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PRAISE An amazing and truly great work—Art. Waiting to Love is stark, free, graceful, uncompromising and therefore new and unfamiliar. I resisted it, except when I was letting it blow my hair back, letting it insult, quicken, and enlarge me. And then it was exhilarating, opening me to the space of love, and the vista from here. It's breathtaking. Deida slices not just through the surface skin, but down into the fibers, and then through multiple levels of muscle, mind and convention—and then deeper dimensions too—in this never-ending exploration of awareness and growth and presence. I've never seen anything vaguely like it. Deida is so far ahead of the pack, there's hardly anyone around to keep up with him. Waiting to Love recalibrates a new level of dialog about how to live an authentic, embodied spiritual life. This book breaks so much new ground, it's a tsunami for those who'll let it wash them all the way to the new water's edge it defines. --Terry Patton Founder of Tools For Exploration Author: Blowback: Technology's Hidden Neurological Consequences Waiting to Love is shocking. David Deida manages to marry the impossible; this spiritual masterpiece is entertaining, elegant, and deeply profound. There is a magic in this book that has the ability to relax our deepest resistances to love and leave us wide open, page after page. Deida gracefully frees us from waiting to love—this may be the last book you will ever have to read on the subject of spirituality. --Vartman Founder of The United Peace Foundation Author: Unreasonable Happiness David Deida is one of the most courageous pioneers at the cutting edge of spiritual life. Waiting to Love takes us beyond mere insights, beyond spiritual highs, beyond selfimprovement and healing—into the wide uncharted waters of true self-discovery—into an exploration that has no end. Not for the faint of heart or the timid, this is the whole nine yards—with nothing held back. --Arjuna Ardagh Founder of The Living Essence Foundation Author: How About Now?

CONTENTS Note to the Reader................................................................................................1 Preface.................................................................................................................3 Introduction...........................................................................................................4 1. Are You Waiting for Anything?........................................................................13 2. Dreaming You are Awake...............................................................................20 3. Whorling as Open Light..................................................................................26 4. Ken Wilber is a Fraud.....................................................................................37 5. I Am an Arrogant Liar......................................................................................53 6. Sacrifice Through Inhabitance........................................................................72 7. The Glorious Mr. Wedgie................................................................................75 8. Torn To Love...................................................................................................78 9. Our Unnecessary Life.....................................................................................82 10. The Ant and the Ruler...................................................................................90 11. Sex is Inconclusive.....................................................................................107 12. Lancelot’s Obsession..................................................................................115 13. Gritting Teeth and Love’s Yawn..................................................................137 14. The Ritual of Life as Love...........................................................................148 15. Three Aspects of Now.................................................................................156 16. Where Is Up?..............................................................................................163 17. The Art and Politics of Is.............................................................................175 18. On Cornflakes and Free Will.......................................................................187 19. Spontaneous Disinterest.............................................................................198 20. The Glass of Suffering................................................................................210

Preface Our life is an offering. Can you feel the urge to offer more? Unoffered love is our suffering. Our ungiven gifts clench as stress. Relaxing as now frees the gift our love wants to be. You and I are love’s means. This moment is our offering. We will die fully given, or we will die ungiven, still waiting. Now is our chance. Let’s be rude together, like lovers at a funeral, touching each other wide open amongst the straight faces, laughing our fullest offering of love for the sake of the dead and the still waiting.

Introduction If you are waiting for anything or anyone in order to feel more full, free, relaxed, happy, or loving, then you are wasting this moment of your life. —The Mutant How can I describe this book? I’ll start here: my life-partner of about 20 years, the love of my life, is living with another man, who has been one of my best friends for almost as long. I sometimes imagine them having sex—anal, oral, and genital—or simply cuddling together. The possessive part of me cringes. Another part of me—I’ll call him the “Mutant,” since others call him by the same name—smiles in relaxation. I’m presently in relationship with a woman who my life-partner suggested for me some years ago with everyone’s best interest in mind. The Mutant in me knows that everybody benefits from this overall arrangement of intimacy, including my life-partner, her lover, myself, my lover, and, most importantly, our extended community of friends and their friends. We all agree that love is offered most fully through this specific arrangement— for now. Waiting to Love Page 4

None of us know how long this configuration will remain the form for our heart’s deepest expression of truth, but that’s what it is: the current “best offering” that all of our hearts can manage, given our strengths and weaknesses. And this “best offering” hurts as deep as our heart’s merciless truth. We are learning how to relax open as love’s spontaneous offering, for real. We are also learning to remain open, even as we are wounded by our chafing human emotions, trusting each other while navigating through seemingly insurmountable storms of reactivity, and at times confessing our disabling numbness. All of this, because our personal travails pale in love’s brightness, which has come to possess our lives, if we will only allow it. The Mutant part of me insists that we allow love to have its way with us, regardless of how unconventional the results may appear, even if our lives are ruined in the process. This bulldozing attitude is balanced somewhat by my other parts, but mostly by those who love the Mutant with unbelievable generosity, and who know how to deal with him: my friends and co-practitioners. We have all spent many years practicing to relax open: feeling, suffering, and celebrating this exploration into allowing love’s gifts to open through us and flow outward to the world. This is an art that takes time to develop, and we are beginners. Our hearts have been, and still are, shredded to tender anguish on

a daily basis by feeling and being willing to risk living the answer to this question: How is love most artfully offered to each other and for the sake of the world? As of this writing, we have mutually discovered—with help from each other, our friends, and our teachers—that love is most fully liberated by this particular arrangement of living we have come upon. Our feeling-exploration continues. Our relationships are monogamous. We are not promiscuous. My few adult intimate relationships have been life-long commitments to serving one another in love, in whatever form that requires. Over decades, I’ve encountered many of my own blind spots that can’t see love’s most true form of expression, or I’ve found that I’m simply afraid to surrender as love wants to live—although the Mutant persistently urges me on. I’ve learned that it’s best to temper the Mutant by trusting the wisdom of my friends, copractitioners, and teachers. If they all agree, I’m willing to do just about anything. I’ll be celibate and live in isolation, or I’ll live in a home with many friends and whatever sexual alliances most benefit all beings. This probably sounds strange, but it’s true. I’m committed to doing what it takes so that love is liberated for all—although sometimes my own fears hold me back. Do yours? Most people are waiting to love. Most of us are waiting to give our deepest gifts to each other and the world. Why? To love without waiting is to jump Waiting to Love Page 6

open as life—without knowing what’s going to happen, yet relaxing because we know our heart’s capacity to love is indestructible. To open without fear requires trust in who we truly are and the love that lives us. This book’s essays avow that we can offer our lives relaxed in utter trust of love’s reign, like a trained dancer trusting gravity’s way, alert and loosened to feel love’s subtle calling, being guided by great intensity of purpose, allowing ourselves to be lived as an offering. We are either living as an offering, or we are not trusting, still waiting to love. Unless we can feel, right now, the love that knows and shows as our self and the entire world, we are unwilling to let go of our fabricated homes of security, because we don’t trust the spontaneous aliveness of every moment’s birth. Openness is our very nature, always, but sometimes we lose touch with the love that is our openness, and so we formulate a life story in fear. We fabricate relationships, families, jobs, philosophies, and a constant stream of internal dialogue, so we have something to call “mine.” Freedom is trusting the unfabricated openness of love.

Are we willing to surrender so fully that we are lived as love’s innate intelligence, acting as our deepest impulse to offer our love’s gifts without holding anything back? Are we willing to relax open as love’s offering while everything that is “mine” inevitably comes and goes, including our wives and husbands, our children, our money, our ideals, even our sense of self? We can die at any time. Our plane may crash. Our arteries may clog. Perhaps we are just at the wrong place at the wrong time and a car plows into our fragile body. In any case, as we age, our body rots to death. And in the meantime, our mind is distracted in ideas and plans, wrangling our emotions in jealousy, anger, guilt, hurt, even joy. This distraction provides a sense of purpose. Our relationships, for instance, motivate us in pain and pleasure to move away and closer, and thus we have a temporary story, cycling through loneliness and ecstatic communion, devastating failure and success. We seem to have a “my life.” There also seems to be a “your life.” This provides the basis for marriage, bringing two lives together—as well as the basis for war, the opposition of life against life. We embrace, fight, and even eat other lives—carrots, or perhaps chickens—for the sake of sustaining “my life.” Chances are, you are more wrapped up in your life than mine. I’m definitely more wrapped up in mine than yours. And so the Mutant would destroy my Waiting to Love Page 8

life—and ruin yours—for the sake of love’s deepest offering, which shines more brightly than “mine” and “yours.” The entire “mine and yours” picture is just one perspective of life, and it causes much unnecessary suffering, the Mutant wants us to know. Some of us begin to relax open a bit and feel the oneness of all life. We become what we call “spiritual.” We become distracted in the “my life” of spiritual endeavors. The Mutant finds this spiritual posturing, yours and mine, to be ridiculous. He is only interested in love’s open being, at any expense. I’m not saying this is healthy, I’m just providing a context for the essays in this book, which were written by my inner Mutant, or at least under his influence. This Mutant part of me is surely urging me along as I risk my most precious relationship, committing to explore love in partnership with a new woman, and participating—with much weeping by everybody—as one of my best friends creates an intimacy with my life-long lover, who my heart knows can never be replaced. Yet my heart is also relieved—blissfully so—by the felt-rightness of this intimate arrangement that seems crazy to the parts of me that would prefer fabricated comfort to being torn wide open by love’s way.

Despite my other parts, the Mutant trains for hours a day—not too tightly, not too loosely—feeling into and through the unseen currents that give rise to what we call “the world,” while also engaging a rigorous plethora of practices to relax open more stably as indestructibly vulnerable love. This part of me is certain, some might say militantly so, that love’s openness is who we really are. This Mutant isn’t a pristine creature. He sometimes speaks with the voice of a mad scientist, a haughty intellectual, a chest-puffing know-it-all. He finds people boring and irritating—including you and me—because they require attention. The Mutant is tired of attention. Paying attention to anything goes nowhere but to more stuff that requires attention, and the Mutant is weary of chasing the mirage. He’s no longer willing to wait to love, so attention’s movement dwindles, relaxing open onto its source. From this source, these essays emerge as an unbidden show of love radiating through the Mutant’s twisted character. The fun piece—if you can call it “fun”—is that the Mutant is rather immature, and so his naïve honesty is sometimes refreshing and often reckless. He wants everyone, including me and you, not to wait to love, not to wait for anything, but to give our fullest offering, right now. He feels death at least as strongly as life, and so life seems as good as dead to his rueful character. It’s as if he were reaching for a flower while a bomb was falling inches above his head: “So what, the scent of a rose?” The Mutant can’t get no satisfaction. Waiting to Love Page 10

Besides being immature and willing to risk just about anything to relax open as love and offer himself fully, the Mutant is also a vociferous curmudgeon, sans flowers. There are parts to me other than the Mutant, and those other parts have written other books. The essays in this book are sputtering shouts of the Mutant, a carefully distanced pseudo-expert on mankind, of which he does not feel himself to be a member. Yet, remarkably, paradoxically, the Mutant has been ripped open by love, an opening through which these essays spill. Try as he might to retract from life, he is wounded by love lost in moments of forgetfulness, and by the tender love alive as every moment, feeling everybody waiting and suffering, not being able to stand it anymore, knowing that no amount of effort changes anybody much. Humans haven’t been enlightened en masse, not by Christ’s or Buddha’s or Mohammad’s efforts, and certainly not by the Mutant’s whippersnapper attempts. At this point, the Mutant has all but given up, or at least likes to think he has. (You and I can roll our eyes at his pretentiousness.) But he wants to say one last thing, and so he wrote these essays, wishing every being would awaken as love’s offering, including me and you, without waiting.

The essays in this book progressively deepen via accumulated interconnections, but are presented in a more or less random order. You are welcome to skip over whatever seems too dense or abstract until you come upon something that you find more interesting. You may have noticed that the Mutant part of me has already managed to show through much of this introduction. The following chapters are wholly his offering to you. Waiting to Love Page 12

1. Are You Waiting for Anything? “If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.” —Arthur Schopenhauer Why is anything interesting to you? Why do finely cut diamonds, silken lingerie, or a woman’s shapely breasts appeal to you? I want them. I feel happy when I touch and see them. I want more. Why does experiencing your children’s love or winning a million dollars make you smile? This is really living and enjoying life fully. I love these moments so much! We want to experience pleasure and avoid pain, and this largely determines the course of our interests and actions. The problem is, and always has been, that nothing lasts. Following our interests doesn’t work. Children grow up and leave home, lingerie looks more silly as the years plunder our flesh, and even

financial triumph or fame ceases to fulfill our heart absolutely. No matter what we do, feel, or acquire right now, eventually we feel a lack. The feminine in each of us seeks the flow of love to fill the lack. If only my lover would really love me. If only somebody was in my life who truly saw me for who I was, who knew how beautiful and special I am, who could feel how much love my heart has to give. The masculine in each of us seeks the freedom of success to fill the lack. If only I succeeded in acquiring more money, or making the world a more peaceful place, or understanding the nature of existence, or calming my mind in meditation, then I would finally feel more free. If you are waiting for anything or anyone in order to feel more full, free, relaxed, happy, or loving, then you are wasting this moment of your life. Once you understand this, the next step is realizing that your life—even your waiting to love—isn’t what it seems to be. He and she were in bed, awakened by the morning. He was thinking about the day, what he had to accomplish. Her head was filled with thoughts, too, but her body felt his warm skin. Waiting to Love Page 14

She wanted to feel him touch her, hold her, take her, and love her, pressing his body into hers. He turned his head to look into her eyes. What was she thinking? He loved her lips, her smell, the way her hair fell across her face. She moved her foot to touch his. They smiled. Their loving could wait a little longer, he thought, as he reached to caress her thigh for a moment. It was time for him to go to work. She didn’t seem ready to open her body to him anyway, he thought. Later that day, they would both be ensconced in activities and forget the love they almost shared. Later in their life, they would both die. Even as he touched her thigh casually, the alarm clock rang, awakening them. He had been dreaming. By the time his eyes were open, the dream was already forgotten, and their activities had begun.

While dreaming, you are feeling and acting as one of the characters in the dream. That is who you think you are, until you wake up. Your love and gifts become bound by whatever you think you are waiting for, by whatever you believe is real. Awake or dreaming, we rarely open fearlessly as love’s fullest offering, giving our deepest gifts as a blessing for all. Most often, we feel afraid to some degree, and we are waiting to love fully and give all of our self, as a lover would, as an offering, as a gift, blissfully gone in the giving. Regardless of our excuses, right now, we are appearing as the very light of consciousness, alive as love, although we may require some training, like an artist would, to fully offer our self as love’s gift without waiting in fear of sex’s deepest expression. This training starts with theory, and gets juicier as the basics become effortless. Theoretically speaking, you could describe the masculine force of consciousness as directional. “He,” the unchanging conscious witness, is the most aligning force in the universe. “She” can go absolutely wild as love’s living light, knowing he remains unmoved but feeling everything, and her wildness becomes aligned by the force of his unwavering presence. You can chat all you want, but nothing aligns her as love’s light more quickly than absolute presence: gazing deeply into her eyes, touching her with Waiting to Love Page 16

fearless confidence and sensitivity, feeling deeply into her heart without pulling back, claiming her by relaxing as the pervading consciousness that already is entering and opening her, now, before any genitals are even involved. There are many ways of describing this cognizant luminosity of openness, loving itself as he-consciousness and she-light, and some descriptions are more politically correct than others. I’m not much of a theorist, so I’ll try to cut to the chase. Once you try following the course of your interests, and your life still feels lacking, you may be ready to open and be taken by the nature of this moment. The nature of this moment as conscious light is so radically alive and explosive, so intensely two always melded as not-two, that “fuck” might be the only word in the English language that carries enough power to convey the truth of love as the pulse of existence. Fuck, in its fullest expression, is conscious luminosity, knowing and showing wide open as consciousness and light, consenting to love itself as this he and she, giving birth to spacetime in their rhythmic resistance and surrender. What is more fuck than that? I fully sympathize with philosophers, scientists, and psychologists who are doing their best to communicate the nature of spirituality—and its aftermath—to the normal reader. These readers are typically so identified with their waking human appearance—let alone their maleness or femaleness or doubt

thereof—that most writers are forced to either walk on eggshells, eliminate the depth of their expression, or both. Like a man being careful not to disturb his lover in a dream, caution can sometimes outweigh the emptiness of the appearance that we assume to be so solid. Caution can obscure the lucidity of this moment’s unfabricated appearance as love’s open shine, and thus we feel stuck and confused, reaching for something that we intuit is possible. “Where is the one who would truly love me?” “How can I succeed?” The fullest realization of fuck shatters this dream into an open offering of conscious light. We are not here to get, we are here to give. Our body is here as an offering, as if our entire life was a gift to a very, very ready lover, who is eating us alive right now. Buying lingerie, raising a family, building a business, working to create a peaceful world—if we are not surrendered as love’s open offering right now, we are suffering. Waiting to Love Page 18

To put it in simple terms: our life is wrought with suffering because we are growing older and approaching death while following our interests that lead nowhere that is more full of fuck than right now—but most of us are afraid of even using that word. And we are much more afraid to live open as love’s offering, being the fuck that is this moment’s effulgence of living light, consciousness lovingly aglow to gone. Luckily, the prevailing spiritual writers are doing such a good job and are being so skillfully cautious in their expression, that I am relieved of this obligation. Thanks to them, I can expose questions without hesitancy, casting delicacy to the wind. How does one live after attaining the realizations of a so-called spiritual life, much of which is bullshit? What does it mean that the fuck of conscious light gives birth to spacetime? What roles do drugs, aggression, and politics play in life after spirituality? How would we offer our love with each other—sexually, in everyday life, and outwardly for the whole world’s sake—if our hearts were unburdened by fear? Other, more careful writers have liberated me to write untrapped by niceties, perhaps offending the more self-reifying humans, and breaking plenty of eggshells while jumping all over the place, like in this essay, without too much caution or even overt continuity— although my intention would be to weave gently a subtle thread throughout. I offer what I can with genuine reverence to those whose skilful care, impeccable logic, and peaceful allocations of wisdom have liberated my sloppy excess, which I pray is for the benefit of those whose tastes resonate with mine, may God forgive them.

2. Dreaming You are Awake “All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.” —Marcel Proust Right now, your experience is coming and going. In every moment of your life, whether you are awake or dreaming, everything is changing, for better and for worse. The love that you want to flow in your life will come and go as people change, grow, or vanish. So will your successes: at times you will feel trapped by life’s obligations, and at times you will feel free. Feeling trapped or unloved, you have four fundamental choices in any moment. 1. You can learn to change your inner and outer life so you feel better, more free and loving. 2. You can learn to accept and simply be present with your inner and outer life the way they are.

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3. You can learn to feel this present moment so deeply that its very nature, right now, is instantaneously obvious as unbounded love or freedom. 4. You can learn to relax open and allow all three of the above simultaneously. You can certainly learn to change things for the better—do a little yoga, maybe, or volunteer to help the homeless. You can also learn to accept things as they are, being fully present—meditating as the observing witness, for instance, as each breath or thought comes and goes. But, if you really train to feel deeply, or to cut through the stream of appearances, you realize that all things and selves are gone the instant they arise. You are already free. Whole worlds and their bodies appear and disappear in cycles of waking, dreaming, sleeping, and dying. You have never known anything that isn’t an appearance, rippling as love in the ever-present openness that can know or feel its own light. You are this love, right now. Your capacity to be free and loving—to live spontaneously as an offering, rippling as the divine fuck of conscious light, making love as everything that appears and vanishes in rhythms of forgotten bliss—this capacity deepens through training. The depth of your practice depends on your motivation and identity. Why do you do anything, and who do you think you are?

