I have seen. I have tasted that which I can never have but I embrace. I have stared desire in the face. I have tasted the fruits of loves flowers in full bloom, made to bask in eternity, if only for a moment. I gave of myself, forsaken that which my mind knew to be true for the sake of my hearts own virtues. I chased what I found in spirits life force, indescribable. I know not how to ascribe the love I feel. I have forced myself to see where my hearts passions lie. I have experienced the truest of lifes bounties, love. Love beyond words, context, love devoid of self, self-evident in being, unconditional. Still I am constantly seeking.

Ones actions lay waste to my hearts reaction. Making my minds better judgments self evident, holding my heart in contempt. Perhaps my openness, willingness, or acceptance, which laid my mind to treason, has helped, showing my hearts true reason. There is nothing else but acceptance. Perhaps in my youth I was naïve, seeking love out as I did, such love that could only come about in contempt of other virtues. Alas I cannot undo my actions, I hold true what has come about, what my heart has brought me to.

Words, like eyes, are windows into a person's soul, possessing the vernacular, whose characteristics cut to the heart of my very being, perhaps without seeing. Life's journey involves risk. I have been made to know, regardless of the finality of any outcome, a greater vision remains. That through our words, be they fiction or fact, we might touch another soul as we share ourselves in our spirits song. In that moment, however brief, we may suspend the walls of separateness that so often cause suffering and pain.

To let go does not mean to stop caring, it means no one can do for someone else which must be done by the self. Letting go is not denial its acknowledgement. It's the realization one can't control another. To allow for learning from natural consequence. To let go is not to admit powerlessness. To let go is to take charge of ones destiny. To let go is not to try to change or blame another. Letting go is acceptance. Making the most of myself. To let go is not to care for, but to care about. To let go is not to fix, but to allow, to be supportive. To let go is not to judge, but to allow another to be, one in being. To let go means not arranging all the outcomes, but to allow others to affect their destinies. To let go is not to be protective, it's openness to face reality. To let go is not to deny, but to accept. To let go is not to adjust everything to my desires, but to be shown their roots. To take each day as it comes and cherish everything in it. To let go is not judgmental, but accepting, try to become what I dream. To let go is not to regret, but to grow and live here and now.

Fear has been ever present in my life. Seeking my hearts true voice, to make it known. I no longer choose to run from it. I embrace the fear through my practice of surrender. Everyday, I sit in silence and practice surrender, letting go. I practice surrendering to fear. Fear that I will not have enough. Fear that I will not Be or Do or Love enough. Fear of life. There are a million fears which live in the mind. Fear I feel is humanities greatest downfall. Fear keeps us from becoming that which we truly are. Surrendering to fear is letting myself become one with it. I want to become so fully intimate with fear that I know it as myself, that it becomes part of me, not outside myself, so I can become fully aware. Everyday, I sit in silence and practice Maitri, surrending to fear. Living in fear is living my death. Meeting death, such change, or anything fearful as a friend, is living my life. Surrending to fear means releasing drama, attachment, desire. It means clearing the space for receiving all the gifts existence offers.

Listening to my soul, I now know that being fully present in every moment means I have the choice of heaven or hell, life or fear or death in every moment. To be divine in human form is a challenge I long to meet, to Be Here Now.

How I meet the challenges that come to me is the heaven I create. I create it for myself every day I choose. Heaven is not an end. It is a process. I create Heaven for myself everyday with my attention and intention on being in the moment. As the Bodhisattva is one who out of compassion devotes oneself to serve humanity. In my heart, in my consciousness, holding the polarities of life as one and the same with neutrality.

In my practice of being I stand in this place of neutrality. I raise up all energies into the impersonal. Where I am not attached. I am not reactive. I am simply present in each moment. Everything flows through me I experience the sweet ease of a lifestream surrendered. Each moment is surrendered to the next. I am no longer living from my ego and its manipulation, protection, defense, judgment, and criticism.

In this way, I hope I can be open to receive all the gifts, the grace, that has been offered to me and allow love to flow through me
Into all consciousness. Joy Joy Joy.

In the ever present reality of being human, fear and pain came pulling steadily at the strings of my emotions this week. I was made to feel. Can I create my own heaven from this as well? Yes, everything is ones choice.

Looking harder, I can see my actions convictions stronger than my words still I am alone. There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. We seek out that which we are. I hold my heart open to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers. The round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. As do you, so as I do.

I am reminded of Blakes writings from Broken Love

Let us agree to give up love
And root up the Infernal Grove
Then shall we return and see
The worlds of happy Eternity
And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me
As our dear Redeemer said
"This the Wine, and this the Bread”

I like the temporal nature of his prose, it kindles my fondness for life and not to take it for granted. I know of only one thing that lasts flux, chaos, change. Which reminds me that the most important things in the world are not things but experiences.

Have you ever, in moments of deep silence, heard the song of your soul? Can you recall a time when the beauty, the sweetness of life, welled up in you by surprise? One day, perhaps, you fell in love. Or for one blinding instant, lovemaking called you back to an ecstatic relationship with life. Perhaps it happened for you upon reflections of youth. Suddenly, filled with an overwhelming, all-encompassing love such as you had never experienced. Perhaps you glimpsed ecstasy in the spaciousness of meditation; dancing in the rain or singing through the night. Perhaps you were propelled beyond your mind and body into a transcendent moment when life, which had seemed ordinary, became suddenly mysterious, poignant, and filled with grace, and time seemed to stop as you stepped into eternity.

