sense of self with this timeless and boundless communion with everything and then allow all of our action to come from this infinitely expansive and fluid place, we can’t avoid becoming profoundly helpful. This helpfulness spontaneously expresses itself as we become what Buddhism refers to as bodhisattvas.

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Blogger Andrew Sullivan offers this post from James Wood’s review of Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer:

Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all tears from our faces. In her novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, “It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world’s suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is “exactly what will be required.”

Again, we see the tendency for us to want to find “meaning” and to make “sense” of that which is beyond mind. Invariably this is what gets us into trouble: we attach to anything we think will prevent suffering, when attachment is at the root of suffering.

Surrendering to what is, on the other hand, and then participating from that space of openness changes everything.