In a dream, when you are attending and feeling as one of the characters in the dream, that is who you think you are, until you wake up. Awake, when you are attending and feeling as one of the characters in the world, that is who you think you are, until you fall asleep, or die. Where your attention is feeling, defines who you are. You can recall your experiences growing up and think that is who you are, a story of memories held in mind: your first motorcycle ride, your first French kiss, the laughter and lawsuits with your last spouse. You can meditate by focusing inwardly, closing your eyes and attending to inner sounds and visions, and think that is who you are, a mystical being of celestial qualities, perhaps angelic and beneficent, far more sacred than what your daily chores feel like. You can open your eyes, look in a mirror, and think that is who you are, an awake body of flesh, accompanied by the blemishes and assets, the baggage and talents you call “my life.” Even in a dream, your dream-eyes can see a dream-body in a dream-mirror, and you can dream-think that is who you are, dream-pimples, dream-problems, and all. Waiting to Love Page 22

So, who are you and what is your motivation? The only thing you always are is unconfined openness that can know and feel, whether you are awake, dreaming, meditating, or sleeping. This openness spontaneously expresses itself as love and knows as consciousness, but it has no borders or shape or qualities other than its very openness and capacity to feel or know. Due to long-standing habits, we forget this openness who we always are. Instead, our attention goes to the churning patterns of our apparent life, whether we are dreaming or awake. We get out of bed, pee, look in the mirror, hug our children, eat breakfast, and go to work—forever hoping to find more love or success—and then at some point it all dissolves (when we awake, or go to sleep, or die). With practice, we can learn to feel and relax as the openness we are, even in sleep and death. We may still get out of bed, hug our children, and go to work, but the whole appearance of life is felt for what it is, a spontaneous appearance. Every body appearing, anyone at any time or seeming place, is of the same selfluminous and spontaneously showing nature, as if they were all bodies appearing in a dream, lighted by the lucidity of conscious openness itself. However, when the world seems solid, then you also believe that your appearing body is who you truly are. Your open love becomes bound to the

outlines you hold: the outlines of your spouse, your country, your career. You become afraid of losing the shape of the appearing world and its bodies. You feel a constant stress, no matter how comfortable and happy you pretend to be. This morning, when I awoke and found myself in bed, I allowed myself to drift back to sleep, and began to dream intensely of a scene in a parking lot. Then I awoke again, and fell into dreaming again, this time swimming in a pool with friends. This occurred over and over, the waking and dreaming pictures coming and going. Then, the awake “I” started his day. My lower back ached. I was thirsty. Throughout the day, I could feel my character in the waking state, my remembered history gnarling through my current behavior. As the oldest of four sons I was treated special, as a precocious child. Now, the stream of my waking bodymind swirling, I often expect to be treated special as an adult. I couldn’t help but smile. My awake-body character is an arrogant, elitist, fearful, recluse, and of the same essential nature as my dream-bodies— the same openness of being that Waiting to Love Page 24

can feel and know, a love-swirl streaming and rippling, spontaneously appearing, changing, and disappearing. Within any dream or awake world, historical events are adding up to the momentum that creates this moment. “You” in any moment are a snapshot of a stream in motion, whose destiny can be known if one’s vision is sufficiently wide. And you are also spontaneously appearing with the entire world, while dreaming or awake. Fear is ignorantly believing in the substantiality of the love-openness that swirls as every appearing thing, gnarling as all forms. Fear is living in a world with a solid you that is separate from solid others, all apparently trapped in a world wherein love seems rarely sufficient. Like an artist committed to deepening your offering, practice opening to the nature of the appearing streams that comprise what you call self, others, and the world. Feel this moment’s open cognizance, shining, unrestricted and free. Again and again, soften your body as a smile, and know the obviousness of this openness as love, pure feeling without bounds. This is who you are, and how you are motivated to offer your self: vanishing as love fully given.

3. Whorling as Open Light “From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.” —Immanuel Kant Our attention is habituated to tension. A thought, a person, the sunset—these are crimps in openness that provide forms, ripples of light, that seem worth attending to. In reaction, our mind continues streaming as tension’s flow. I feel so alone. I wish somebody were here to share my life with. I wonder if I’ll finish this project today. What time did I make that appointment for? Whoa! Almost dropped my coffee cup. Check out that neighbor of mine, always strutting her stuff. In any world that appears, waking or dreaming, the stream of our thoughts, feelings, and actions is a pattern of tension that carries with it the illusion that we are going somewhere, and that others are going with us, loving us, more or less. Attending to that pattern of selves and world is an unnecessary act, although to each of us it seems like the story of our lives. Waiting to Love Page 26

God, I’d like to be married to a man like that. What’s wrong with me? Well, who can blame him? I’m overweight and getting older. Every thought evokes another thought, triggering feelings in our body and emotional reactions, so we act in a way that creates thoughts and feelings in others, enacting a never-ending interconnected webwork of streaming cause and effect—whether we are in a dream or waking world. The way we think and feel now is due to billions of influences—mostly not in our awareness—in our apparent dreaming or waking lifetime appearance-bodies. The Krebs cycle taking place in our cellular metabolism and the psychosomatic habits inherited from our parents remain largely outside of our attentiveness. We can intentionally change small portions of the appearing picture, but the big stream of the (dreaming or awake) world and others continues until it disappears in deep dreamless sleep or death. Our needs—to be loved, to discover our life’s purpose, to contribute to the world, and so forth—pertain only to the character presently appearing, the one whose story rivets our attention for now. Part of my story: I remember as a child, I would play for hours in the sandbox with my toy trucks, building roads and cities with sticks and small rocks. I was completely absorbed in my play, until mother called me to dinner.

Years later, I began to be interested in girls. Combing my hair, acting cool, and using ample deodorant gradually overtook my interest in sandbox cities and toy trucks. Soon, I began to read in earnest, trying to find an answer to why life seemed to be so painful and meaningless. I knew there was an answer to the questions: Why is there anything at all? What is my place in the world? What is God, if God even exists, and why do I love whom I do? Girls became secondary to finding the answers I sought. Eventually I met people who seemed to have the answers I was looking for. Spending hours, days, and years with them gave me many more answers than I ever got from reading. Books became obsolete, except for entertainment and technical knowledge. I began practicing what I was taught by people who lived more deeply open than I did. My life became dedicated almost entirely to training myself to be open, clear, and happy. I took on a dietary regime, thinking it would help clarify my mind, and I refused to eat my grandmother’s cookies. I meditated and did yoga many hours, without missing a day, even when my friends needed me. I became as obsessed with improving Waiting to Love Page 28

myself as I had been with my sandbox cities, girls, and finding answers in books. Whatever we attend to will eventually become uninteresting and forgotten. Our life story that seems so important today is a temporary tension arising with our attention. As your apparent self grows, you may experience a kind of compassionate disdain for those who are yet to outgrow the phase that has most recently become uninteresting to you. Spirituality itself is not the end, but simply a temporary obsession of attention as it eases to recognize its nature as openness, or love, itself. Phases occur when the appearing self thinks it has arrived at something truly important. For instance, it has opened beyond the need to feel that spiritual growth is anything other than a part of a storyline in the stream of attention’s form, beyond trucks, girls, books, answers, and even spiritual practices. From this phase of our mindstream, searching for an answer is oh so boring. Men and women who seek spiritual salvation, or presume to have attained it, are among the most boring people on earth. Their wholesome eagerness mitigates the mystery of life. They may eat special food, follow a sacred regime, or know that theirs

is the true and noble way. Each assumes that his or her destiny is worthy of exceptional attention. Their story is gloated with preciousness. Their surety crushes love’s spontaneity. They know the answer, thank you. Salvation sates the spirit, halting love’s momentum. The so-called spiritually profound person resembles nothing so much as a docile cow with sufficient grass. Days and nights are filled with the delicious fiber of proper behavior, deep understanding, and the certainty of right pursuit. They graze in spiritual pastures: the candles are lit, the postures assumed, courtesy abounds. These big-bellied creatures are fed in gatherings large and small, and their astute cud chewed with relish. They are given bales of wisdom, and they eat it up. “Do this and that.” Munch, munch. “Don’t do this and that.” Mmm, lick. And the most savory bite: “Everything is divine, and you are perfect just as you are.” Waiting to Love Page 30

Gnawed truth becomes pabulum. The spiritual aspirant, sustained and enthused by gormandizing bundles of revelation, masticates love until bland. Witless satiation exemplifies the spiritually bovine way of life. Sooner or later, however, satisfaction turns out to be unnecessary, and undomesticated love abides without being catered. Like baseball cards, dolls, and bodily existence, the spiritual way of life is an enthusiasm naturally outgrown by spirit. I wrote the above at a time when “the spiritual way of life” became obsolete for my appearing awake-character. The writing is textured by the superiority-assumption gnarling in my mindstream, set in motion by my particular childhood influences and inherited traits, just as your inherited traits and influences are gnarling your mindstream right now—another person reading these words would be experiencing their own stream of thoughts and feelings. Thinking I am superior—and that “I” am a solid thing in a solid world—generates contractive feelings and actions that ripple outward from me through the appearing space, affecting the appearing world in myriad ways,

some good, some bad, but aggrandizing the apparent solidity of the world in any case. So, other people feel themselves as solid, and thus naturally fear the death of the “thing” that they are. But in any moment that the appearing “I” feels the openness that is the very nature of now, including the whorl of superiority in the now-appearing stream of my life, the entire picture instantly relaxes. I, others, and the world become suffused with openness and humor. Jeez, my appearing character is a jerk. I can’t believe how arrogantly I just acted! I’m glad my friends can see right through the stream of events and know that our whorls can be intentionally modified a bit here and there, but mostly they will be gnarling for the duration of our appearing lives. The humorous love that shines in the eyes of my friends reminds me to feel deeper than the story that is showing as the moment, allowing the whole moment to loosen as the love that is living us, as if we all realized we were characters in a short-lived dream, bright, alive, and about to vanish in the open cognizance of the dreamer. Without my friends to remind me, I might take the appearing dream too seriously and get lost in the story of my seemingly solid life. My body and mind are disintegrating. Due to genetically inherited characteristics manifesting in the now-appearing Waiting to Love Page 32

bodystream, my spinal discs are rupturing, I’ve had diseased organs surgically removed, my head is balding, and my eyesight is failing. My physical posture and emotional preferences reflect those of my parents’. Spending time with my grandparents, I can see the genetic stream that flows through generations adding its whorl to my food predilections, sexual quirks, and relational attitudes. My early childhood experiences, though not especially traumatic, have created numerous ongoing kinkings, or psycho-emotional responses, in the streaming of my personality. All of this disappears when I sleep, and reappears upon awakening. My dream selves have their own streaming body and mind, and they seem just as real and just as “me.” Sometimes, the appearing “me” in dreams (and while awake) would like me to be different so that appearing others can benefit more and suffer less. My friends and I often laugh together in remembrance of our one clear identity, regardless of our personal twists and eddies. We may try to bring fresh flow into some of our more smelly and stagnant backwaters, but such efforts are secondary to the recognition that the water itself is nothing other than loving, knowing, openness, regardless of current appearance.

The shape of our selfing as seekers and givers wears thin in the thickness of love’s unconfined freedom alight as this moment’s openness. If you met me, I believe we would agree: my character is somewhat of an asshole. This personality whorl would be equally apparent to you and I, as if we were looking at a tree growing with a gnarl. We could both smile at my whorling rudeness, recognizing our essential identity as love’s openness that is able to know and feel as our streaming show of selves. You and I appear as dynamic rivers streaming with unique histories—composed of rapids, eddies, and gnarls—and we are both spontaneously appearing along with the rest of the world, as if in a dream. We are, and the entire world is, in truth and at all times, whether appearing as an awake or dreaming moment, of one essential nature: the unconfined openness that can know and feel with no bounds at all. Saraha, a great Tibetan Buddhist practitioner from long ago, spoke of this difference between being straight or gnarled on the one hand, and opening in love’s freedom on the other: “If you examine minutely the mindstreams of people who continually devote themselves at present to physical and verbal acts of virtue and those who spend their whole lives engaging in harmful actions, you will Waiting to Love Page 34

find that there is not an iota of difference in the minds of both types of people with respect to the perpetuation of attachment and aversion, hope and fear. If they gain freedom, they gain freedom because their mindstreams are freed; if they are confused, they are confused because their mindstreams are confused. But since the mindstream of neither type of person has been freed, there is not a hair’s tip of difference as far as their wandering in cyclic existence. Hence, although there is a short-term distinction between virtuous and harmful actions—they give rise to temporary happiness and suffering, respectively—neither is more than a prolongation of cyclic existence.” (Dudjom Lingpa, Buddhahood Without Meditation, Padma Publishing, 1994, pg 61.) Cyclic existence is our life story, day after day, dream after dream, appearing-life after appearing-life. Some of our stories are more twisted than others—the gnarled streaming of our bodies and minds differ. Some of us live more straight and others live as twisted as a tropical storm, with very different results in the appearing world. Nevertheless, all seeming life stories begin, play out, and end the same: waking until dreaming, dreaming until dead asleep, re-appearing and disappearing, sometimes dying without reappearing in any remembered form. And always, the deepest “I am”—whether waking, dreaming, meditating, sleeping, or dying—is able to feel as love’s openness, relaxed as if nothing

has ever happened, regardless of the story that seemed to have appeared for a while, if it is remembered at all. Waiting to Love Page 36

4. Ken Wilber is a Fraud “Forgive us our virtues.” That is what we should ask of our neighbors. —Friedrich Nietzsche How to live as a gift in this appearing world while also feeling the world, and your gift, as insubstantial as a dream? Ken Wilber, one of my very favorite writers and a friend who I love greatly, is someone I consider a tremendous gift to the world. He has also recognized this dream we inhabit for what it is, and for what it isn’t. His writing—a system of philosophy that can be called “A Theory of Everything,” which is the title of one of his many books—takes into account the humor of its utterly non-solid foundation, spiritually speaking. As Ken has suggested, starting with The Atman Project, every book he has written has had one hidden sentence that says, in effect, "everything in this book is a lie." In this sense, Ken is a conscious fraud, although I’m not sure he would describe himself that way. In any case, he represents one way to live skillfully, for the benefit of appearing others, as a gift in an appearing world.

Everything he writes about, and Ken himself, is of the nature of open knowingness temporarily appearing as if in a dream that can never be truly substantiated, although much can be said about it. Ken certainly knows this, and includes it in his writings, although many people attribute too much solidity to his presentation, both as a person and as a philosopher. One day, I started thinking that maybe Ken had painted himself into something of a corner, despite his hidden sentences and profound knowledge of the unknowable. Perhaps his immense body of work was inadvertently helping some people reify their solid sense of separate self that thought it knew its place in a world so well-modeled by Ken’s work, rather than knowing its place in a seeming world, and thus resting openly and in humor, with Ken, while entertaining whatever apparent knowings Ken offers so artfully. My whorl-festered awake-character started wondering what would happen if Ken was more explicit about his non-ignorance of the unconfined openness that loves and knows. Is his conscious fraudulence still the most beneficial way to offer his gifts? Why continue to write hidden sentences, “Everything in this book is a lie?” Instead of pretending to be so seriously engaged as a modeler of “everything,” what would happen if he openly lived as if he knew (which he does) that “everything” was only apparent, and associated with a brief and essentially Waiting to Love Page 38

non-existent self that seems existent along with a whole Kosmos that can be theoretically modeled (in Ken’s “all-quadrant, all-level” vision) for precisely as long as it spontaneously self-arises and opens gone? Instead of engaging Germanic debates concerning ontological realms of existence versus gradients of developing consciousness, what would happen if Ken learned pointing-out techniques from his dog, and just pooped on the carpet of his critics (in a trans- rather than pre-rational fashion, of course)? Instead of donating his appearing self as a brilliant philosopher, again and again evoked by idiot-scholars to re-explain and further articulate his offerings, what would happen if he jumped into the next appearance of his self, allowing students of his work to continue that which could never be finished? In my perverse mind, he has certainly used his current vehicle of self to the point of near-obsolescence, at least in terms of conducting himself as a philosopher of everything, repeatedly subject to auto-catalytic rejection by the prevailing metabolics of academic thought, which lack the enzymes to digest some of the more subtle delicacies that Ken enjoys and tries to give to others on a platter exquisitely, and foreverincompletely, presented. It was just a strange thought.

A haughtily voiced eddy of my character began laughing and writing while affectionately imagining Ken. After some people reacted rather strongly to the resulting essay, Ken said, “Part of wisdom is knowing how to balance goodness and greatness… People just don't get what you are trying to do. And wisdom means being able to tell the difference.” I wholeheartedly agree with Ken’s feeling that perhaps my greatness had “stomped” on my goodness when I wrote, with great smiles of love, the following: Ken Wilber is a good man, as well as a great man. A good man is kind, decent, caring, sincere, and compassionate to others. A great man is lovingly ruthless, and dies with no gift left ungiven. Ken is too good for his own greatness, and therefore I, who am rather under-endowed with goodness, feel obliged to stand up for Ken’s greatness. Ken Wilber is, in my opinion, the most influential and prodigiously beautiful philosopher of our time. His mind authenticates genius. His books are far more than brilliant and startlingly unprecedented. His character exudes the subdued charm of one who knows way too much for the common good. As both person and writer, Ken Wilber is glorious in almost every way. However, few understand that he is a fraud. Waiting to Love Page 40

I do not say this lightly. Ken is my friend, although some would say that Ken doesn’t have any real friends, only supporters, sycophants, mentors, and students. Ken is an inspiration to hundreds of thousands, although some would say that Ken’s inspiration has already peaked, and his life is now waning into bureaucratic huffing and puffing while he seeks to build a pseudo-academic monument to reify his stature. Some would call Ken’s heart cold and his disposition arrogant. I disagree. Ken Wilber is a fraud. That much is apparent to even his most casual acquaintances, and surely to his lover, the woman who must suffer his hoax most acutely. One can only imagine their bedtime rituals: the wellresearched hygiene, Zen-inflicted tenderness, and cheeky insouciance of a man living a scam so completely that even his eroticism is felt as a bluff by this woman who adores him, and yet cannot get him to fully admit to his audacious scheme, to come clean for real. And so, I will do the honors for him, whether I am forgiven or not. Ken has sacrificed everything—full enlightenment, guileless intimacy, even the pleasantries of unguarded conversation—all for the sake of his con. His commitment is admirable. His ploy goes virtually unnoticed in the conscious view of his comrades. Subconsciously, however, suspicion is frequently aroused.

I love Ken. I will therefore do my best to defend his virtue. He is a fraud, that is certain; but how would you feel if you were he? Imagine you had plunged into the depths of the Kosmos and deeply realized nothing new? Imagine your greatest discovery, after reading thousands of books, meditating for decades, and investigating most every philosopher and teaching in print, on the web, and in person—what if your greatest discovery was that you were a fraud who had the choice not to be, but that it would cost everything and change nothing? Having thought virtually every thought ever thought worth thinking, why would you ever think again? I’m not talking about thinking in order to build a space station, improve the integrity of world politics, or balance your checkbook. I’m talking about philosophical thinking, motivated by the search for the deepest truth. To whom would you consider yourself thinking, having thought the truths that have been thunk by Ken, and thus knowing that if you can think it, both “you” and “it” are less than the deepest truth pointed to by the thoughts you had already thunk or ever can think? Imagine you were class president in high school, valedictorian, athlete, and golden boy. Your first philosophical treatise written in your early twenties garners the attention of the spiritually-prone intellectual vanguard. In the midst of your benevolent rise Waiting to Love Page 42

to philosophical grandeur, your beloved wife passes away, slowly. As never before, your heart knows thought’s limits. You spend years not writing, but drinking, assessing, and heart-inquiring. You spring back to life with a vengeance, creating a love-illuminated conceptual foundation for arguably the most important intellectual framework in recent history. Your life’s work is given the superlative kudos it deserves by a few adequately-minded allies who possess the woeful eyes of vanquished truth-seekers, and you enthrall the masses as they clamor for an Answer—and all the while, you trust nobody with whom to rejoice in the beauty of your scam. I can assure you, Ken Wilber does not believe his own truly awesome work is the Answer. If anybody knows the limits of maps, insights, and vision-logic—however grand that Kosmic vision may be—it is Ken. Ask him, and I’m sure he’ll tell you that his work is just another conceptual tool that stands on the shoulders of giants and will be likewise overstepped by history’s stride. To me, Ken’s work is art. When I read his work, I feel the divine tickle that reaches through all true art and touches the place where God need not be discovered.

Ken’s writing belongs to that special order of art known as “classic,” art that signs the end of a genre’s most fertile days. Examine what are considered to be the truly classic novels, classic silent movies, classic baroque musical pieces: each, without intention and by its own perfection, makes its genre obsolete, although lesser endeavors may continue in their elaboration, eventually mutating into a new genre. Thinking about the Kosmos in order to realize divine truth is now as antiquated—and as enjoyable—as playing Bach on piano. Ken’s work stands as classic art, for he has made the collective need for intellectual spiritual inquiry obsolete—except as a way of practicing classical art, instructive, insightful, and pleasurable even for philosophical morons, as long as they can read well enough. You can read Ken’s writings once, twice, even many times for the pleasure of God’s touch through Ken’s mind, but after reading Ken, after getting Ken, what is there concerning the philosophical search for the deepest truth to dutifully think about? Only the divine “ah” of philosophical Art remains, and its sublime exercise that reveals a domain of truth including but far outreaching thought. Waiting to Love Page 44

Ken has thought for everyone who has ever tried to think their way to God, and he has thought them as far as thinking will take them. “Ken Wilber” has made himself obsolete, and therein lies his fraudulence. If you look at a picture of his face, which is often featured hugely on the cover of his books, he seems to be smugly Pleiadian. His unholy and selfcertain cyborg-mates-with-Mona-Lisa smile is, I assure you, part of his scam. Eventually, every idea is followed by more profound ideas, until at last, as in Ken’s case, profundity itself stands obvious without the need for indication. That look on Ken’s face is the look of a snake oil salesman long past his days of even being interested in making money, let alone duping others into believing in philosophical cures for the deep itch of truth longed for. So why does he continue? Having crowned the genre of spiritual philosophy by making the collective effort toward theorizing-your-way-to-God starkly obsolete, why does Ken continue building his Integral Institute to assist others in doing just that? Why does he continue to write book after book, catering especially to those whose minds could fit easily into Ken’s left earlobe?