I have been shown such wonders in natures grace. My writing now is a solemn protest, for lack of actions waste. Words, no matter whether they are vocalized, made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word, to Love, to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of the iceberg.

Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way to yourself. When you look at it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.

When the real heart breaks open, the question becomes, “How can one serve the One?” How can one be this Truth?” And there’s no final answer to that kind of question. It’s always in the moment, at every moment, to be it now, not “How can I be it?” in some image, but just to be it now. We discover that we’re no longer a gatherer of beauty, a gatherer of bliss, a gatherer of peace. We’re not a hoarder. We’re its servant, you and I. There is absolutely nothing finite to understand. Infinite is the experience that is sought.

In Shakespeare's Othello, the protagonist, deeply in love with his young Venetian wife Desdemona, is ever the noble and simple-hearted soldier trusting of those around him. Desdemona ever devoted to her husband hangs on his every word. Iago, however, Othello's advisor and apparent friend, plays each character against each other creating an atmosphere of separation and deceit. He whispers doubts into Othello's ear, inciting in him violent jealousy, ultimately leading to senseless Shakespearean tragedy, the likes of which seldom has been seen save for Hamlet.

Everyone acts as Othello by their true being, open at heart, trusting, seeing that which is the best in each other. Yet we can become seduced to insane actions, for insidious Iago is a state of mind; never seen, yet omnipotent in lifes shadow. Iago whispers to us both from within and through other people as a voice of collective conditioning. Leaving many of us to live with a painful sense of separation from others, a sense of something missing, and a pervasive experience of limitation, fear, and desire. As a result we engage in a whirlwind of activity, avoidance, conditioning, to the objects of our fears and to obtain the objects of our craving. This trance of problem based living, fuels an endless saga of struggle. It seeps through the cracks of our noblest aspirations.

Faith in an idea is risky. Never has there been a more treacherous vice than that of egos logic. Ideas can change, and tomorrow we may not believe the same thing, we come to see our beliefs as self evident. Love is experiential, derived from actions experience. Once we have tasted such reality, no one can remove that from us. What we run from pursues us, what we welcome transforms us. I have seen that which is, I hold that space, I embrace it with total acceptance.

I have ran down many paths to heartache, to let my heart break. Let it completely break. Let it break open. Breaking also so much of myself. And there's something beautiful in that. Most spirituality is a way to manage the heartbreak in a sense. Matthew from the Peyote Way once told me “The way back is the way you came, through heartbreak." So perhaps such heartbreak is my calling. Only then can I see. I’m knocking from inside the door. The beauty in such truth makes me cry. That's it. That's the heartbreak. The deep innerness of all things, the last word that can never be spoken. To each of us we all reveal ourselves differently.

I wanted to live as one, but whether I would or not was a mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn't a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education. I know my fear as your own. Once you have been so scared, you know more about your frailty than most people, and I think that changes a person. One never is anything more than they let the summation of their experiences, become. I was brought low, and there was nothing to take refuge in except those philosophical edifices: this disease has forced me to ask more of myself as a person than I ever have before known.

For a long time I considered myself an overall happy person. However, late last year in AZ, I went through a shift in my awareness that left me with this non-stop pervasive feeling of happiness. Perhaps a better word for it would be bliss. You’ve experienced this feeling of total oneness at some point in your meditations. This intense feeling is now with me all day, every day. Sometimes it is so strong I have to stop and take some deep breaths for a bit in order to be able to function instead of just melting into the feeling. I can still be knocked into negative lower emotional states, but even when that happens, I can simply focus my attention on this background, ever present feeling of bliss, and just allow the negative emotions to dissolve into it. I think Eckhart Tolle describes this state as a feeling of being totally in the present moment.

This level of happiness is unconditional, not rooted in circumstances, so even if my life circumstances were to radically shift one way or another, as they have, this feeling hasn’t been strongly affected. I can still see it persisting even now, besieged by my emotions, captive with broken limb. I know how I reached this state and locked into it, and because I did it consciously instead of accidentally. It has to do with the way in which you use your consciousness, and more specifically, the way in which you view your reality. When you adopt a certain view of reality and learn to use your consciousness a certain way, a pervasive feeling of bliss is the natural consequence. This frees you from the thinking that you must achieve anything in order to be happy. Being mindful you gain the ability to always act “from” a state of happiness instead of “for” it.

I didn't start out intending to go on such a spiritual journey whatsoever. I set out to see, seeking a reality in my life clearly without my distortions, my projections, my conditioning, my assumptions, my beliefs leading me astray. At least to be aware I was seeing things through the lens of my beliefs. Always though I have wanted to make my beliefs transparent rather than so ingrained. I can see many of my shortcomings, still there are many more I have yet to know, I don't even know what they are. So I am left confronted with myself. Its ended up being a process of asking a lot of tough questions. If one chooses to focus on lifes limitations rather than the limitlessness of lifes being, one forgoes seeing that which is the moment, for an aberration a colloquially of what could be.