Living Enlightenment

I found myself softly weeping for myself this morning. This is a strange thing, and comes as the result of a little journey that I have been on the last couple of weeks. I have been spending time with a wise and beautiful woman, who embodies many of the qualities which I deeply admire. I found myself liking her, and feeling the attachment as an unresolved tension when she is not present.

I recognized my suffering, my contraction, and felt the pain in that contraction, the sense of being separate from something which I enjoy. I am grateful for my friend, as she has shown me some attachments which I was not aware of, and bringing them into awareness shows me where I have a tendency to get distracted, and thus limit my freedom. In distraction, the happiness that comes from the radiant everpresent self that I am, I temporarily transfer that intrinsic happiness to the object I am chasing, and that's the problem. I chase the object as the source of happiness.

Noticing my suffering, I started to softly cry for myself. These was a simple expression of  compassion, of self Love, or resonance with suffering (albeit minor in comparison to other sufferings in the world).  I do a lot of Tonglen (compassionate exchange) meditation, where one of the steps in the process is to breathe suffering of others in to the heart and transform and release the difficulty. I also visualize myself as an object, and breathe in my own pain and practice giving love to myself. In doing the process, one realizes that the human vehicle has different components, such as the dualistic suffering self, and the non-dual True Self and Heart of Compassion.

Increasingly I am able to separate them out, and today I felt that. I felt I was automatically the unlimited Heart of Compassion, spontaneously and automatically embracing Bruce. Beautiful. I am authentically the source of my own Love.

And the practice from here? Continuously noticing the self contraction, feeling it, knowing it, being naturally curious about it, knowing that the everpresent noticing will bring about the release. That's living enlightenment in the world of form, it's the cessation of seeking and resting in the everpresent arising of what is. If you could simply understand that the enlightened mind (bodhi) is unattainable, then you are enlightened, hard is the meaning of that saying, it is to teach you to refrain from seeking. The trick is, if you try and stop seeking, it's more of the same thing. It is an ever present noticing of what is arising.

My friend thought I was courageous in saying some of the things I said to her. I don't think so, courage never really entered the equation. What I have is absolute confidence in the unseen aspect of my being that notices whatever arises, and its capacity for imparting a sense of freedom and happiness into the world of form if I allow myself to rest in that unseen, unborn awareness. This gives me wider playing fields, lets me gamble more, lets me experiment, as I know that fundamentally, I can't screw this up. That's freedom. The fundamental solution to the end of suffering and the living of freedom is to wake up, paradoxically, to that which can never be seen. And if twinges of fear and contraction arise...well...just notice that too; they make no difference to freedom.