Some would say his reason is compassion for others. They would say that Ken is a Bodhisattva, cranking his aging mind like a hopped-up ’67 Mustang, still well-greased and revving faster than just about anything else out there, so that others can take the ride he’s taken so many times already, and see the same sights. That is, he is postponing the inevitable parking-of-the-car for the sake of others. That is, he is a fraud due to compassion. Others would say that Ken is still stuck in his trip, still thinking that thinking goes somewhere deeper than the well-known-to-Ken tracks and the philosophical scenery adjoining the road of cogitation, wheeling about ad nauseam. Sly Ken often refers to himself as a “pundit” rather than a “teacher” or “guru,” reinforcing for others the sense of himself as an intellectual guide. But Ken-as-intellectual-guide-and-lover-of-the-thought-trip is long gone. That passion has been drained from his deepest heart. Ask anyone who lives with him. My guess is that this karma was exhausted with his monumental tome, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Since then, he’s been selling snake oil with that indeterminately human visage on the cover of every bottle. Waiting to Love Page 46

Don’t get me wrong—like all maturity-appropriate toys, snake oil is as real as it seems. It temporarily absorbs your suffering. If you believe in it, you are alleviated. Follow the directions diligently in any of Ken’s works, let your mind imbibe the fullness of spirit that flows through Ken’s utterly graceful mind, and you will be released of the disease that you thought thinking would cure. This effect will last for precisely as long as you no longer think that theories of anything (and especially theories of everything) will get you to the deepest truth. The birth of Ken’s mind had this one purpose, and it has, for the most part, been fulfilled. Ken’s mind has thus made itself obsolete. The philosophical search for the deepest truth has been exercised to the asymptotic edge of pure Art (although infinite details can always be worked out by the parade of philosophical craftsman sure to follow). The artifacts of Ken’s mind are now and forever on display as pristine classics, the peak and end of a genre’s heyday. The work of Ken Wilber as we know and love it is basically over, along with the intellectual search for divine truth, for those who have replicated Ken’s thought, for real, in the wheeling of their own heart’s mind. The Ken we now see still driving his intellect at full speed is a fraud, a con, a vestige fueled by real goodness and the fumes of

non-necessity. This is only my opinion, of course. But look in Ken’s eyes. Ask Ken’s most dear lover. Even ask his dog. Ken has been faking it for a while now. He fakes it better than most people can really do it with their most supreme effort, but Ken’s art has now become mere craft. And craft just doesn’t cut it—unless you can’t tell the difference, which most can’t. And so Ken can continue his sham, only at the expense of the deepest hearts who love him, as well as his own. Many others are benefiting, no doubt. But the heart of Ken’s mind was rested long ago, and those who commune with his now-heart know it. Ken is churning out craft that the hoards still find artful. But where he is most alive now, remains hidden. To show his now-heart without time’s cyborg face would require an act of courage and renunciation so immense, that I can barely imagine it, let alone imagine the effect it would have on his family and closest friends. They would love him all the more, certainly, for those closest to Ken most suffer his true greatness as it is held behind his genuine goodness. This is my best shot: Ken’s love is ruthlessly empty now—of family, of mind, of destiny—but his goodness continues to invest Waiting to Love Page 48

each with care and kindness. Ken’s deepest heart-motive has come to rest in ways that others still need to move, and so he moves with them— encouraging them, even—for their own good. If he continues, Ken will die almost completely given. As great art, Ken’s writing is and always will be classic. As a man, the greatness of Ken’s now-heart is being sacrificed on the momentum of his goodness. Personally, I wish he’d live and love without a trace of amiable inertia, but then others might feel abandoned by the accommodation that Ken carries as his crucifix, and many would find him truly despicable. Until he is willing to be at least as great as he is good, Ken’s life and work will remain tainted, however subtly, by a fraudulence that others will read as arrogance. Ken tries hard not to show what he really knows, or rather, to show the Unknowable regardless of consequence. He is burdened by what he knows is good for most. That subtle hesitation to be real is felt by others as a tempered wall between Ken’s heart and theirs, a coolness assumed to be intellectuality and arrogance. To remain an unequivocally good man, Ken holds back and abides by the etiquette most befitting a world of others. However, Ken has seen through others, and his now-heart rests

open beyond the need for other-concern or for goodness. Thus, his fraudulently authentic loving is hinted with separation born of residual kindness. In addition, his mental precision, once pure of motive, is now tinged with obsolescence, and so his communications can’t help but carry the faint fragrance of exasperation, which some people also sniff. It is Ken’s goodness—his genuine care for others—that now makes him seem less heartful than he truly is. Ken’s now-heart makes no others, no unequivocal good and bad, resting empty and full as only One. He now fakes the benevolent morality of the good-sided man, perhaps for fear of the ruthless loving his undivided greatness might bring to bear. Ken Wilber is a fraud. I say that we accept only the real deal, demanding Ken’s up-to-date and unfully-given gifts, straight from his now-heart, however ruthlessly his One love may create and destroy. We owe Ken that, for making the philosophical search for the divine as beautiful—and archaic—as Bach. Waiting to Love Page 50

After writing and sending this essay to Ken, he responded by email: well, hell, i love it! but, um, what about my fucking humanity?! the only sad part in all this is that my goodness is needed for integral institute, which is precisely where any ruthless greatness is not allowed, nor even wise. so i have trapped myself in goodness, for a bit longer. if the funding unfolds as my good self suspects, then i will allow my greatness to stomp on my goodness, and i might punch you in the face, too. now we don't want that quite yet, do we? so you see, i must reign in the rule of the ever-brightness of my great self until certain pathetic, fraudulent events have come to pass, which only slowly kills my body, so perhaps death will be cheated yet a bit longer. incidentally, i'm writing boomeritis as a novel, a postmodern model that criticizes postmodernism. it is, of course, amazingly great. love, ken

Originally, I wrote a number of essays that included the names of well-known authors and teachers, from whom I requested a go-ahead. Ken was the only one who OK’d the publication of the essay concerning him, without hesitation. In subsequent dialog, he did his best to teach me about skillful means and the

wisdom of balancing goodness and greatness. I obviously still have a lot to learn, and I continue to be inspired by Ken’s courage and unflappably loving humor. Thank you, Ken. Waiting to Love Page 52

5. I Am an Arrogant Liar It is a luxury to be understood. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Fundamentally, if you are holding on to any perspective at all—such as, spiritual practice is for the sake of alleviating the suffering of others without causing harm—then your very holding perpetuates the appearing world along with its suffering. In this waking world, you can’t breathe without killing millions of microorganisms, even while you meditate on loving-kindness. Every step in the forest, however careful, snuffs out the lives of many small living beings and their families, leaving others maimed and crippled. Your ancestors probably murdered the native peoples of your country, so that now, generations later, you could inherit the leisure time to think about helping the few remaining indigenous people on the earth, whose atmosphere you toxify while you drive your car to do volunteer work. The fuller your perspective, the less ground you have to stand on, until love is allowed to spontaneously live you open as an offering, without the necessity of any perspective to motivate your actions.

All perspectives—including this one—cannot show the whole picture. Furthermore, every perspective—including this one—is a lie. So, how do we live? Having glimpsed the always-nature of this present moment—unconfined, cognizant, loving, openness—what guides our lives? How much time do you want to spend in selfor world-improvement, and how much time do you want to spend in mutual recognition that nothing solid exists to be improved? Is there a middle way that allows both the recognition of openness (with no necessity to change, or even notice, anything) and the art of living wisely and well? Most people, including myself, tend to err toward one side or the other. We tend to forget the openness that always is, and we become tense. Then, as tension itself, we try to change the appearing world and our appearing selves, because we are afraid of dying or experiencing pain, and we want to soothe our mortal cringe with the balm of hope for love and goodness. Or, we tend to remember the present openness that always is, and then neglect our effect on the appearing world of others by insulating ourselves from their heart’s suffering. We cling to the sense of relaxed openness itself, because we are afraid to vulnerably feel, or we are too lazy to act upon, what we do feel when we relax fully open. Waiting to Love Page 54

A maturing spirituality involves the spontaneous realization that you are already open to, and open as, what is, including all apparent others. Health and disease, kindness and abuse, sex and battles—all of life can be a felt-expression of openness and love, or you can deny openness in the act of fearful separation, even by clinging to the feeling of openness itself, at the expense of feeling the hearts of others. One currently popular opinion is that spiritual growth, through practicing and cultivating depth, kindness, and compassion for others, leads to a good life, internally and externally. Another opinion is that “others” is an illusion, and that true spiritual recognition obviates the need for any gradual practice or developmental improvement over time. But these are just a few perspectives. And like all perspectives—including mine—no perspective is the whole picture. The picture of what a well-lived life is supposed to look like varies according to your point of view. As an analogy, suppose that you were to take a photograph from where you are sitting or standing right now. You would capture one perspective of the room you are in. Now, imagine taking a photograph from every possible perspective in the room— gathering photos from a virtually infinite number of viewpoints—and stacking these billions and billions of photos so you saw all possible perspectives of the room superimposed at once. The result would be either

all black or all white, depending on whether the billions of superimposed images were photographic negatives or positives, but in any case, the result would be an image of undifferentiated oneness. To include all perspectives is to see one, with no difference. Whether you call the resulting image totally full or totally empty—or both, or neither—you’d be right. The image of undifferentiated oneness includes all perspectives, so it is totally full. Yet the result of such inclusion is that all differences disappear, so there are no seeable things at all, as if empty. It is both. Being both—full and empty—it is neither. To see or express any thing—through photography, words, or any other means—you assume a limited perspective, and to that extent what you describe is a lie. It is not complete. And it could be negated by another perspective that saw the same thing from a different angle. Included along with every possible perspective, like the superimposed photographs from every angle in the room, your particular perspective of this moment is just a peculiar limitation of the empty oneness full of all potential viewpoints. The only way not to lie is to include infinity by allowing full presence to be expressed through undivided brightness, or perhaps unbroken silence, or perfect stillness, or undifferentiated feelingoneness, with no difference. But this doesn’t say anything. It is simply the only way to express unlimited truth. Waiting to Love Page 56

Therefore, to say anything is to limit the truth to a particular perspective, to tell an incomplete truth, or to lie. All art—such as photography, painting, or music—presents a limited perspective. Great spiritual art is a great lie that reminds us of truth. Silence and absolute non-difference may be the only way to fully demonstrate truth, but if we are going to offer a perspective at all, we might as well do so artfully, I believe, in a way that evokes the unspeakable truth. The blandness of today’s spiritual idealism lacks artfulness, in my opinion. We can be artfully bland—some of the greatest sages hardly moved or said a word. But blandness as a spiritual ideal, or the wished-for harmlessness of so-called psycho-emotional “balance,” suppresses art. The Jew from Nazareth, Jesus, didn’t talk therapy to help balance the psychological dispositions of the moneychangers. The Hindu deity Krishna—when he wasn’t trysting with maidens—encouraged his disciple Arjuna to continue fighting on the battlefield, killing friends and relatives who might be enemies, while remembering the Lord. Kali, a female deity, is depicted chopping off men’s heads. Rumi, the Persian mystic, would get drunk with his best friend, destroying his brain cells thereby as he spoke spontaneous poetry. An Indian who introduced Buddhism to Tibet, Padmasambhava, battled all sorts of demons in the subtle realm and embraced all sorts of sexual consorts in the physical world. And the Old Testament God allegedly turned people into salt.

Not all purveyors of spirituality—living or mythic—are harmlessly bland or balanced or “integrated” in psychotherapeutic terms. And why should they be, except from one perspective of what has shown itself to be the current historical norm? What would your dream-self consider a healthy psychoemotional response in a world of monsters chasing you through a dream-forest of blue trees while your heart is pounding and you suddenly start to fly as your foot is ripped off in the teeth of your mother? Every appearing self and its co-arising world entails a brief and illusory sense of how one should live for the benefit of others—what is appropriately healthy art, science, and morals for that self and world. As your sense of self becomes more obviously a currently-appearing/disappearing wisp of alight openness, rather than a solid identity separate from others, your sense of what life is and how you should live it becomes more of a heartfelt spontaneity rather than a ponderous investigation—although such pondering happens spontaneously, too. As my current waking self, I have never killed anyone with a sword like Arjuna, nor have I upturned tables like Jesus. I have never cut off anyone’s head like Kali. I have, occasionally, spoken drunken poetry, although not with the eloquence of Rumi. The perspective I present is always limited, as is yours. I’d prefer that our lives together be artful, rather than bereft of love’s reminder and truth’s evocation due to the suppressive popularization of idealized Waiting to Love Page 58

spiritual balance and niceness. But in any case, spiritual realization doesn’t make things nice, in this or any other world. Let’s look at our waking-world, as we know it. In some ways—the scent of a rose, your lover’s smile—this world is beautiful. In other ways, it’s not a pretty picture. You can act to temporarily sustain more gorgeous moments, if you stay out of hospitals, war zones, and places where starving people are covered by flies, and if the inevitable death of you and your beloveds doesn’t ruin your capacity to gloat in niceness for now. Nevertheless, every moment, whether beautiful or ugly, is alive as an expression of the openness that includes all, as if the undivided openness of the all-inclusive photograph came alive as each of its perspectives, some prettier than others. Every moment is a living openness, a mysterious display of the one appearing as many while never being other than the one. Feel as deeply as you can right now—whether you are cheerful or angry, bored or depressed—and only openness avails. This openness includes all possibilities, just like the photo comprised of every perspective of the room. This openness is infinity, and it is utterly empty of things, as if nothing has happened. It is a oneness that ripples as the appearance of all—including psycho-emotional balance and disease, benefit and harm—and always remains as is, open and alive.

While dreaming or awake, this openness seems full of lighted happenings. While dead asleep, this openness seems empty and dark. As you begin to fall asleep, practice feeling your heart as if it were glowing. Do your best to feel this light even as you fall into the darkness you call sleep, where this luminosity becomes the lucidity of consciousness without an object, pure open knowingness without lit form. When dreaming images alight, feel their illumination as the same light that fills your waking day, the same glow you slept into pure open knowingness. Feel this openness—relax as this openness—while darkness shines or life’s pictures shimmer, including the appearance of your buffed or sagging body and your chaotic or calm mind (while waking or dreaming, or even while dreaming that you are dreaming). At depth, we are always this openness. Feel as this vivid spaciousness, alive as love ripped open by others’ suffering. When you forget and become tense, relax open again, and trust being lived as love’s vulnerable, spontaneous expression. Fully feel the suffering your perspective includes right now, without closing into a nice, separate place of safety. Even when you feel hurt, criticized, or ignored, even when you feel others dying, sick, or maimed, relax as openness Waiting to Love Page 60

right now and fully feel. Breathe whatever you feel in and out of your entire body, as if offering your permeable flesh to love’s light and ache. You may notice that you become tense again. Feel all and relax open as if you were making love with the beautiful sky, your ugly neighbor, your own depression, or your lover’s spite. Without retracting from bliss or anguish, feel all the appearing bodies and minds churning in lust, generosity, and opposition, chewing one another, laughing in joy, and always dissolving, as every dreaming and waking drama is fully felt, embraced as a lover, and fully forgotten. Soften your belly, breathe fully, surrender to the love that wants to live through you, and relax open to be lived as love’s deepest offering right where you are. As long as we deeply surrender to be lived spontaneously by the force of love alive as all, then every single experience of harm or benefit, every utterance of eloquence or stuttering, is but a unique expression of this one openness of free being—unless we close down or resist some aspect of our experience. Then, in our refusal to feel, we enact separation. We restrain our spontaneous deep-heart offering, and our uniquely limited expression becomes limiting; our particular actions becomes less artful as we contract love’s boundless potential. While calmly harmless or passionately aggressive, or while necessarily eating various beings so we can have the energy to serve other beings, our actions

can be specific, and thus limited, artful gifts of love-magnification without necessarily limiting love in fearful separation. For instance, imagine a woman who is surrendered open, transparent as the one alive as all, not limiting her love’s offering, vulnerably feeling-breathing every heart’s suffering and joy, while fully gifting all from her heart’s depth. Her appearing character is limited. She may seem to be a tumultuous, cigarette smoking, lecherous bed-wetter, and still transmit or magnify more love in the appearing world than a peaceful, vegetarian, monogamous yoga teacher who is acting in a love-limiting fashion. A healthy, integrated, or balanced life is just one way that love appears and shimmers in form, and it is certainly not the only way. Openness can be expressed as spontaneously full presence, and love can be known and offered without doubt, through any of its limited forms or perspectives, as apparent selves feast upon and heal others and the world. Spiritually realized people—those who are most alive as love’s openness in spite of the picture or perspective that may appear—don’t necessarily have pretty lives in the waking and dreaming display. In our waking-display history, the Nazarene Jesus was crucified a few thousand years ago. The renowned Indian sage Ramana Maharshi died slowly of painful cancer this last century. The Tibetan monk and leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama had to flee his native country in the late 1950’s as fellow monks were being attacked, and they are allegedly being killed and tortured, even today. Knowing openness, Waiting to Love Page 62

or being love, doesn’t guarantee a pretty or harm-free picture, or even a human picture, let alone a balanced personality or body. I am not a spiritually enlightened person, but I have relaxed enough so that the openness that always is has a chance, at times, to predominate the appearing picture that includes the stream of my life. My physical body, in midlife of the waking state, is chronologically rotting, in spite of my well-informed diet and exercise regimes. My emotions stream in accordance with acquired habits of virtue and vanity: I tend to be priggish, afraid of pain, disgusted by much of life’s realities, childishly regressive with those who seem better than I, and held back from those who seem worse. Sometimes, while dreaming, I fly, or die. Any specific perspective or picture of myself, others, and the world can be felt arising as the currently visible—and thus limited—aspect of the openness of love’s appearance. It doesn’t matter how unbalanced, not nice, or fantastic I or the world may appear. The substance of any of life’s pictures is love’s light, alive and knowing, feeling and showing, responding to and forgetting everything, and always open without a trace. This conscious luminosity is the empty feeling-substance of love’s openness whether I am flying in a dream or being an arrogant pedant with my friends while awake. All perspectives, all worlds, all limitations of personality and

bodily expressions, everything is the feeling openness of conscious luminosity. All pictures are a limited view of openness. We can prioritize the always openness. Or, we can prioritize the current picture. Or, we can be alive as one that includes all, offering love in each picture’s perspective as we feel and act spontaneously from our deepest heart, forgetting every moment wide open. If we prioritize the current picture, yours probably pretty much coincides with mine; ours is a human domain. Most of our attention while awake is locked into our relationships, earning a living, eating, raising a family, trying to help the world become a better place, creating art, and so forth. When our attention is locked into the picture, then we respond as if what we are seeing is solid and real. We read a few books, and we start philosophizing about the nature of the very picture that is spontaneously appearing, including those books. We see a kitten mangled in collision with a car, and we respond with nausea. We see an attractive person give you a warm smile, and we respond with interest or desire. If your lover spanks you during sex, you are erotically turned on or frozen in fear, depending, perhaps, on whether you were, or were not, sexually abused as a child. Waiting to Love Page 64

The way a grasshopper might respond to a passionate spanking is surely different from the way a human victim of childhood abuse might respond, which is probably different from the way a never-traumatized and adoring lover in a playful and trusting intimate relationship might respond. Your bodymind is human while awake, and usually human while appearing in dreams, and your sheer humanness accounts for most of your responses and even for your sense of time. Who are you today, and what have you done with your life? A remembered history coarises with the your currently appearing self, awake or while dreaming. Time itself arises with each picture: dream time (seconds can contain years of events), waking time (where did the last five minutes go?), the forever summers of your youth and the quick decades of your elder years—the sense of history or “duration” itself arises along with everything else appearing now. Your actions are intermeshed in a cause-and-effect webwork with all past and future actions at many different levels of selfing. Existence is unfathomably complex—which is why almost all attempts at massive change-for-the-better become entangled in complications and fail to a significant degree. Feeding the world’s starving, negotiating peace in the Middle East—millennia of actions including environmental alterations, political coups, human accident, and religious beliefs—are contributing to the momentum of the appearing

now. In any case, each moment of self and action is gone in an instant, every instant. As fresh as an unexpected kiss and gone to open on arrival, such is the currently appearing picture of self, others, and the world. Enlightenment, or spiritual opening, doesn’t change the picture much. Just because you may relax and abide more fully as openness—the always and already one, the totally full and totally empty “I am” of beingness, regardless of the picture that is appearing—it doesn’t mean you will become a grasshopper, or suddenly act like you weren’t abused as a child or didn’t inherit a genetic or environmental predisposition to Christianity, Judaism, food scarcity, cancer, alcoholism, or arrogance. Without quibbling about who is most enlightened, there have been spiritually open people who have evidenced a wide range of qualities and tendencies: leukemia, substance addiction, heart disease, pomposity, simplicity, poetic genius, potent silence, passionate song and dance in gatherings of thousands, a preference for solitude, a destiny including fame, torture, wealth, or poverty. There have been enlightened huggers and warriors, wearers of silk robes and filthy loincloths. Rather than closing to full feeling or retracting from the threat of nothingness, spiritually mature people are more likely to be spontaneously alive as the Waiting to Love Page 66

openness of love’s being, through their currently appearing configuration of form, whether bland, exciting, sexual, celibate, diseased, or healthy. Willing to feel and offer everything as love, their individual lives may be limited but are not limiting. Relaxing open exactly as their form is displaying, their loving is artfully played through whatever cards they have been dealt by nature’s unfathomable confluence of influence. As people begin to become interested in spiritual growth, they tend to expect openness to look a particular way. I certainly did. The current fad includes an expectation that spiritual growth is toward a balanced personality, a fit body, and a healthy world. Yet, nobody I have heard about—from Jesus Christ to Ramana Maharshi, from Rumi to the Dalai Lama—has achieved this inner and outer balance or health for self and all. Still— through their words, acts, and presence—they have never ceased articulating love’s openness, although their style of offering love’s art varies hugely. Just like them, we can learn to speak, see, and act within any waking or dreaming picture with less fear of death’s nothingness and more freedom as love’s fullness. We can practice loosening our attention’s tense need to cling to the appearing picture, allowing attention to naturally relax into its source as unconfined, open knowingness. We trust this fall into openness just like we trust our fall into the deep bliss of sleep, although we remain alert, sensitive, and lucid, allowing love’s light to shine open as the picture of our waking world.

We feel outward from our heart as if drenching the walls and trees and stars with our love’s brightness. Again and again, we remember to give our love, relaxing, breathing, sitting, speaking, dancing, and acting as the openness who we always are and always have been. By softening our body, relaxing our breath, and trusting ever-deepening love to emerge from our heart as our life, we can easefully feel and enact every moment as openness, though our childhood tendencies may continue to twist and color the love we offer as life’s art. If you didn’t fear death, if you didn’t doubt love—if you were unafraid to breathe everyone’s heart-suffering and offer your love without holding back in this moment’s picture, fully feeling, responding, and forgetting wide open—how would you act right now, in the form of your body and mind that is currently part of the picture? You aren’t appearing as a grasshopper. What are you appearing as? Man? Woman? Full of coffee or parasites or pain? Are you holding a gun, as the enemy approaches to slaughter your family? Are you holding a baby, in the peaceful comfort of your suburban home? How does your presently appearing form live open as the gift of uncompromised love? This is our discovery, in every appearing world until it is forgotten in openness, dead or alive. Waiting to Love Page 68

Personally, I enjoy the company of characters who recognize the often heart-wrenching drama of life as the heart-born projection of love. Together, we can help each other to relax, breathing open to be moved by love’s deepest force, even while expressing a limited (but not limiting) self-in-a-picture, perhaps angrily shouting, silently shining, or chatting about the dirt on our shoes. As for myself, in this current picture, I do not appear as a grasshopper or even a nice guy. However, when I look into the eyes of someone who is surrendered open as the love that is alive as conscious light, we both know that we are lived by the same love, although our bodyminds may appear very, very different. Whether we are vibrantly healthy, psychologically balanced, or droolingly alcoholic, we can both smile in mutual recognition of our one identity. For instance, I may appear arrogant, as I am often told. My currently appearing self can be whorling in an arrogant fashion and lost in the particular picture of the moment, in which case I will feel stuck as a solid “me” trapped in a world of others who feel separate—and those others will feel my arrogance as separative. Or, I can be arrogantly presenting while trusting to feel open, freely alive as love’s spontaneous offering—and anyone who is also open will recognize our

identity as spontaneous luminosity, one openness loving through the show of two people. We can receive the display of my arrogance—or humility—as a particular love-formed image appearing in this moment’s openness of being. We feel our oneness heart to heart. We see openness in each other’s eyes. We offer our gifts through the unique twists of our human forms in the current picture, with no tense need to idealize harmlessness or balance at the expense of love’s most deep and spontaneous expression—although we certainly may prefer calmness to chaos, health to sickness, peace to war. Alive as openness, we may still act to change the picture, but humor isn’t lost, and love isn’t forgotten, whether or not the picture changes much. In mutual recognition of our one openness of being, our actions and words are given and received as spontaneous offerings of love, enacted and seen from a necessarily limited point of view that is influenced by historical events, yet always an expression of love’s unlimited art, whether or not the particular picture suits our tastes, dreaming or waking or dying. We are openness—and every possible appearance. Only in mutual vulnerability and free surrender can we be moved by the nuances of love’s spontaneous currents showing as the appearing world. Reminding each other Waiting to Love Page 70

to relax open as the deepest force of love, our actions are aligned by and imbued with the uncontrived grace that lives and breathes us all. This is the art of life. And so is your perspective.

6. Sacrifice Through Inhabitance You will not become a saint through other people’s sins. —Anton Chekhov I never met a man I respected who, at one time or another, didn’t use drugs in a judiciously excessive fashion. Some women apparently don’t need to make use of plant extracts, resins, and fermentations to ease their mindstreams to yes. But the great men I have known occasionally found the “no” of sobriety too protective and unnecessary to sustain without offering themselves to be inhabited by one substance or another. When a mediocre man uses drugs, he becomes more mediocre. His mind dulls. His humor dribbles. His reflection enlarges but flattens in distortion. A mediocre man uses drugs as he uses all friendships: to escape, to gain insight, or to see himself worthy. Companionship helps him tolerate the fact that his life falls short. Drug use for such a man is tinged with the guilt of inadequacy. But for some men, the enduring of life is already a brief feast of humor and bright love. Untwisted by dilemma and unburdened by a life of almost, these Waiting to Love Page 72

men don’t seek the relief of drugs, any more than one might seek the relief of food or children. For these men, the nature that courses through their blood and body is enabling a continuity that is life, rather than constituting a special act that distorts life. Most drugs are toxic and shorten one’s life. But for whose benefit is one living? Living for the sake of love is a dangerous plunge. Falling in love, parenting, and making art have shortened and sweetened many lives. The measure of any act is not its length, but its liberation of love. The question is not whether you feel more loving after a swig, a smoke, or a swallow. In fact, if there is a question at all, then you should embrace a life of sobriety. Likewise, if you have real questions—“Should I, or should I not?”—about eating or sexing, for instance, then purity and wholesomeness are the appropriate guides for your actions. Only when each question has been lived so thoroughly that every action is love’s answer, only then does the motive of self-preservation give way to sacrificial companionship. Motherhood may be the epitome of offering one’s body to be grown in and eaten. Drugs offer, to men also, the opportunity for sacrifice through inhabitance. One is given over and even ruined in the process, but a great mother, artist, or lover has no option. The body is lived by love, inhabited by

quantities of nature for the sake of love. The accounting of one’s demise is measured in units of love’s occupancy. Youth is often a prerequisite for inhabitance by drugs or children, for the body is plied and the toll taken by their demand. By middle age, the body is no longer sacrificed to love by being torn, but simply damaged. If one’s youth is fully given to love, and thus ruined by love, what remains of the flesh is so tenderized that no question can take hold. The body’s vitality of purpose is, over time, replaced by its robustness of surrender. To wane thusly is to know love without residue or doubt. Who protects their self from this inhabitance? Who won’t allow spirit to enter and occupy their body for the sake of love? Most are afraid to be eaten, and so are merely distorted by inhabitance. Sad is the man who has held himself apart from being feasted upon. Abstinence and craven indulgence are usually acts of refusal; purity and the desire to be distorted are two ways of the heart saying, “No.” Better to be corrupted by love—violently so—and used up in the birth shudders of sacrifice. To be inhabited by drugs or children or breath or food is simply a degradation of the body over time, unless your offering of “yes” leaves nothing ungiven. Waiting to Love Page 74

7. The Glorious Mr. Wedgie What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense. —Charles Baudelaire I was standing in an airport, when I saw a well-known spiritual teacher surrounded by his shaven-headed devotees. Immediately, I had an impulse to give him a wedgie. I couldn’t help but imagine running up to the group, making my way through the students, grabbing the back of the teacher’s underwear, and heaving mightily upward. Hopefully, he would have smiled. Or, perhaps his followers would have beaten me. In any case, the image came and went, although my mind, exhilarated by its own condescending proclivities, continued to consider this teacher, the glorious “Mr. Wedgie.” If you took a dense mind, a Jewish body, and a need to find the perfect parent, held it all together with mustache and naiveté, and awakened it to the nature of reality, you’d have something like Mr. Wedgie. I believe he is one of the least penetrating spiritual teachers and most endearing awakened beings I have come across.

In this case, shallowness of mind is not a bad thing. On the contrary, like Helen Keller or Stephen Hawking, Mr. Wedgie’s deficiency has led to a kind of glory. Just as one end of a balloon bulges when the other end is squeezed small, elegance and simplicity have swollen as Wedgie’s splendor. What he lacks in depth or insight, he makes up for by being continually amazed by the plain truth. His enthusiastic simplicity is contagious. Most people are idiots. And those who are not, become progressively more useless as their complexity of apprehension matures to coincide with the unknowable mystery of existence. As love’s articulation begins to encompass the actual human condition, all rules become irregularities. However, when love squeezes through an idiot, its expression is graspable. You can use it, applying your life to a set of laws. You can list and repeat the essential points. Truth is inherently banal, but an idiot’s truth is more so. To finally know the truth of existence is to trivialize its implications, and this reduction is what makes Mr. Wedgie’s teachings so useful. He offers the real truth in the fashion of primitive art. The outlines visibly hold the bold colors from the imperfections of subtlety. As in a child’s paintings, good and bad are clearly separated, like blues and greens, creating a lollipop-tree vision of the flowering of spiritual life. His vision is classic and universally Waiting to Love Page 76

recognizable—never mind that no actual tree has ever been seen that looks remotely like a lollipop. All paintings are equally just paint; an idiot’s truth isn’t more or less real than the most sophisticatedly accurate representation. How you like infinity disclosed is a matter of taste, really. The mystery that is shows itself to itself through every hole of being that notices anything. Mr. Wedgie’s lollipop-truth serves to awaken some, whereas others enjoy a more variegated scene by which to awaken as they are. The juvenile-arrested simpleton finds spiritual perfection expressed as goodness and lack of damage, often modeled on the harmless parent they never had. But love plays as time in contrasting colors of destruction and creation, often mixed in hues of indeterminate shading. Up close and in the fray of love, good and evil as well as benefit and harm lose their definitive portrayal. Mommy bends you as she adores you. Daddy terrorizes and inspires. Who is it that longs for beauty as absolute no-harm? The one for whom a lollipop tree, in all its idealistic simplicity, is a sign of truth’s perfection. And so it is with Mr. Wedgie.

8. Torn To Love Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world. —Cesar Pavese I love feeling the curves of her soft body as she sleeps pressing next to me. Her neck and shoulders flow round to reveal love’s fullness made flesh, her joyous breasts. I want to squeeze her whole body into me, so she would be more than mine, her smell cascading through my veins, making me alive. She is not the same woman whom I was with years ago, but I love her. The woman I called mine for almost 20 years is no longer with me. The woman with whom I thereafter joined is now who I call mine. Therein, life’s rhythm pinches and spreads. The heart knows love but cannot choose. The heart—an organ whose true boundaries do not exist—feels wrenched and squeezed by life, yet is never truly misshapen. The women I have ever loved now inhabit my heart. I claim their form and take their shape and nothing happens that isn’t love already. I lose everything Waiting to Love Page 78

to the women I love, and I wail and struggle, and nothing happens that isn’t a vaporous memory of light. What the heart always knows is never forgotten or commenced by relationship or its change. Love’s openness is never wrinkled by urgency or pain or soft curves, although memory’s textures often disguise love’s nakedness. The moment of touching the woman who I love can congeal as importance: I want to own her. I want to take her. Or, I doubt her, and I want someone else. Love is always showing open, but I want to claim or leave her as my woman. I trail my fingers down her side as she is lying still, breathing, trusting my touch in her sleep. I would do anything for her and forever—yet, I have felt the same before, with another woman. She knows this, as I do. And so our spoken promises, though true, convey an impersonal smile of knowing. Nothing lasts but love, tearing open without beginning or end. Year by year, decade by decade, bodies have their time. Clinging and hoping are futile gestures. The only love to give is the love whose offering is unchosen. As the offering is made, choices flash and dim in explosions of hurt and joy, making no real difference to love.

Newness blooms and the tired drops away. She is mine to love and, just as suddenly, she is not. Our love continues deepening even as our bodies drift away, choicelessly, no matter how we struggle and cry. Love knows the agony of hearts ripped open, knows the loss of a home created together. Love is undiminished by the tearing of two hearts come to live as one. Every body, every me and every you, knows this torn love. It need not be mended, for the tear is deeper, not apart. Lovers who can still obtain solace in their homes of glue have yet to lose enough. Their hearts, protectively, refuse to yield, to breathe wide open. Tenacious occupation clings in valleys of untrust. Like a family holding hands and closing their eyes to what lies beyond, untorn lovers attend to their artless routine of safety, their regular peaks and hollows, for fear of opening to know what they know. Each touch of my lover’s flesh can bind or brighten. Will our hearts be clung together in patterns of made need, untorn open by love’s light? Or will we loosen our hearts and offer a love not sticky with fear of change? Unfabricated love is the only offering whose commitment is absolute. Bodies and minds are in motion, and little is more hurtful than remembering the heart Waiting to Love Page 80

to rhythms that were. Every attempt to hold what was known eventually yields, until the anguish carried by bodies in time is allowed endlessly. I embrace her, offering all; nothing happens but love. Love is the tearing of each lover as time ceases to make a difference to love.

9. Our Unnecessary Life Most of the evils of life arise from man’s being unable to sit still in a room. —Blaise Pascal The human dilemmas of everyday life swirl at the beck of our attention. We have a choice: we can attend to this or that. Our buttocks itch, so we scratch. Our child cries, so we hold her. Our lover licks our neck, so we shiver. We have a choice: we can allow our feeling and attention to merely wander, distractedly, in the company of buttocks, children, and lovers. Or, we can attend to attention itself, feeling the open cognizance of feeling itself, in which case our buttocks, child, and lover feel open already, as if transparent. We notice them, but they are not necessary. This may seem a grievous choice. A loss. What’s the point of being alive if not to notice things and love and work and play? After all, don’t we want to enjoy life? Waiting to Love Page 82

Why would we ever choose to loosen our attention to feel the feeling of being itself, to relaxedly open as what is always the fullness of now (which may include children and lovers as shimmering visions)? There is no choice really. You and I will assume ourselves as an object amongst objects—a body with buttocks, a parent with children—for as long as this interests us. We will watch pornography as long as it interests us. We will talk with our friends about politics or sex or recipes until something becomes more interesting, more urgent. We are moved to attend to that which seems to proffer us comfort and pleasure, perhaps alleviating our pain and discomfort. We are moved to earn money and clean our house and raise our children, because we don’t want to choose the option of being poor, filthy, and alone. There is another option, untaken except by those for whom wealth and poverty, affection and loneliness, have become equally uninteresting and non-urgent. Despairing that nothing seems to make us happy—not our money, our lover, our tidy house, our children, our religion—disillusioned, we are set free. Our need to feel or attend to these things is loosened. The cord of necessity is cut. Our attention is now free to find out what happens when it does not move toward or away from any thing.

At first, this moment of freedom is not noticed. It passes, and once again our attention is moving toward and away from this and that. Time to cook dinner. Where is that pan? Oh, I’ll never finish cooking in time to get to the meeting tonight. Maybe I’ll just pick up some food on the way. As a seeming object in the swirl of events, our sense of self feels threatened by not attending to wherever our attention goes. If we don’t cook, or pick up food from a restaurant or garbage bin, we will starve. If we don’t take care of our children, they will die. So we do these things, over and over, until we fall asleep or die, and that is our life. If this situation is fine with us, then we continue. If it is not fine, at first we try additions to the usual pursuits of love and success. We may start to meditate, or take drugs, or simply become depressed and wallow in meaninglessness. We are not noticing the natural essence of every moment. Something is happening, and we know it. An emotion is occurring, and we feel it. A thought floats by, and we attend to it. Two aspects are happening—a perceiver and a perceived—and they always happen together. Waiting to Love Page 84

Feeling this happening a little deeper, we feel only one openness, suffused with the capacity to know and feel, vibrating as its own objects, shining as its own light, nothing inside or outside of this, who we are. But then that moment passes, because we habitually are slaves to the momentum of our attention, and we solidify ourselves as breadwinners, parents, lovers. As people with a life, a story, a destiny. We are slaves to the momentum of our attention while dreaming or while awake. We are surrounded by seeming objects and others, and we also teem with an internal bubbling of thoughts and feelings. We and our world, inner and outer, are defined by our attention, which is a tension or motion in the openness of being. Eventually, we admit that we are suffering our life, that we are afraid of dying, and that, except perhaps in deep sleep, we are always attempting to relieve our sense of tension by soothing ourselves with temporary love or success. When this search for fulfillment—the soothing of feeling not deeply happy—becomes uninteresting, then the momentum of your attention no longer binds the knowingness aspect of openness. You can know what openness is, directly, without attending to anything in particular, simply by allowing feeling to feel what feeling is. Feeling is love. Feeling is openness. Feeling is freedom. Feeling is the openness who you are.

But the habit to forget openness and become bound to the stream of happenings—your own appearing body and mind and your relationships—is strong. Wow, for a minute there I was totally open, but now I’m back to thinking that if only I do something things will be better. For a while my thoughts stopped, but now I’m thinking again, and getting agitated. I’ll try to feel into the openness again. If you try to feel into the openness of the moment, you are assuming such action will make you happier, and perpetuating the habit of attention’s momentum. So, instead of trying, simply notice if you are perfectly happy attending to what you are attending to right now. If you are honest, the answer is “no,” you are not perfectly happy. By noticing this, your attention’s habits become less interesting, and you will find yourself naturally relaxing the tension of attention, until it unmotivatedly rests open as it is: the unconfined capacity to know and love. Find out what you do when attention rests from its futile search for thoughts, emotions, and relationships that seem to promise fulfillment. How do you earn money, or hold your child, when attention no longer is attempting to get somewhere other than now’s openness? This always-fresh discovery is your life, moment by moment. Waiting to Love Page 86

As I kiss my lover, the sensations explode and disappear. Openness is already. Love is alive. Even as my lover pulls away and criticizes me, openness is this moment’s nature. Maybe I’m dreaming, or maybe I’m awake. It makes no difference. My lover appears, I appear to kiss my lover, my lover pulls away and speaks unkind words. Nothing is gained or lost of this moment’s feeling-openness. And then suddenly I notice that I have forgotten this openness, and I am lost in the movie of my life. I’m reacting to my lover as if our relationship can affect the openness I so desire to re-claim. I want my lover to be different. I want our relationship to give me the openness of love that I have forgotten. Remembering and recognizing this present openness, attention instantaneously relaxes, openness becomes the obvious feeling of now, and the play with my lover continues, whether we are in a dreaming or waking display. In dreams, years sometimes pass in what seems like minutes to the waking self. It doesn’t really matter what time-duration arises along with the rest of the picture that seems so real. At some point, attending to the picture becomes less interesting than the effulgent openness that always is, whether shining as a waking world or dreamscape. The picture just keeps changing,

cycling through successes and failures, love and rejection, the same story over and over, and eventually attention naturally relaxes from the cycle. You can still attend to anything you want, but the necessity to do so wears out. Longer moments effortlessly recognize as openness, without following or turning away from anything that attention also happens to notice. Your waking and dreaming relationships may continue streaming. But your feeling-attention is not bound by the sense of necessity. Nothing is necessary, and nothing is necessary to avoid. What has been set in motion continues. If you have given birth to children, you continue parenting until death, sleep, or the ending of the dream in which the children happen to appear. If you have built a business you continue working, until that falls away, when it does. Now, feeling apparent others, you are not bound by them. Your mindstream and theirs continue. Perhaps yours is characteristically shy, and theirs is brash in its expression. Perhaps yours is selfish and theirs is generous. Perhaps your bodystream is sexually monogamous and theirs is more polygamous. However the characters appear, your realization of this moment is openness, unbound and unaffected by its own appearing light streaming as this and that. Waiting to Love Page 88

Until the obviousness of open being is the primary feeling of now, you will not relax your efforts to change the picture, and your currently apparent life story, awake or dreaming, will continue with seeming necessity. Fear will characterize your every action. Fear of loss and gain. Fear of death and life. And especially, fear of love’s implications. Relax open as now, so fully no attention is urged to move. Feel all apparent others through and through, so nothing is unfelt. Find out how love moves you, and allow it.

10. The

Ant and the Ruler

If you can talk brilliantly enough about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. —Stanley Kubrick I remember when the space around me seemed like a three-dimensional place. The trees, buildings, and grass seemed to extend out from me in space. In between the everchanging things was space itself, clear of things, empty. But now things seem different. Space and time seem alive, showing spontaneously as a display of light like the dream of a naked woman, born, captivating, and forgotten, as if nothing has ever happened. This spacetime feels like an open shimmer of love, and includes the individuals I would call “me” or “you” or “my lover.” This luminous apparition of a place is not exactly a joke—my body aches with disease, I tussle with my lover, and children are starving and being murdered around the world. Still, “my body” and “the world” don’t seem as solid as they used to, although suffering hurts perhaps more deeply. Waiting to Love Page 90

Describing how this engaging vision of spacetime is born afresh each moment is like describing how a baby is made. Babies are created by romantic, atomic, and unfathomable karmic causes as well as by sloshy biological ones. So, what details would you include and exclude in order to finish a description—the actual truth about how babies are made—within a reasonable amount of time? Since the causes are innumerable, we cannot in a finite period of time know or tell the whole detailed truth about making babies or anything. Furthermore, to whom you are describing the details—your four-year-old son, your cat, your fundamentalist Christian grandmother—drastically shapes the area and depth of understanding in which the conversation can occur. Understanding or describing the mechanics of making babies is a complex and inevitably incomplete task. However, realizing how you make babies—once you are mature enough—comes pretty easy: you just do it, quite naturally. Likewise, further maturity doesn’t necessarily make for a total understanding of all the scientific details, but realizing how you make spacetime is as simple as doing it, and as natural as getting into bed with your lover. Some of us just assume that spacetime is what we’ve come to see it as: a solid world out there in which we move along with others day after day,

earning a living, burping and farting, building businesses, and writing concertos. God gave birth to spacetime. Or, spacetime was born from a big bang billions of years ago. Adults choose various physical and metaphysical myths and metaphors to help them understand the birth of spacetime, just as children assume all kinds of things about where babies come from. Metaphors as ridiculous as storks carrying babies often need to be employed, in order to avoid a look of complete lack of comprehension. Spacetime is being made right now, or you couldn’t be reading this. How does this miracle of birth, bringing forth you and these words, come into being? Let’s start with some metaphoric images. First of all, you are reading these words because there is light. Light occurs while you are awake, and light occurs in your dreams and meditative states, too. Light (or any energy, such as sound) is native to many places of being, not just the physical world. And the light of any place—the light itself, whether of a dream or a waking place—feels a certain way. We often say that a lover “lights up” at the sight of his or her beloved. Further, we can sense how lovers alight with love are drawn together to perfectly know each other through gaze and touch and sex, to know themselves as a unity of one love. Waiting to Love Page 92

In a similar way, consciousness lights up as love, and consciousness wants to know its thus-illuminated beloved perfectly as not-two, in the biblical sense. Love is the feeling of consciousness—the oneness, or open space that can know and feel—as its own radiance. Love is the lighting up of the openness that is consciousness. Just look at your dreams, or at this moment, right now. There are no boundaries that confine this moment, so it is like open space. A knowing of words and meaning is happening. And it is all lit up. These three aspects—space-like openness, cognizance, and light—are already one, simultaneously, now. But most of us need a story (with a remembered past and an imagined future) to give our lives meaning. For a good love story, besides a timeline, you also need at least two, a lover and a beloved. For a good adventure story, you need a hero and a world to conquer or discover. Therefore, if you want a story so your life seems to be going somewhere with someone, consciousness needs to assume its own radiance as “out there,” as an other, or as many others. A story needs at least two-ness. Light is how consciousness lovingly shows itself to itself. All light is the light of consciousness, or conscious light. Forgetting that conscious light is not-two, this selfreferencing—conscious light folding onto itself forgetting its oneness

so consciousness seems a pair with its beloved light—is the birth of spacetime. Self-reference—conscious light recognizing its oneness in the fold that seems as two— generates vibrations or oscillations, just like when love recognizes itself through two human bodies suited for coupling as one. Consider the self-referential and truth-denying statement, “This sentence is false.” This statement generates a sequence of oscillating meaning. If the sentence is false, as it claims, then it is true. But if it is true, then it is false, as it says. If false, then true, then false, then true…and so on, in a circuit of vibrating meaning. Electrical circuits—all of which fold onto themselves in self-reference—can easily be built to generate vibratory frequencies that appear as radio or television signals. Computers are based on similar principles of various patterns of oscillating zeros and ones cycling around and around. Sentences, computer programs, and mathematical formulae can be devised to create very, very complex oscillations. Your brain works this way. Your TV works this way. And conscious light works this way. Appearance is created by self-referencing, cognizance knowing itself, love loving love, electrical flow flowing back onto itself. Anything you perceive and everything you experience is, at some level of Waiting to Love Page 94

description, an oscillating frequency or wave that can be generated by self-referential circuitry: biological, electrical, or in consciousness. “String theory” is a relatively new mathematics used to describe existence in terms of vibratory self-reference, or mathematical “strings” and “knotings” that give rise to what we know as spacetime and matter. Just as we don’t need to know the details of biochemistry to make babies, you don’t need to know the details of string theory to make spacetime. If you want to begin developing conceptual metaphors to help your mind grasp the birthing of spacetime, you can begin by understanding the vibratory ins and outs of self-reference, such as the resultant oscillation of “This sentence is false.” Perhaps this will help you get a feeling for how spacetime arises due to consciousness negating its truth as one to love itself as an other. Then you can imagine yourself as an ant crawling on a ruler—but that comes later. Conscious light says “no” to its oneness in order to make a difference between consciousness and the world of lit-up appearance, and then “yes” to reuniting as one— this is the root act giving rise to the sense of someone “in here” experiencing a world “out there.” This is the birth of difference and the longing for re-union or re-ligion or sex. The nature of spacetime is a lot like sex: consciousness feeling apart from light, a “me” that seems apart from an “other,” a separation that yearns for felt-

unity. Then (in the act of experiencing anything) the openness of consciousness, its cognizance, and its light feel together as one. Like one love knowing itself through two bodies that can’t help but hump, conscious light knowing itself as an “other” creates frequencies of oscillation, just as in computer circuitry or “This sentence is false.” Consciousness denying its oneness literally creates spacetime, the perceivable domain of conscious light, shaped in various forms and vibrating in different degrees of subtlety and undulatory density. Even the so-called vacuum of deep space is alive as love’s conscious light—and you are alive as that same conscious light, mistaking itself for something “in here” craving for (or afraid of) something “out there.” Thus, your heart is feeling the true-false oscillation, the yes-no yearning to know love’s oneness perfectly while also holding back, fearful in “difference” and “separation.” This is the story of your life and every human life. Even the vibration we call “fear” is made of this loving, this one conscious light folding onto itself. Conscious light knots itself—folds onto itself—and thus comes in contact with itself as a seeming other. You can close your eyes (or leave them open) and train to feel whatever you can feel deep in your heart before there is a sense of other. With practice, you can even feel the subtle vibration of the first fold caused by conscious light doing selfreference, then folding on itself again and again in ever-greater complexity, thus appearing as the oscillation-full domain we call spacetime, which includes grandmothers, telephones, and moods. Waiting to Love Page 96

In our waking world, technology has embraced certain principles inherent in the lovesubstance of conscious light knotting itself to touch and know itself. This self-reference of conscious light creates what we call various kinds of energy—such as electricity, radio waves, and nuclear energy. Science is only beginning to embrace other principles inherent in the spontaneously arising self-referencing of conscious light that we experience as three-dimensional space, such as gravity and inertia. Scientists agree gravity and inertia exist, but can’t agree as to why, or what they mean. Eventually, engineers will discover ways to transform and make use of these selfreferentially produced energetic qualities of conscious light—just as radios transform vibratory waves we can’t perceive through our biological senses into waves we can hear as music. We are immersed in radio waves now, but we need a technological device—a radio—to convert them into a form we can experience. Radios permit consciousness to hear its own oscillations as music, from rock and roll to classical. Through a similar transformation, we may soon be able to bilocate or “move through space” or “experience a three-dimensional location from across the world” with the same ease and virtual instantaneousness that we can now, through the technology of radio, “hear music from across the world”. Of course, we won’t really be moving, any more than a stork carries a baby. You see, there is nowhere to move. The display of movement is happening “right where you are,” in an appearance generated by conscious light knotting onto

itself, and thusly generating spacetime, including the now-you and the now-world. At more subtle levels than what humans call the usual world of spacetime, there is less gravity and inertia; these domains are less full of conscious light denying its oneness, and thus self-reference is less urgent and the self-folding knots are looser, resulting in more isness and less fluctuations or density in time. Less gravity and inertia means less time necessary for knowing more space: virtually timeless space-travel via technological advances, perhaps. Or, through meditative training, being in one place and seeing another place, supposedly separated by space that requires time to traverse, or knowing now what takes place at another time. This is where the ant and the ruler come in. When an ant walks across a one-meter ruler, the ruler is an event in time. The ant’s limited capacity to perceive requires that it moves through space to “see” or experience the whole ruler, and it can only do so a little bit at a time. The distance between perceiving the one-centimeter mark and the ten-centimeter mark might be thirty seconds. So, to the ant, the ruler unfolds bit by bit as an event taking time, and the end of the event—the end of the ruler—seems unpredictable until the ant “gets there” in time. Waiting to Love Page 98

To a normal human, the ruler is an object in space. You can see its beginning and end simultaneously. The ruler doesn’t take sixty seconds in time. The ruler does not need to unfold in time in order for you to know “where it goes” or “where it will end.” You see the whole meter, beginning and end, as an object all at once, whereas that meter unfolds as an event in time to an ant traversing its length. The evolution or maturation of perception or attention is largely the gathering of more and more time-like events to be noticed at once as space-like events. Any appearance can be envisioned more all-at-once, object-like, or else it can seem more like an event changing through time, maybe to end later on, in the future. You can envision a knot all at once as an object, or else it can be felt as a sequence of events in time. If you were stuck inside a knotted string, burrowing through one surface after another, you would have no way of knowing that every apparently separate surface that you suddenly bumped into through time was the one undivided surface of the string folded onto itself in a knot, an object already “done” in space. Your adventure would require time to unfold, although the knot is already self-folded as an object, and thus your adventure would be entirely predictable from that perspective, no time required.

If you were stuck inside the statement, “This sentence is false,” you would cycle through true, false, true, false, over and over through time, instead of seeing the whole sentence all at once, knowing as an object what would otherwise be a cycling of meaning, first true then false, and so on through time. You can imagine that an ant might be able to develop a technology so that it could see both ends of the ruler at once, just as we humans can—if it only knew that the ruler was something that could be seen at once. An ant technologist would need to proceed from the assumption that the ruler didn’t necessarily extend in time, but could be instantaneously seen whole, all at once, as an object in space, such as our human senses allow. Then, through appropriate technology, the ant could experience the beginning and end of the ruler “event” without moving through the amount of time it previously required, just as a future human scientist with new technology might be able to experience an “event”—knowing the whole of the moon, say—without necessitating much, if any, “time,” to get there. Your lifetime is like that ruler. You seem to have to live it, bit by bit, moving toward the future. Your life appears to unfold in time. But it is possible to see the whole thing at once. Your life can appear as an object all-now, rather than as an event that transpires through time. This is obvious to many accomplished meditators, or even to many neardeath victims who report seeing their “whole life” flash before them in an instant. Waiting to Love Page 100

Many people—probably even you—have had random flashes of knowing things that they shouldn’t be able to know, things at other places, or “before” they happen. An ant is one way through which consciousness is able to touch itself by denying its oneness in the act of folding onto itself, thus creating an apparent “ant spacetime,” an oscillating density and specific frequency of apparent space, objects, and individuals moving through time, a certain domain describable, perhaps, in terms of knotting strings. Humans are another way conscious light awakens and folds to know itself. Evolution and heart-maturity involve consciousness awakening to know more of itself all “at once” and “as one,” perhaps before any folding at all. Technology can help us convert what used to take time into something that happens “all at once,” so more instantaneous knowledge (by telephone or TV or future “inertia-free” or “gravitationally-bending” vehicles) is possible. Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that individuals have had glimpses, if not full realization, of that which always is, as if there were no ruler to traverse, so time wasn’t necessary and there was only one isness without beginning or end. As soon as conscious light forgets its indivisible oneness in knowing or loving itself, then the seeming separation of “you” able to touch “others” appears. This knotting, and forgotten unity, of love’s one string onto itself, generates all

the burrowing adventures of apparently separate surfaces apportioned out in spacetime. When conscious light is not knotted or isn’t moved to forgetfully know or love itself as a separate surface for the sake of generating an appearing story of burrowing through time in an effort to get somewhere different, experiencing the oscillation of love and betrayal by others—when our story is unnecessary and our self-folding relaxes, then space and time instantaneously disappear like a mirage, as reported by many saints and sages throughout human history. In between the tightest human neediness and the loosened, unknotted isness beyond any need for folding conscious-light to know itself as not-one, there appear layer upon layer of various folds and interweaving densities of neediness and morality. There are domains populated by beings and objects that correspond to every kind of need for self-reference or complexity of knot, every degree of tightness and fear, every need for a story of a self that takes place and time. In fact, the varying degrees of urgency to know or love one’s story by experiencing others or any event—to know that you exist or anything exists by consciously experiencing anything at all—creates the various densities and folds that appear as space and time. Waiting to Love Page 102

So, how are babies made? How is spacetime made? It depends on who asks, and how long you want the answer to take. And mostly it depends on the maturity of the conversation. What an ant experiences as a ruler unfolding in time from beginning to end, you experience instantaneously from beginning to end, without the need for time. The ruler simply is. Train to apply the same feeling-realization to the entirety of spacetime at every level of subtlety, and eventually you may mature to find yourself naturally alive as openness that can know and feel as light, whether or not folding spontaneously creates spacetime. When you look into a friend’s eyes, actually feel into his or her heart as his or her heart feels into yours. Gazing into your friend’s eyes and heart, feel love loving love. With each friend, feel consciousness recognizing consciousness. Feel—and smile—as one open knowingness touching itself as an “other.” Feel the entire world and the stars as if spontaneously floating in an instantaneous appearance, the medium of which is like the light of a love-made dream going nowhere and arising whole, without the need to experience anything in time, so that whatever is, simply and obviously is. Feel deeper and deeper into the nature of feeling itself, so you relax completely as feeling itself, before you feel the knotting or stress-in-feeling you call “something.” Perhaps, with practice through apparent years, you

suddenly feel as feeling so freely that you relax as you are before the first fold creates the tension in consciousness that we call “attention,” the root-vibration of spacetime. You and I can practice through what seems like a lifetime—even if it is only a few moments of a dream. We can naturally loosen to feel before the folding and the resultant domain of appearing spacetime. Then, we can lovingly allow the whole instantaneous luminosity to vibrate as one openness knowing itself as an apparent self and world. In the meantime, as humans grow to encompass time into a more space-like or “everywhere all at once” field of experience, all kinds of science, arts, and morals will develop. You may, while resting in bed and drifting asleep, loosen the vibratory knot that maintains what we call our waking state of three-dimensional space and time. You may, while dreaming or meditating, allow the interweaving of various oscillatory domains of appearance, each hued by a self-referentially produced color of love or density of time. Significance-packed events, which would normally seem to require hours or eons, may appear all-at-once, virtually instantaneously. You may experience visions and visitations that are barely describable but deeply heart-maturing and thus full of “future” or even “eternal” or “timeless” truth—packed with Waiting to Love Page 104

scientific insight of artistic beauty that might allow technologies and entertainments to be powered by the very light of consciousness letting loose as the substance of spacetime. Physicists will explore wormholes, analogous to ants that discover “time traveling” technologies, allowing them to simultaneously experience both the beginning and end of the meter ruler—two events that, before the wormhole discovery, seemed separated by space that was traversable only through a substantial amount of time. Poets will elucidate beauties stretched beyond our vision, and economies will shift from being strongly motivated by the fear of “other” to a more unified experience of conscious light, loving itself through loosening urgencies of “need to know I exist.” Through training, you may glimpse all-time-at-once, or perhaps you will have this peek at your physical death, just prior to resting as the unborn light before the knot is made and consciousness feels itself in the very first fold. By repeating these short moments while alive as a currently appearing form, lit up in a dream or while awake, time relaxes as the space-like openness that is its always-present source. Until then, feel deeply: Why do you need to know that you exist or anything exists or that others love you? What do you get by walking the length of your

life-ruler that makes time seem so necessary and real? Practice relaxing to feel “where it all goes” at once, and you will be undone open, even as spontaneous knotting seems to oscillate as objects and others and selfing, all alight and alive as love’s openness. Waiting to Love Page 106

11. Sex is Inconclusive His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last. —Alain Chamfort The oneness of conscious light is not the end of sexuality, but its beginning. From there, as the openness of conscious light folds onto itself and thus generates a spacetime undulating with apparent selves and others, the magnetic need to re-unite cognizance with its own luminosity begins. Conscious light folding onto itself is not only like the act of sex, it also produces the masculine and feminine qualities of human sexuality in our currently appearing world. When consciousness is parted from light, held back as a witness, this makes two, creating a lover and a beloved. A “masculine” cognizance and a “feminine” radiance are co-created, providing company for one another, dying to reunite, but also refusing to surrender open as one, for fear of losing their separative story of two-ness. Every human being has an apparent choice: In any moment, they can identify with the feminine light of spontaneously showing energy: “I love your shoes! Do I look OK?” Or, they can identify with the masculine witness, the cognizant

aspect that never changes but tacitly wants to know: Who am I? What is a theory that could encompass the entire Kosmos? Will my favorite football team win in the playoffs? The masculine is riveted to witnessing: the cheerleaders dance, the whistle is blown, a ball is kicked, a theory is proposed, what is going to happen? The feminine is riveted to feeling what is showing now: the garden is beautiful, the chocolate is delicious, what is my lover feeling about me? Spiritual recognition is thus flavored by these two starting points. Each appearing “I” identifies, moment-by-moment, and in shades of the spectrum, more with the need to know or more with the need to show. Likewise, desire is flavored more by wanting to claim or be claimed, wanting to offer or be given possession. She wants to be known deeply and claimed by his love. He wants to see her nakedness and possess her love. Even in mere animal desire, he can pin her arms open, exposing her, commanding her, “Say that you love me! Say that you are mine!” And she does. But she longs for the most sacred truth of his claim. She suffers anything less than his heart’s deepest and most loving command. Waiting to Love Page 108

In deep love, she lures him, enchanting him into her heart’s bright devotion, into the offered fullness of her body and energy. He smithereens her, gently entering through her heart’s protection with love, knowing her more deeply than she may know herself, and thus killing her fear softly with his undaunted gaze and authentic authority claiming her heart. The more he knows death and is fully, fearlessly present, as if this were their last moment together, the more she yields her hiding and offers her bright heart through her body to be taken open, more ecstatically exposed than her willingness would allow. This “he” and “she” are part of all humans, but each part of our appearing self (and we all have many parts to us) identifies with one or the other more or less at different times. “Take me, I’m yours,” the light of she yearns, intuiting that she is his, she is the luminosity of cognizance. Immaturely, she may believe that she personally belongs to him personally. However, even with long training, so that solid personhood is instantaneously being felt through as love’s dancing transparency, she is still his—as the spontaneous radiance of open cognizance, no separate sense of human self involved.

From that place of unhesitant cognizance, knowing her as his spontaneous shine, he may playfully command, with the authority of unthreatened openness, “You are mine, and you will give me all of you.” But if he doesn’t know what he wants and thus gets lost, drifting in the picture of life, taking superficial appearances personally—she can’t trust him. What deep cognizance always wants is to know absolutely, which is to be empty as openness, feeling freely and deeply without obstruction: to be open as love. Most people are distracted by feeling that something is missing and then subsequently search—eating, reading, working, sexing—to assuage their suffering. This searching becomes their life story. Few people have trained to be less distractible, able to stably feel the deep openness of simultaneous he-cognizance and she-luminosity, without the need for a story. Most people get stuck in their search or life story. When he is lost trying to know, he yearns to ravish her luminous radiance. When she is lost trying to be seen, known, and claimed as love’s offering, then she yearns for someone who can savage her to openness. Human passion makes the plot of life’s story, for anyone who doesn’t presently open as the co-arising unity of he-she. Waiting to Love Page 110

Openness is the ground. Great sex—sex that absorbs humans in its very brightness of love’s bliss—is relaxed openness, the effortless unity of consciousness and light, of hecognizance and she-luminosity. This requires that the masculine-playing partner really knows openness and passionately aligns light’s display, spontaneously and effortlessly but with authentic and authoritative force, by remaining present as relaxed openness in the midst of wild sexual and emotional energy. Great sex also requires the feminine-playing partner of light-energy to be unburdened by the need to know anything, devotionally unprotecting her bright heart as an achingly exposed offering alive as relaxed openness, so that unbridled pleasure gives itself to be lovingly “bound,” wedded in the sexual “religion” (Latin religare “to tie back,” from ligare “to bind”) by the fear-slaying mystery of love’s command. Of course, most every “he” doesn’t recognize the depth of openness right now, so his knowing is shallow and untrustable, lacking the natural, valiant humor and authority of no-fear. He will repel the “she” that is deeper, she who requires ravishment by the openended and undauntedly fierce knowledge of love, longing for a “he” that enters her without fear of no-conclusion. The corollary smacks, too: A shallow he attracts a shallow she, needing only to be seen on the surface and known emotionally, not heart-pierced so deeply

that she is exposed in all her untamed, untrammeled glory, her fear-to-open murdered despite her accumulated distrust. As openness, he recognizes there is literally nothing to know. As openness, she feels love’s light so abundantly its lack never seems. The he and she of openness can freely play the wedding of cognizance claiming his light, luminous love giving herself to he which commands her nakedness, together allowing conscious light’s transparency to openness, hiding nothing. Not grounded in the recognition of deep openness, she hides her devotion, and he mistrusts his claim. She refuses to feel the hurt of not being possessed by his love fully. He refuses to feel the hurt of her hide-and-seek chaos ruining what he has achieved through knowledge. Her emotions hint toward upcoming betrayal. His need to know and control seems trivial and rigid, unworthy of devotional trust. Fear underlies her showing and his knowing. Shallow sex between fearful lovers wallows longingly in pools of waiting, vaguely unrelaxed bodies striving for a unity that sneezes briefly in moments of intensity. Deep sex is the undulation of spacetime’s vibratory humor, let loose through two bodies alive as openness, moved as love’s capacity to know and feel, lit up as love’s light. Waiting to Love Page 112

Openness knows itself by folding onto itself in human form, one form wild as light’s naked show, the other form knowing love to death, together allowing love alive without necessity as a relaxed and spontaneous offering, resulting in the rhythmic humping of the universe. More often, we see the results of shallow knowing and showing. We see racks of designer clothing indulged to compensate for not feeling seen. We know hours spent witnessing sports to compensate for not knowing what is, but at least knowing the rules of the game and feeling the unknown become known as each team plays to resolution; no more motion but a real conclusion, the witness rests its case. Children and gardens and shopping and talking move as she. Projects and working and adventuring and finding the answer to a question—coming to know the heretoforeunknowable outcome of a sporting event, a technological solution, or a spiritual insight— bring to rest he. Openness is forgotten in human simulations of search, motion, and rest. Roses and daughters grow and die, philosophies and stock markets rise and fall, dinner is cooked and eaten, and wars are lost or won. Most human simulations of life are tensionmotivated by forgetting or ignoring the unconfined, open cognizance that is right now alive as love, displaying as the light of this entire moment, as every dream and thought and perception, as every emotion and event.

Without resting as true openness, he winds up tighter and tighter, feeling natural openness less and less, until he rapes her in order to feel his simulated freedom to do whatever he wants, to conclusively assert his separative power and false authority to know and control and dispense with her in the most fearful way. Untouched by love’s true claim, she tortures him with betrayal, misleading his dogged need to know where she stands, weakening his confidence so he can never succeed, so hurt is her heart by his shallow, pokey, squeamish entrance into her fathomless devotional love. Physical and emotional abuse is the end product of a long history of fearful recoiling from what seems—the he- and she-simulations of human life—forgetting to feel, live, and love as the openness that is. Dreaming or awake, all abuse is based on forgetting the now-moment’s open love that is shining as all that can be seen, relaxing as cognizance so openly that no conclusion needs to be found and no offering is ever held back in this appearing world. Feeling now as it is, your children, work, and thoughts are openness-made and openness-known without fear. Every moment is born of the ongoing wedding of he and she, lovingly alive as the rhythmic sex of appearance vanishing open to more or less. Waiting to Love Page 114

12. Lancelot’s Obsession Man does not live long enough to profit from his faults. —Jean de La Bruyere Spirituality is a hope for something better. We get interested in spirituality because we are suffering. We want to be relieved of love’s lack or insight’s shortcomings. We want to feel more fulfilled or understand something deeper. We want to love without limits. I have studied with teachers in an effort to understand and love more deeply, and these teachers have led me to do all kinds of strange things in an effort to grow. I followed my teachers’ instructions because I felt their greater openness, and I trusted their efforts to serve me. Often, I would discover, after the fact, that I was just chasing my own tail; my teacher was giving me a chance to view my own game with clarity, often painfully so. I learned that the very motivation with which I approached spiritual practice was my failure to open. These days, people sometimes approach me as a teacher. They seem to go through the same process that I went through, wanting to do practices—just about anything—in an effort to open. But like myself, they tend to neglect

noticing that their very seeking is the action that creates the suffering they are attempting to escape through so-called practice. For the sake of ease and anonymity, I’ll glom together the obsessive spiritual seeking of several young men that I know into one character who I’ll call, “Lancelot.” His entire life is wrapped around the search for spiritual enlightenment. He goes from teacher to teacher looking for deeper truth. He berates his girlfriend for not being spiritual enough, and he has sex with others—he also tells his girlfriend to have sex with others—in the hope of getting through whatever blocks are stopping them from being open and free. I’ve seen Lancelot have sex with his friends’ wives after getting them drunk, supposedly for spiritual reasons. I’ve seen him fondle the foreskin of his buddy—again, as some strange rite of spiritual love. I’ve seen him hang women by ropes and slather their naked bodies with lotion, spanking them and rotating objects in their vaginas because he thinks this will help them open more spiritually. Let me just say that it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for Lancelot to drink copious quantities of liquor (all for the sake of the spiritual challenge, of course), go crazy, bite people or get into fights, and wake up in a hospital when he finally shakes off the sedatives administered by caring doctors. Waiting to Love Page 116

Right before my eyes, Lancelot has asked his girlfriend to beat him as hard as she could while he tried to “remain present,” and he encouraged a fearfully repressed man to punch his face repeatedly, until one of Lancelot’s eyes was swollen shut and his upper lip was engorged to the size and shape of a purplish banana, oozing blood and leaking oily fluids, eventually requiring surgery. The man’s life was transformed—his sex and work became far more passionate—but at quite an expense to Lancelot’s face. As an onlooker, one might think that Lancelot wasn’t that smart, that perhaps there were less violent ways of relaxing open as love’s full presence. Lancelot makes a big deal about his spirituality, just as most young people righteously aggrandize their life choices. At various times, he has told his parents that he refuses to talk with them about anything mundane, that he thinks they live a superficial life and he won’t engage in trivial conversation with them. His parents are relatively wealthy, and Lancelot has told them he wants to be free of needing to please them, so he refuses to accept any financial inheritance they might will to him. He told his parents that he has given his life to God, to a guru, to something special and more meaningful then the life his parents know. Lancelot means well. He genuinely believes that his efforts will help him grow. Many people follow him as a spiritual leader, in fact. To them, he gives answers. His voice is soothing. When it isn’t pummeled swollen, his face is

quite pretty, easy to look at and believe. In front of his students, his girlfriend waits silently by his side, until she joins in and answers questions too, calmly and with great dignity. Lancelot came to me because he thought I could help him open spiritually. What could I do? He is a well-intentioned guy and his search is genuine. He really does want to grow. Apparently, some highly-respected spiritual teachers have told Lancelot that he’s enlightened, or close to it, and so he has been teaching for years, essentially aping the words of his teachers, including mine. I spent decades developing a thorough teaching, including hundreds of exercises and years worth of training programs, to help people use their relationships and sexuality as a doorway to recognizing the openness that is their true nature. Lancelot has usurped these teachings and practices, wowing the crowd with his prowess and depth of knowledge. He actually seems to be serving his students quite well. I feel relaxed and relieved: if the masses will swallow his offering, I no longer feel obliged to dish it up. Although he is a beginner, Lancelot has embodied enough of these practices to teach them effectively to most people. And because he is a beginner, Lancelot has the enthusiasm common to all zealots. He still believes that he is helping people—that he can help people—and that he can continue growing himself. Waiting to Love Page 118

I remember when he asked about a mutual friend, “Why isn’t he practicing spirituality more?” Lancelot observed that our friend spent so much time working—our friend freely admitted he hardly spent any time doing spiritual practices—and Lancelot wondered why. Our friend has access to all the exercises and wisdom that Lancelot does. Our friend is older, wiser, and more experienced than Lancelot. Lancelot wondered aloud, “Why isn’t he motivated to practice more?” Except for patron-types who enjoy basking in the glow of spirituality via association, sort of like hanging out with the cool crowd in high school, the majority of spiritual practitioners are mediocre losers. Most of them couldn’t cut it in the dog-eat-dog socalled real world, so they gravitate toward a way around their inadequacies. They become spiritual seekers. By going through the motions of a spiritual life—the holy books, teachers, chanting, and whatnot—they hope for happiness just as others seek it by raising a family or creating a successful career. These types expect that if they do spiritual practices—meditation, yoga, sacred dance, singing, devotional rituals, etc.—then they will feel more fulfilled, happier. But that’s not what usually happens. Similarly deluded in my earnestness, I’ve been a member of spiritual communities, and I can say with a modicum of authority that most of these people are less happy than the average grocery store clerk. They are struggling with disciplines, or repeatedly attending

meetings with their teacher, and hoping to find some measure of spiritual improvement. Perhaps they will become calmer, more loving, less afraid, they hope. But doing spiritual practice to attain anything in the future negates the very premise of God or Love or Truth as your true nature right now. If it must be sought for in the future, it isn’t your true nature, now and always. Obviously, proper training can be useful to render that which has become obscured more visible. But the majority of spiritual practitioners are training to achieve a future goal in their imagination, rather than training to feel, right now, the deepest truth, love, or God that is alive as this moment, from top to bottom, inside and out, whether sleeping, dreaming, awake, or already having died, as we may already have. In Lancelot’s case, his good heart has led him to do some strange things in the hope that the deep truth of God, the openness that is our nature, will become more obvious. I went through the same route. Like all of us, Lancelot has his shortcomings, but he is spiritually sophisticated enough to know that true spiritual training is about opening, relaxing to be what is and always is, rather than changing something for the better that could be subject to further change. He’s heard and understood the arguments about effort re-enforcing one’s selfing, thus obscuring the obviousness of love’s open effulgence as the presently appearing world. Waiting to Love Page 120

So Lancelot is not in the same category of panderers who believe spiritual attainment is in the future. He knows that in any moment of relaxing open to feel without fear, the feeling of being itself—the unfabricated, unconfined cognizant openness that spontaneously shines and feels as all appearances—is the answer to his questions, the grail for which he seeks. He knows that love is the feeling of being, openly alive right now. He just usually can’t feel it. Some people get lost in the conventional games of life—relationships, earning a living, and so forth—but Lancelot has gotten lost in the game of spirituality. In his view, some people are practicing better than others. He sees spiritual winners and losers. On good days, Lancelot thinks he is a more successful spiritual aspirant. On bad days, he feels like a failure. He categorizes his friends likewise: one guy is a spiritual success, but another one is failing to practice because he is too entranced by work, women, fame, or whatever. Television game shows are great indicators of today’s modern human mindstream. If clams had the capacity to watch TV, I can’t imagine what a TV game show for them might look like. Or game shows geared toward the serial-killer market share; there’s an interesting visualization. But most human game shows involve contestants pitted against each other for the award of a date with a sexy bachelor or bachelorette—or for prizes based on their knowledge of world history, or their capacity to remember trivia and outwit each other.

Lancelot doesn’t watch TV game shows—he’s far too spiritual for that. But if there were a game show that pitted one human’s spiritual prowess against another’s, Lancelot would be an unrivaled fan. He’d probably be first in line to buy tickets to participate in the show. You see, Lancelot has framed his entire relational life as if it were a contest of spiritual capacity: How can I practice better as a spiritual lover? Who is the best spiritual practitioner? Will I ever be a real spiritual champion? So in honor of Lancelot’s commitment to being a title-holding spiritual lover, and with the humor by which I discovered my own futile game of seeking, I offer him the following contest: discover the best way to open your girlfriend to love’s fullest expression of living light’s bliss. A bit of background: the spiritual way of life and sexual intimacy have always been considered a tenuous coupling. Historically, many people who were seriously committed to a spiritual way of life—many Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists, for instance—have become celibate or monastic, in order to minimize the extraordinary amount of time and energy absorbed in marriage and family. As celibates, they think they can apply more of their life to spiritual practices, praying, meditating, or whatever, instead of getting all wrapped up in the mating game. (Of course, some recent studies have indicated that homosexuality is and was relatively common among monastics, but that’s another story.) Waiting to Love Page 122

Some people feel only sexual monogamy is appropriate in God’s eyes. Other’s feel that their religion condones polygamy. In any case, so many people are ignorant spiritual practitioners—seeking a future salvation rather than allowing a present revelation of openness and a moment-bymoment practice of relaxing as this revelation—that they aren’t doing anything spiritual at all in their relationships. Most people are trying to get something for themselves through intimate arrangements: sex, financial security, romance, affection, a family, a friend to give them comfort, and so forth. Other people have matured enough to realize that intimacy is best approached less selfishly, with more willingness to compromise, or share. Rather than strategizing, “What is best for me?” they wonder, “What is best for us?” People can grow from being me-centered to being we-centered. They can grow from wanting to receive sexual satisfaction to wanting to share it. They cultivate compassionate tolerance and acceptance. They open from self-centered who’s-incharge power games to mutual respect and equality. But there’s another game to be played, and this is what I’m proposing in honor of Lancelot’s quest for spiritual championship amongst sexual contenders:

How can intimacy be arranged so that all the participants and the entire world are evoked to relax as the openness of conscious luminosity that is the nature of every moment? How can intimate relationship be used as a spiritual practice? This shift in perspective changes the rules of the game. First of all, you may never get what you want, which is what you seek in a me-centered intimacy. Secondly, the careful sharing-of-the-pie style of we-centered intimacy may or may not remind everyone of his or her true nature. Perhaps someone is relaxed into their true nature by being commanded like a slave, ravished like a slut, or by watching their spouse have sex with someone else—all the while feeling open as the conscious luminosity that shines as this entire moment. Perhaps Lancelot’s seemingly extreme practices, involving sex and aggression with his girlfriend and friends, are actually helping everybody to learn to remain open during difficult times, shining as love’s light in what would otherwise be their most fearful and endarkened places of hiding. Most spiritual practitioners avoid learning how to love under all conditions, especially when they feel stuck in the often lustful and violent junk of their private psycho-emotional closets. They are afraid to play the game all the way, opening as love’s relaxed offering in the midst of their darkest desires. Waiting to Love Page 124

Perhaps if performed with care and deep heart-connection, Lancelot’s seemingly bizarre practices could help him and his friends find the answer to how to relax open as love’s conscious luminosity in the scariest moments of unveiling their secret motives, including sexually. I’ve played this dangerous game for years, but I’d be cheating Lancelot if I gave him any answers. Besides, the “answers” are unique for every individual and each relational arrangement. I say “relational arrangement” because the notion of “the couple” is one of the first things to shift after one has grown tired of me-centered power games and the lukewarm but compassionate compromise of fair, we-centered partnerships. Very, very few people in this world marry one person, stay with that one person as their only partner for the rest of their life, and actually open to their true nature in the process. Usually, people engage in serial monogamy (one long-term committed relationship after another) or outright multiple relationships—and they still don’t open as their true nature. Women’s rights, community concern for children, and changing economic structures have altered the necessity for the usual one-man-with-one-woman-and-children legal marriage contract. That was useful for passing on possessions, land ownership, and political lineages, but the complex impulse for multiple partners has often quivered beneath the surface smiles of

supposedly sound marriages. Perhaps it is time to consider intimate relationships as sacred arrangements—enacted for the benefit of all beings—within a community of parents, children, and friends who love and serve each other. Why? There are many reasons, and I have written a number of books describing how to engage intimacy as a form of spiritual practice, including what to do with the pervasive urge to merge with more than one person, so I won’t repeat these ideas here. Instead, I will focus on one hint for Lancelot in his quest for championship in the spiritual game of relationship. You, and your lover if you have one, are already engaged in multiple relationships. These relationships don’t necessarily involve flesh-pressing sexual intercourse, but they do involve the exchange of sexual energies. This exchange occurs, for instance, when one person helps another navigate through a storm of emotional chaos. Or when one person massages another with soothing, rejuvenating energy. This automatic sexual exchange is why taboos between ministers and parishioners, or therapists and clients, is necessary—the physical sexual urge that comes along with the more subtle sexual energy exchange can become overwhelmingly strong, unless clarity and boundaries are established. Waiting to Love Page 126

Masculine sexual energy is lovingly commanding, claiming the feminine heart with integrity, humor, sensitivity, and authentic confidence. The masculine skillfully navigates through choppy waters of emotional and daily travail, leading (to one degree or another) to the always-present relaxation as openness. Feminine sexual energy is lovingly devotional. Feminine bliss is a matter of trusting love, surrendering to be taken open by the masculine’s heart-and-body-commanding claim. In doing so, the masculine is attracted deeper into the never-ending love that is feminine devotion. The feminine attracts or enchants the masculine beyond fear into openness by the most attractive force in the universe of human experience: the bodily offered undulation of love’s energy expressed as undeterred devotional surrender. The TV game show I am proposing (with a smile) in honor of Lancelot’s noble obsession with being a spiritual lover par excellence is this: which contestants can create the intimate arrangement that makes most obvious this moment’s open nature as love’s conscious luminosity? As with all TV game shows, the contestants would need to be pre-selected. How would this proceed? Again, I’ll use Lancelot, the glommed-together character of several of my dear friends, as an example.

When I first met Lancelot he was a spiritual teacher with hundreds, if not thousands, of students all over the world. He would sit up in front of a fawning audience and deliver the most banal spiritual pabulum imaginable: You are the unchanging witness of everything that changes. You are God already, and there is nothing you need to do except be the divine love that you are. Be the consciousness that witnesses all changes, and relax as that unchanging vast ocean of peace. Blah, blah, blah. Then, Lancelot would go home—if he remembered where his car keys were. He was so unable to take charge and navigate his everyday life, that his girlfriend’s body became stiff as a harried businessman’s. She had to make all the decisions, keep track of the airline tickets, and basically hold the whole show together, because Lancelot was a flow boy. A flow boy is a man who has over-identified with his own flowing, feminine, energy of surrender. Women in abusive relationships love flow boys because they are safe and sensitive. Women who have grown beyond depending on a man, and have achieved emotional and financial independence, find a flow boy’s ambiguity, lack of direction, and inability to commit, to be wimpy or even disgusting. So, first we would have to eliminate potential game show contestants who were still enamored of the spineless-flow-boy/tense-woman-in-charge syndrome. Waiting to Love Page 128

And of course we would eliminate abusive men who were perpetrators and emotionallyneedy women who wallowed as victims. Admittedly, that wouldn’t leave many contestants. But I’ve seen Lancelot and his girlfriend grow through these stages in a matter of months, with appropriate training. Lancelot is much more able to command and navigate from his deepest heart. And his girlfriend is much more able to open Lancelot beyond his fear through the strength of her devotional offering. Her body is much more supple, graceful, relaxed, and bright with the light of love’s true light, now that Lancelot actually has a plan and at least tries to carry through with it. The game show challenge consists of discovering the most fruitful intimate arrangement for the sake of everyone involved—including the whole world. In other words, rather than trying to get something from the relationship, or even to improve the lives of the people involved in the relationship, the challenge is to optimize the giving of gifts for the sake of all. I’d be willing to wager that Lancelot could find another man who is better at scheduling his girlfriend’s day than Lancelot is. Also, I’d bet that his girlfriend could find another woman who is better at waking Lancelot from his boyish need to have a spiritual contest at all, opening him to total surrender on the spot by using her body in a way that stops his judgmental-mind in love.

Finding others who are better than you at serving your intimate partner to greater openness is, of course, at odds with the rules of me-centered and we-centered relationships. Nevertheless, the need for such help is so intense that it finds its way in through the back door. A woman may chat with a trusted and sensitive man friend about her relationship and gain insight that she could never get from talking to her husband, who doesn’t really like talking about this stuff anyway. A man might look forward to seeing the lustrous beauty of a young woman’s glow—say, a radiant co-worker—and be inspired and energized, feeling really alive in a way that his wife doesn’t evoke. These things happen. Most people keep them secret, or underplay their importance. Even though it is a call for a missing sexual “nutrient,” the longing for specific sexual energies is often trivialized: “Yeah, my husband just can’t get enough of the Playboy channel on cable TV, but as long as he doesn’t act out his fantasies, it’s fine with me.” Or, “My wife thinks her therapist is God. She worships the way he listens to her and makes her feel better about herself. And that’s fine with me—I sure as hell don’t want to spend hours therapizing my wife—as long as he keeps his hands off of her.” We each get our masculine and feminine “nutrients” one way or another, and very rarely do we get all of them from one person. A tennis coach might give a woman the masculine feeling-guidance and direction that her husband Waiting to Love Page 130

doesn’t. A prostitute might role-play and give a man some spectrum of feminine devotional energy—the voracious slut, the coy virgin—that his wife doesn’t. We can get a lot of these energies just by watching movies, TV, or reading books. We fantasize about movie stars usually for these reasons; we imagine getting our unfulfilled masculine or feminine nutritional quota from them. Nature and music can give us muchneeded feminine energy; to-do lists, schedules, and challenging careers can give us the masculine direction that we might otherwise miss. Somehow or another, we each need to metabolize full masculine command-claim and full feminine surrender-invitation, or we develop pathological neediness. Starve a child of essential minerals long enough, and he or she will begin to eat dirt. Starve a man of bodily-offered devotion, and he’ll watch pornography. Starve a woman of authentic heart claim, and she’ll give herself to some form of abuse which allows her to feel her incapacity to resist: she’ll feel claimed by moodiness, chocolate, stupid-but-dominant men, or by fantasies of being tied down and ravished. If Lancelot were smart, he would find ways to provide his girlfriend with the nutrients she needs so she can relax open and shine the love that is her heart’s fullest bloom. If he can’t personally provide these nutrients for now, he would consciously arrange for them to be provided by someone or something

else. This transforms unconscious or secretive habits and addictions into conscious offerings of love. The best intimate arrangements are the ones that provide everybody with the masculine and feminine nutrients necessary to support ongoing relaxation as the openness of love’s conscious luminosity. Maybe choosing to give birth to children helps this process, maybe not. Maybe sexual monogamy serves this openness, maybe not. The need for such nutrients is different for each person, and changes over time and with age. A twenty-three-year-old woman might require lovingly aggressive masculine sexual ravishment on a daily basis, whereas a fifty-year-old man might be served equally to surrender open in love’s bliss by a good foot massage. Now the question remains, who should give the ravishment or foot massage? Whose gift is it to offer? Perhaps a professional should be hired to provide the service, or maybe the intimate arrangement should be expanded to include more than two people. Perhaps Lancelot is the best lover to open his girlfriend’s heart and body through sexual means, but he’s lousy at helping her flower her career. In this case, he might invite a man into the intimate arrangement who is gifted at career management and who also needs a woman that can give a great foot massage, which Lancelot’s girlfriend can do, although the two explicitly agree not to engage in physical sex. Waiting to Love Page 132

We can imagine that Lancelot has a friend who is in a really good marriage, but Lancelot has a deeper spiritual understanding than his friend, whose wife comes to Lancelot for conversations of spiritual guidance. This can be made into an explicit, honorable, and formal exchange, with no secret backdoors or pathological suppressions. Lancelot could clearly offer this woman spiritual counseling—which is a nutrient she lacks in her marriage—while committing to abstain from having sex with her, because her husband does open her sufficiently through sexual means, or at least could learn to do so, perhaps from Lancelot himself. Of course, these arrangements are tricky, and that’s why the pool of potential contestants for such a game show would be so small. For instance, many women are opened to God sexually most by those men who open them spiritually through words— and thus Lancelot and his friends would have to really determine, day-by-day, whose sexual involvement would most serve to open (or close) his friend’s wife. If Lancelot chooses to gift this woman through verbal spiritual guidance and physical sexual exchange, then what happens with her husband? What gift is he going to give? Does Lancelot have the capacity to serve his friend’s wife in this way while still serving his own girlfriend? Sometimes, giving a gift shifts the energetics in the intimate arrangements and disables one’s capacity to give other, much more important gifts.

And what of the world’s opening? Let’s assume that through years of committed loving, through painful trial and error and hard-won wisdom, Lancelot, his girlfriend, and his friends come upon an arrangement that does serve them all to open deeply. Does this arrangement also result in the world’s benefit? Do their families and friends and coworkers and children open more or close down due to their intimate arrangement? Even though just about everyone has their secret or casual means for getting their masculine and feminine nutrients—ranging from the masculine guidance of a social schedule and to-do list, to the feminine invitation of a belly dancer at a local restaurant— many people will freak out when the offering of these nutrients is made explicit and formalized amongst an arrangement of loving friends. If someone is still seeking personal security or a 50/50 split of who gets to make a decision, then the complexities of such an arrangement, let alone the jealousies and unfulfilled personal longings for feeling like the special chosen one in a love relationship, will wreak havoc on one’s sense of self. Of course, that’s the whole point of such a game. To simultaneously deconstruct selfings through the tearing of love’s most precious veils while also creating an arrangement that allows love’s gifts to be offered without the separative need for hiding. Waiting to Love Page 134

Maybe Lancelot will, indeed, usher in a whole new era of relationships, based on the self-dissolving offering of love’s force through the art of intimate arrangement. For those who choose this game, it will hurt so bad they will have no choice but to surrender open and be lived by the force of love that far exceeds their clinging need for safety and comfort. And the fullness of love’s liberated offerings might make pornography, the “selfsufficient and stressfully alone business woman” syndrome, and the secretive, guiltridden rendezvous obsolete. Maybe the nature of TV game shows themselves will change. If people are already receiving the masculine and feminine nutrients they need to support their relaxation open as love’s fullest offering, then what thrill would they get from watching neurotics searching for love and success on TV? Maybe Lancelot isn’t as stupid as he looks. Perhaps his need to view life as a spiritual contest—as inane as it seems to his close friends and girlfriend—may actually be the precursor to a cultural shift that we can all watch on TV. Instead of trying to win for the sake of self or the award of a safe, cozy relationship, Lancelot’s impulse will lead to contests that open people to give their self-hope to be ruined for the sake of love’s fullest offering on earth. Their personal dreams for a “good life” may be shattered in the process, but perhaps the arrangements that are created will allow an entirely fresh appearance of love’s flow amongst humans.

Lancelot’s obsession with who is practicing a spiritual life best may ultimately lead us beyond old forms of loving into depths of trust and agony that few have been so far willing to bear for the sake of love’s most full offering in this appearing world of ours. If so, God bless Lancelot’s spiritually competitive obsession. Otherwise, he’s just another spiritual dumb-ass like the rest of us aggressive seekers, trying to out-practice our friends and achieve love’s endowment that is bursting through all of us as the light of every moment’s relaxed openness, if we’d only stop trying to win. Waiting to Love Page 136

13. Gritting Teeth and Love’s Yawn Every hero becomes a bore at last. —Ralph Waldo Emerson As a body in a world, here is our choice: we can be more loving or less loving. That’s it. We can relax as the entire moment’s show of love’s swirl, feeling open as all—a vicious rainstorm, tweeting birds, our lover’s lips, a sense of worthlessness—or we can close to some aspect of experience, pulling away as if we were separate. Suppose we feel sick. Our body aches. Our thoughts boil deliriously. Our stomach churns, and we can almost taste our vomit. We can resist these feelings because we don’t want to experience them. Or, we can open to feel our pre-puke wooziness so that openness reigns larger than the chunky feelings themselves. We can feel our nausea, and instead of tightening our gut and wishing we weren’t feeling so bad, we can relax, soften our belly, and feel our nausea completely. We can feel our distress as art, as if we had paid to take a roller coaster ride and feel woozy as entertainment, so that our child could enjoy the experience, even though we don’t really like it that much. We can practice this while sitting in the dining room, sick.

I feel horrible, damn it. I wish I felt better. I hate this feeling. Well, I might as well relax and enjoy it. I’ll breathe deeper and soften my body’s tension. Hmmm, nausea feels like a sea swelling in my gut. It’s not very pleasant, but it’s just a feeling. Rolls of blah, moving through my belly. I want to double over and resist the pain, but I’m going to relax open without hunching my shoulders, feel the nausea fully without curling into myself, and open further. I practice to feel the room around me, filled with furniture, carpeted, still smelling of the dinner I cooked last night. I hear the sounds of distant cars on the highway. I feel my lover and close friends, and I imagine what they must be feeling right now. I feel my nausea but I also feel outward to the stars and the openness of space. How far can I feel? Is there any edge to this moment? I can’t find a boundary, feeling outward, further and further, without end, all the while also feeling my anguish and everything else. The feeling of nausea is swirled in the whorling of patterns: the cook at the restaurant where I ate lunch yesterday kissed his girlfriend who had the flu a few days ago, and he sneezed on my sandwich that he was preparing. His girlfriend got the flu because she babysat for the Smiths who decided at the last minute to go to a movie, and their children were just about to get sick, but didn’t show any symptoms yet. The children crawled into the babysitter’s Waiting to Love Page 138

lap—my cook’s girlfriend—and kissed her because they wanted to taste her bubblegumflavored lipstick. Now, my nausea. The meshing of influences extends far beyond what any individual can ever know. It includes quantum fluctuations and zero-point energy giving rise to the inertia we feel when we move our arms through space as we run to the toilet. The whole meshing webwork includes the susceptibility of our immune system, biased by our parents’ genetics as well as by the coins and shoes we put in our mouth as infants. Nausea. Sickness. We don’t want it. But it’s here. And it’s here for a reason. It’s here enmeshed in a webwork of reasons, some so small we can’t see them, some so long ago we can’t remember them, some so large we can’t conceive of the moon’s reflected light on the curve of the cook’s girlfriend’s breasts that inspired him to kiss her, tongue deep in her mouth, their juicy smooch becoming a vector for the Smith’s children’s virus that now triggers the biochemistry of my nausea. Blame is useless. Sickness is how the openness of light is currently rippling. To close to this—or any—feeling is to deny the openness we are. To feel fully is to be openness fully, which is love. This is our only choice: to open as love or to close. We may not like feeling nauseous, but we can train ourselves to relax open as love when we would otherwise tighten, hunching our shoulders

to protect our heart from pain, attempting to pull away from unpleasant feeling, creating separation, the origin of deep loneliness and private torment. This pulling away—from our pain, thoughts, emotions, and sensations, or from situations and relationships—is unlove, and gives rise to the unending search to fulfill the lack we have created because we are afraid to feel fully. Fear of pain is natural enough; nobody likes to hurt. But hurt happens. Closing in fear of pain—being afraid of the fear of pain—is an unnecessary addition that creates a secondary layering. We remove ourselves from the primary appearance of love’s whorling openness, and we inhabit an extra-thick world comprised of the contractions of our own protective contortions. We perpetuate the fear-born motions of separation, adding unnecessary layers of momentum to love’s spontaneous whorling. We create supplementary currents of mesolidifying thickness that make it even more difficult to recognize and relax open as the love that we are. You can try to fix the nausea. You can take medicine, for instance, or try visualizing a healing light shining through your belly. Why not do your best to reduce pain? But if you are pulling away from the sensation in addition to doing your best to ease it, then you are adding a special kind of whorl—a fear whorl—that tightens the knot of solidity. Waiting to Love Page 140

Open and feel all experience, exactly as it is—and also act in the most beneficent way. Otherwise, even if you take the right medicine, your closure to experience will re-enforce your habit of separation. Your heart will feel a little more unquenched, your self more solidly knotted in a depthless world with less love available as you withdraw from the spontaneous display of now’s deeply open whole, as it is. Your separative resistance as you pull away from feeling any experience creates the habit of solidifying a “me” and its subsequent ripples of loneliness, alienation, futility, meaninglessness, and the lack of love. The less we are willing to relax open and feel, the more we are likely to enact the separation of an inside from an outer world of others. After years of fearful recoiling from feeling all, we are likely to have a strong sense of a private “me” inside—streaming as thoughts, emotions, and sensations—separate from a public world outside, available for all to experience as they will. Within any world your fear determines the strength of this division. If you are dreaming that a monster is chasing you, your dream-self “inside” appears to flow with fearful thoughts and emotions and the dream-world “outside” appears to contain a creature running after you. If you can feel the openness that is alight as the entire dream, then all of it—your fear, your body, the scary monster—is obvious as dream-luminosity that only seem to be “inner” or “outer” appearances.

When you wake up, all of this will disappear, as openness continues to feel and know, now alight as your waking appearance, whorling as a private inner life of thoughts and emotions seemingly separate from the public outer world of jobs and lovers, just as while dreaming. This division of inner and outer is based in your fear to feel everything so fully it is known as love’s open light. Our waking and dreaming whorls can bleed through to each other. The phone rings and you incorporate the sound into your dream. Your dream-self remains unaware that you are dreaming. You don’t know that a phone is ringing in the waking world and bleeding through into your dream events—until suddenly you shift to your awake self, and then it is obvious that the recess bells ringing in your dream of Mrs. Hansen’s third-grade class was actually the alarm clock next to your 50-year-old body in bed. Our present experience—whether we are dreaming or awake right now—is the tip of the wave whose currents are whorled by bleedthroughs from dimensions of which we remain unaware, as well as by the webwork arising as the appearing world. Our nausea can be related to many unseen influences—for instance, what some cultures might call the “spirit” of the land upon which we walk, or the nasty attitude with which our food was cooked—while also being enmeshed with the decision the Smiths made to get a babysitter for the evening that resulted in our cook sneezing a spray of viruses on our sandwich. Waiting to Love Page 142

God knows why this moment is happening as it is, or what is happening altogether. You can spend your entire life compensating for what arises, and then you are caught in a never-ending story of inadequate love, depth, and openness. You feel nauseous, so you compensate by driving to the pharmacy for some medicine, your car burning fuel formed by the fossilization of our dinosaur-era earth, your eyes noticing the shoes on another person in the drugstore, resulting in your desire to earn more money to buy more shoes…and so on. You feel hungry so you open the refrigerator, smelling something foul, spending 20 minutes throwing out old rotting leftovers, and all the while forgetting to meet your friend at the agreed-upon time, who becomes so upset he spills hot coffee on his new suit and decides not to invite you to the party that you would have met your next business partner at… Every single time you act in response to what appears, internally or externally, you set in motion further whorls, which incite further acts, by you and others, unendingly. If you fear to feel what is appearing full-blown right now, and you therefore pull back from feeling your nausea—or your lover’s criticism, or the thought of strangling your boss—then you add a deeper division between inside and

outside, a more fundamental sense of separation, loneliness, and life’s meaninglessness day-after-day of superficial doings. Pulling back from feeling any arising—dream-monsters or your own dark desires to kill— thickens the false sense of separate self and others, making it more difficult to relax and live as the love arising as this moment’s deeply feeling openness. So you suffer. With training, you can practice to open and fully feel whatever is—which includes nausea—while also acting to reduce the pain. Soften your body while the queasy spinning sensation curdles your gut. Without ignoring your illness, feel the space around you in the room, as if the air were made of clear water that flowed through every pore of your skin. Feel into the deepest part of your heart’s longing to love while also feeling out as far as the moment goes, beyond the buildings, landscape, and sky you can see. Feel infinitely inward and endlessly outward simultaneously, and as this unconfined open feeling, drive to the pharmacy for medication to alleviate your pain. You can open and feel fully while at the pharmacy noticing your attraction to the shoes on the fellow customer. Feel your glance move to the shoes, your jaw squeezing a bit tighter, your weight shifting from one leg to another, and your throat swallowing. Feel the animal that was killed for its hide, and the workers sweating to make the shoes you wish were yours to own. You were born a human. Humans desire things like fine shoes, classy cars, and Waiting to Love Page 144

beautiful homes. Don’t suppress your desire for the customer’s shoes; this desire is as natural as your thirst for water. Instead, allow your desire to relax open beyond its usual confinement so it feels the less visible aspects of your target of envy—including the skinned animals lying on bloodstained cement floors and underpaid workers who couldn’t afford to buy the shoes they spend their day gluing and shaping, their finger’s forever dyed with the colors of your longed-for shoes. Be lovingly intimate with a more whole swirling of currents that presently appear as the shoes, allowing your deepest heart’s desire to move you as it will, tenderly feeling as open as you are willing. You can open and feel fully while your mindstream perseverates on earning more money. Money is security. Without it you might die. And if you die, then what? Feel who you were before you were born. How bad was it? Feeling before your birth, is there a hard wall, or an openness, an unknowingness? Money helps postpone death’s unknowable surrender. Imagine you are dead right now, and this is the afterlife. Imagine there is nothing after death, and this dream of life is gone forever. Perhaps, as in every moment you have ever known, the openness that always is abides before your birth and after your death, as well as now. This is for you to feel into, persistently, perhaps in formal periods of meditative stillness as well as in the present moment.

Moment by moment, you can relax open, feeling all ripples of openness alight as the inner-seeming and outer-seeming currents—shoes, money, desire—of your dreaming or awake world. Open and alive as love’s spontaneous showing, even your inner-seeming feeling of wanting to kill someone dissolves open, as all “wantings” and “someones” become transparent as love’s rippling light, like the monster in a dream from which you are waking. This dissolution as open love is quickened by feeling the whole swirl of currents, remaining vulnerable to your ancestor’s offerings, the suffering and lives spent to create that which you want and that which sustains the people who are still appearing. Every inevitable effect of your actions—nausea leading to shoe-desire leading to slaughter-derived leather—provides further fodder for fearing to feel the whole truth and suffering and threat of existence. So you pull back from open feeling, thickening and reinforcing the sense of a world and self that feel separate and solid, devoid of the freedom of love’s deep openness. Your resulting life is one of feeling perpetually trapped by never-ending obligations and unclaimed by love’s force. In any moment, you can openly feel the ripples of appearance—the nausea, the monsters, your desires, both deviant and natural—without pulling back. Waiting to Love Page 146

Then, the inner and outer world feels more open, eventually relaxing transparent as love’s light. Your actions and their ripples loosen as love’s spontaneous play, heart-felt and heart-released, rather than strengthen into a sense of solidity and separation between a necessary “me” in here and a world out there. You can train in opening or closing. It is your choice. You can relax open and feel all alive as love’s spontaneous ripples arising in resonance with an infinite webwork of unseen influences, lives given and taken, endlessly playing toward no end in sight. Or, you can close as unlove, afraid to feel as the openness that lives us all and into which we all die. Closing, waiting to love, you will suffer as your pulling back re-enforces the solidity of separation in which you feel stuck, trapped, and alone, seeking for the profound love and openness from which you are presently retracting. At last, as your choice to relax allows the ripples to soften open, your necessity, your heroic story and inevitable tragedy, fading in the light of love’s overwhelming yawn.

14. The Ritual of Life as Love Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh. —Paul Valery Cunt. Speech is energy. Words affect you energetically, emotionally, even physiologically—if you are a trained reader. Otherwise, their appearance means very little. A squirrel—or a human trained only in Chinese—would see “cunt” and would be less emotionally and physiologically affected than you. The energy you give and receive through speech, gestures, and thoughts is like the energy of cunt-words, hugely affecting and evocative if you can read it, nonsense if you can’t. In your appearing world of others, your words, motions, and stream of thoughts are, to one degree or another, transmitting openness or else evoking tension by triggering defensive reaction to seemingly threatening energy. Cunt. Waiting to Love Page 148

Love. Sweet. Speech is energy, and you wield it more or less consciously, depending on your training and sensitivity as your current self. Your posture and thoughts are, right now, “cunting,” “loving,” or “sweeting,” outward for all to feel, although, like squirrels or foreign-language speakers, people are more or less affected by your offered energy. As your capacity to express the nature of openness deepens, then your words, postures, and thoughts are given as intentional offerings. Your life becomes, essentially, a ritual done for the sake of others. Why bother thinking so you can know your own thoughts? They are yours already. As are your motions and words. Rather, you think, act, and speak for the sake of others. Your heart feels the blessing or suffering created by your offerings rippling through the appearance-space of your present world. As an infant, the word “love” is a squiggle of black lines on a white background, nothing more and nothing less. But with training in reading, “love” means something, to you and everyone else who can read English. Until then, “love” just sits on the page and doesn’t mean more than a crack on a wall or a piece of lint on the floor.

Your speech, your gestures, and your thoughts are rather arbitrary until you learn how to read them and what they mean. You don’t realize how you are affecting others until the languaging of your body, speech, and mind is clear to you. Then, your exact posture— the position of your fingers, right now—means something, to you and others. Your vocal chords may vibrate as “cunt” or “love,” and their rippling meaning is felt as it emerges and fades in openness. Your thoughts vibrate in the mode of devotion or analysis, as they appear and disappear in the cognizant space of mind, and their meaning—more or less expressive of our natural being of love-openness—is immediately felt amongst those who can “read.” The essential nature of all energy is openness that can know and love, appearing as spontaneous luminosity. All dreams and waking worlds are self-lit in this way, shining as their own open knowingness, energetically radiant as love. Ritualized chanting and singing are ways of training speech-energy, just as sacred dancing and hatha yoga are ways of training body-energy, and meditation is a way of training mind-energy. Training this way helps re-habitualize the appearing speech, body, and mind so they can be more relaxedly transparent to the spontaneous and free light of openness shining through them. Waiting to Love Page 150

The more transparent your words, postures, and thoughts are to the unconfined, natural openness that can know and love, then the more you will be able to act as a transmitter of openness in any appearing world. The less able you are, the more contractive your life will be, for yourself and others. True ritual is thus an artful enactment of love’s openness, as well as a training for dehabitualizing and relaxing the distorting tension you may have gotten used to creating with your words, posture, and thinking. In deep dreamless sleep tonight, you won’t remember “cunt.” It will be as if it had never happened. In deep sleep, it will be as if nothing has ever happened, nothing has ever meant anything. But when appearances arise while dreaming or awake, what things mean depends on your training and development. And beyond their meaning, you can train to remember and abide as the same cognizant openness in deep sleep, although no appearances arise. You are a cunt. You are a runt.

You are a can’t. The luminosity of this moment’s openness ripples with meaning, and all the selves in this world react according to their training and habit, including you. How you respond to the three sentences above this paragraph—how your breathing, tension, and mindstream are affected—depends on your training and habits. If you don’t read English, your response is minimal. If you can read, then you will probably attend to the meaning that ripples from reading these sentences: “Who are you calling a ‘cunt’ and a ‘runt’? And what the hell do you mean I’m a ‘can’t’”. With further training, the rippling itself is felt as the openness of being, the same unconfined capacity to know and love that is, whether you are awake, sleeping, or dreaming these words, right now. We can grow through three phases of training, or ritual, whether we are learning how to read, how to perform a sacred dance or chant, or how to meditate: 1. You don’t really feel what it means. 2. You do really feel what it means.

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3. You feel what it means as a rippling appearance of unconfined open being. This leads to three kinds of spiritual activities. 1. You don’t believe that spiritual activities make any difference; ritual, dance, chanting, prayer, meditation, and so forth are just a bunch of hocus-pocus. 2. You are very serious about your spiritual practices, and believe that you have found a way to realize something more profound, a deeper way to really offer your love to the world and others. 3. You rest open as the unconfined being of luminous knowing and loving that every moment already is. Your entire appearing life is enacted as an artful ritual, effortlessly expressing the inherent openness of being. At first, people are me-centered, and they think, say, and do whatever they want to. Then people realize how important their actions are, how much they affect everyone, and thus how careful, kind, compassionate, and correct they ought to be, if love and openness are to be realized and expressed. People grow from being me-centered to wecentered.

Eventually, people realize that nothing needs to be done so that this moment, including its appearing selves, is wide open, luminous as love, alive as knowing and feeling. Nothing needs to be done, or not done, for this to be so. Sacred chanting, saying, “cunt,” moving your fingers this way or that—their meaning depends on which of the three above-mentioned possibilities you are selfing as. Of course, each self can move amongst these three possibilities, being an agnostic one moment, a true believer the next, and open as love’s effortless enactment in another moment. Training helps stabilize your appearing-self’s capacity to recognize and relax as the openness that always is, rather than wandering and getting lost in the realms of meaning, or remaining blithely ignorant of how your actions are affecting others, appearing while awake or dreaming. Cunt. Runt. Can’t. Can you sing aloud each one of these words as a sacred expression of the unconfined, luminous, love-cognizance that is right now appearing as you, living open as you, all others, and the world? Can you learn to offer energy—all energy—as love’s gift? Can you train to say, “You are a cunt” with the same heart-melodious endowment as, “I love you.” Regardless of what any moment—any word, gesture, or thought—seems to mean, train to remember its nature as love’s indestructible openness, so that the energy of all meaning is effortlessly and spontaneously transparentized as Waiting to Love Page 154

ripples of openness by your relaxed recognition (repeated gently as unforced rerecognition in the next moment as action and meaning shine open). Persistently training in this spontaneous way, all speech, action, and thinking—as dense or obstructive as they may currently seem—are instantaneously opened as blessing rituals of offering, until their inevitable disappearance. Utterly forgotten, all meaning is vanished as openness itself, ever able to feel and know, whether or not something is happening or anything is ever remembered.

15. Three Aspects of Now The ardor chills us which we do not share. —Coventry Patmore The things of life seem to have value. I’m working on a computer writing these words, and outside people are swimming in a lake not far from my window. A spider lurches on the windowsill. I don’t know what the spider sees or hears or feels, but it seems to be choosing its paths, encountering obstacles, navigating around them, continuing its day. Wasps have built cozy, mud-daubed homes above my doorway. With a shift in attention, we can inhabit other realms, perhaps feeling the lives of spiders and wasps. Simply closing our eyes and relaxing, letting the stream of thoughts eventually quiet down, allows us to feel domains not so familiar during our normal day. No computers or windows or lakes. Open space, shining, feeling, knowing. We can traverse various psyche-scapes, still feeling a “me” that is viewing those places. With deeper relaxation, no-separation feels open as unconfined cognizant appearance— the light that appears is also the open space that knows and feels. Waiting to Love Page 156

A three-step unfolding takes place instantaneously: First is the unconfined space-like openness, then its capacity to know and feel, and then the arising energy or light that we call our current world, including our current self. Our finally appearing self is never apart from the space-like openness or its capacity to know and feel, but we can feel these three aspects of now somewhat distinctly. If we train to simultaneously feel all three of these aspects of the now moment— openness, cognizance, and luminosity—then the non-necessity of anything that appears is freedom. To be free is to love without necessity. Our current world and self, seemingly so solid and anchored, is a quivering soon-to-be forgotten display of conscious light. Openness that can know and feel is always its nature. To love is to feel without fear. We can feel any person or spider while also training to feel the openness-cognizance that is shining as whatever is, right now. Our love thereby deepens, feeling more as openness, radiating more as freedom, curtailing less as fear. With training, we can learn to feel the spider’s “inner” psyche-scape, or an individual’s stream of thoughts. This is similar to a rider learning to tune into his or her horse’s feelings, but instead of a horse, one can learn to feel the experience-stream of just about anything or anyone.

This capacity to feel appearing selves “from the inside” is merely a possible by-product of training to feel the threefold happening of now: it’s openness, its capacity to know and feel, and its luminosity, or appearance as the alight display of energy, as selves, and worlds. As you train to feel every seemingly solid self and world happening, you may also begin to feel how they happen. Standing in the shower, I feel the water on my skin. I feel the open space that is the capacity to feel the shower. Openness feels alight as the sensations of a self that is showering. I can equally inhabit the spider on my windowsill by relaxing attention from writing, allowing the center of feeling to drift over “there” to the spider, rather than “here” in my current self’s thoughts and typing. Can I prove it? I can only confirm it with other people appearing in this current world who can relax their attention to feel as the spider, and compare what we feel. Can I predict someone’s exact thought? No. Not even mine. Can I read somebody else’s mind? No. I can only feel their “minding,” like the meaning of a dance done with thoughts rather than with physical gestures, like feeling what my horse wants. Waiting to Love Page 158

What does a spider know of itself? Who do we think we are? I assume that a flower cannot see its own color or smell its own scent. I assume a spider cannot see the same stars in the sky as I see. In the shower, I am aware of my currently appearing body: I can see it in a mirror, and I can feel it kinesthetically, the water splashing on its surface and its orientation in gravity. But a snake might see my body as heat, perhaps indistinguishable from the heat of the shower’s water. A scientific instrument might pick up the electromagnetic fields that would register as “my body.” My “smell body” might be stronger to a dog than my “shape body.” Like a flower’s scent, many dimensions of our being are far outside the limitations of our capacity to perceive our self or now-world. We probably have all had hunches that proved true, or maybe we dreamed of events that actually happened later, while awake. We are already touching much more than our currently appearing outlines seem to allow. We are like a flower shining in a world of colors that we don’t even know exists, and never will. We will never know the whole of what we are, or what anything is, or even what its borders are, apart from our appearing-self’s instrumentation: brain damage or a few tweaks to our neurochemistry can dramatically change what appears to be.

The simple delay in time between the moment a photon hits our retina—causing a chain of chemical and electrical events in our nervous system—and the moment when a picture arises in our consciousness, already guarantees that we can only see the past; even more so for the stars millions of light-years away. A wave of compressed air can hit our eardrum, and, depending on our age and auditory acuity, we may or may not hear certain frequencies in the music surrounding us that others—dogs and young children, for instance—may easily hear. Within every experience of any waking or dream world, each appearing self is equipped quite differently, as are each world’s laws of physics, its apparent stretch of time and space. Any world or self that seems to be, however, is obviously being known and felt as it appears, shifts, reappears, and disappears. That is, the capacity to know and feel always exists if any thing or self ever seems to exist, even if we can never know what anything really is other than what it appears to be—a spontaneous and dreamlike appearance, unanchored by any reality that may or may not be “out there” right now. The nature of that which can feel and know and love and shine is unconfined selfexisting openness, regardless of what seems to appear for now. Waiting to Love Page 160

Love, or openness, is the nature of the spider’s world, as well as mine and yours, and the bacteria’s too, crawling in our nostril, never knowing Shakespeare, or the joys of breastfeeding, or the horrors of human war. Other than noticing the appearance that we can feel now—which has already disappeared without a trace—we can never know what anything really is. This openness of feeling is love, the nature of now. But if we are not ready for it, then a glimpse of unfabricated openness is horrifying. We may wake up in the morning and not know who we are or where we are. We may clench in fear and grasp for an identity. “Who am I? Where am I?” Not the spider, said I, but the writer, for now. A fabricated world of a known self with a remembered history knowing its place in a familiar world is what we are sustaining, for fear of falling into total unknowingness. Familiarity—the opposite of love’s ever-fresh openness—is necessary for the reassuring sense of any appearing world and self. Hence, all familiar worlds and selves are at odds with unfabricated, open love. The nature of any moment is full-feeling openness, and every appearing individual is a selfing assemblage, automatically seeking spidery, bacterial, or, perhaps, human familiarity, while each flower’s color remains invisible to

itself—and thus without value or meaning—in the very world familiar to the flowers. We can practice to remember and feel the open, knowing nature of now—whether or not we are familiar with who and where we are, regardless of how much of the moment is actually visible to us. When we practice trusting the open, knowing nature of whatever is showing, then our body—waking or dreaming or dying—relaxes. Our heart ceases to clench, trusting to splay as the living light of this moment’s open showing, whatever appearances happen to shine, even as empty, lucid darkness, unbound. Remembering to trust love’s conscious luminosity, again and again, our values and meanings of the human domain are replaced by the spontaneous display of openness, whorled by now-appearing habit and physics. If we are so inclined, we can compassionately ritualize love’s offering as art, so as not to shock those accustomed to familiar human value and meaning. And thus, perhaps, we can help undo the grip by which the need for familiarity jars love in a fabricated world of fear. The open, cognizant luminosity of love is sufficient. Spiritual training involves finding out, for ourselves, without a doubt, that this is so. Waiting to Love Page 162

16. Where Is Up? What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. —Bertrand Russell I am startled to have been born human. I can feel, equally fully, what it would be like to have a penis or a vagina as my genital. Multiple sclerosis and visions of Jesus are both easily accessible to me as whole-body experiences. For some reason, I have been born with the odd capacity to experience and enact just about anything I want—well enough so that others are sure it is real—and I have already experienced and enacted everything I have ever wanted. Frankly, I don’t like the human domain of experience, and never have. Eating, defecating, making love, making money, participating in relationships, being with family, partaking in art, understanding science, feeling nature, beholding mystical visions: all of it feels like an intrusion.

I am shocked, constantly, by being a human. But I also resist it when I mistake it for what it is not. Let us start with what seems an easy entry into what is and what isn’t one’s human experience. When you dream, where is up? “Up” is a word that indicates a direction relative to “down,” which usually means up is toward the sky and down is toward the earth. But in a dream, as your body lies in bed, up and down indicate directions in a dream world, although the directions seem as real as while awake. If you are like most people, you have dreamed of flying. In such a dream, you can soar upward, moving left and right through space, gliding up off the ground. As real as it feels, down and up and left and right are all your dream-feelings. The direction of up in a dream is just a dream-feeling—it bears no relationship to the physical earth and sky of the waking-state landscape. The space in which a dream takes place is altogether a dream-space. Waiting to Love Page 164

What are the qualities of this dream-feeling of upness? For those of us who have flown in dreams, dream-up feels away from dream-down. Up feels more open than down. Up feels “higher” whereas down feels “lower.” In general, left and right (while dreaming or awake) are directions with less emotional feeling invested in them than up and down. If you tell someone to “Go down!” the feeling is usually more intense than “Go left!” Directions have feelings associated with them, and they are mostly the same feelings whether we are awake or dreaming. Many people confuse left and right while awake or dreaming, for instance while driving a car. While driving, you have probably confused left and right more often than you have confused forward and backward. Left and right are barely distinctive compared with forward and backward, or up and down, which people rarely confuse. If you are clinging to the middle of a tall tree and somebody tells you to climb up and go right, you are not likely to mistakenly climb down the tree, although you may climb left, accidentally—even in a dream. Brain damaged patients, as well as non-human primates and mammals, often can’t tell the difference between right and left at all, whereas up and down are quite firmly established and frequently emotionally charged. Although a few human cultures use their right hand for greeting others and their left hand for

cleansing themselves, many more cultures have very strict and almost universal rules concerning up and down. Up is, almost universally, where heaven abides. Down is where hell is. Up is where royalty or superiors stand. Down is where subordinates bow. Up is bright and down is dark, both emotionally and visually: “Today, she looks really down, but she seemed so up yesterday.” Try this experiment: Close your eyes. Then look right for several seconds and feel whatever you feel. Look left and do the same. Then look upward, still with your eyes closed, and feel whatever you feel. Then look downward. While looking in each direction with your eyes closed, do your best to be very sensitive, feeling from your heart area as you would while viewing an emotion-laden photograph or painting. What do you feel in your physical body, and especially what do you feel in your emotional “body,” or the domain where you feel emotions? While looking with closed eyes in each of the four directions, which direction feels best: left, right, up, or down? Why? Why is there any difference in feeling-tone at all? You probably know this children’s song: “Row, row, row your boat Waiting to Love Page 166

Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream.” The metaphor that life is but a dream is as familiar to today’s children in New York as it was to Lao Tsu in ancient China. Life-as-a-dream is a staple image of both Eastern and Western philosophy and religion, and is also an essential element to the plots of many stories, such as the movie, The Matrix. As everybody knows, sometimes when you are dreaming you assume that it is real. There is no way to tell, in fact, whether you are dreaming right now. The point is, when it comes to “up” and “down,” it doesn’t matter if you are dreaming or not. Whatever domain you seem to inhabit, there is an “up” and “down” feeling-direction, which has no necessary relationship to the physical earth and sky. Many meditative practices (and even some forms of prayer) involve feeling upward, seeing lights or hearing sounds from above, or receiving energy or commandments that seem to come down from above. These same meditative exercises—for instance, allowing yourself to be absorbed in the light or sound above—work equally well while you are dreaming.

Anything that is consistent through different domains—equally true while waking or dreaming or meditating, for example—is probably not dependent on the “rules” of one of those domains. That is, upness is prior to waking and dreaming; it infuses the waking or dreaming landscape with a sense of directionality. Upness is something that can be felt even in meditative domains wherein your body and the perceptual world entirely dissolve. The feeling of upness is more real—more consistent and less changing—than any object, person, or place you can see, taste, touch, smell, or hear, while awake or dreaming. Your human environment has an “up” to it because, whatever and wherever “you” are altogether, your now-appearing environment is pervaded by a more fundamental sense of directionality that is feelingly-present with or without the particular appearance of your now-environment. The feeling of upness precedes your particular experience, now, while dreaming, while meditating, and perhaps even before birth and after death. (Many afterdeath reports involve the feeling of going up and out the top of the head or moving up toward the light.) And the feeling of directionality is just one of the fundamentals of experience that is more true or consistently present than the particular objects and activities that occur while waking and dreaming, including sex, money, art, or science. Waiting to Love Page 168

Once, as a child, I was riding my bicycle. Suddenly, everything shifted so that my body, the bicycle, and the entire surroundings seemed like a faint movie projected on glass. Through the transparent images on the glass I saw and felt a depth of reality far more fundamental—like the sense of upness that persists through waking and dreams—than riding my bicycle. And then another shift occurred, so that another depth became clear, and so on. Finally, every depth just disappeared, or became utterly transparent, as if it had no necessity or importance whatsoever, and yet I was still aware of riding my bicycle. I was going nowhere that I wasn’t already. Unending depth is the dimensionless home of our being, and you and I are creating our environment by where we place our attention. Concentrate on making money, enjoying a relationship, and serving your community for year after year, and that is what you will tend to notice: money, relationship, community. Close your eyes and concentrate on “up” for year after year, and you will tend to notice the light or sound that precedes and comes down to take shape as this more superficial or lower human environment of separate bodies and minds. The lower you go—which means more superficial and less depth—the more that the sense of “happening” constrains infinity into a series of specific experiences. The higher you go, the more time becomes space, until nothing is happening but isness.

Each of us are choosing the density of our experience—darker or lighter, lower or higher—by desiring varying degrees of time-happenings. The more you want something to happen, or the more happenings you want to occur, the more you suffer darkness and being “down.” Close your eyes and feel upward into the light—only do that—and you will suffer less than if you invest all your money in the stock market and watch the stock-ticker fluctuating moment by moment. However, more people prefer the tension of attending to the fluctuating stock market than the fullness of light-bliss afforded by closing your eyes and feeling upward, so they watch the business news on TV instead of contemplating upward. And more people prefer feeling the bliss of the higher light than feeling nothing at all, and so they attend to their contemplative vision with the same desire as if it were the stock market, rather than feeling so openly nothing happens but God—the unspeakable domain that is— beyond and including all domains of time and experience. All experiences, of every kind, are motions in time. The higher domains are more spacelike and unchanging, and the lower domains are more full of time, unfolding as distinct objects in motion and relation, including multiple inner selves and outer selves. For a feeling-sense of different densities of Waiting to Love Page 170

distinctions, imagine you were a majestic bird flying through the silent space of an objectless sky, or that you were a man, filled with conflicting subjective distinctions— doubts, fears, and judgments—fighting a war surrounded by hundreds of objective distinctions in time: other fighters, bombs, and flying bullets everywhere. Domains of experience range from the lower ones, unfolding with more distinctions in time—they are therefore more frantic and tense or hellish—to those upper domains that are freer of time and more spacious, closer to eternal and unchanging. As we have seen, the relatively unchanging feeling of upness infuses the ever-changing happenings of the waking and dreaming domains, and the higher domains are less dense with distinction and change than the lower. The domain prior to the directionality-domain is even more spacious, with less happening in time and more obviousness apparent without the need for time. To illustrate this process: When learning to read as a child, first you make much of low-level distinctions. You first sound out the letters one after another (which takes time), then you learn to read words whole (and the meaning becomes more obvious with less time necessary), until the obvious meaning of the unchanging words on the unchanging space of the page is almost instantaneous.

With practice, less time is necessary and the meaning of what appears in space is more obvious, in every domain, lower and higher. Spending the time to “sound out the letters one after another,” or experience event after event, emotion after emotion, is unnecessary, and certainly uninteresting, once the meaning of the entire domain—the unchanging page or “space” of waking or dreaming—is obvious. Whether dreaming or waking, “you” are appearing in this domain right now, and you are attending to the timely distinctions and events—sounding out letter after letter—as your human interest requires. To satisfy your human need to experience intimacy (which always comes in a pair with aloneness), for instance, there must be other people that come and go in time. All the coming and going, all the others and you, are appearing, like in a dream, as letters on a page that only seem to make sense when felt moving through time, as part of a domain that feels necessary for as long as its meaning is yet unobvious, and therefore sounding out the letters is still interesting. When you are uninterested enough in these human events—when they are sufficiently transparent—so you are free to attend to what is obvious before the need for time, what is prior to even upness—before you were born into a domain of directionality, or before this moment comes into a sequence of time—you will feel nothing happening, spelled out exactly as everything that is happening in time. Then, your suffering—your attention only to time’s more Waiting to Love Page 172

shallow appearances—is a matter of choice, and there is no excuse for resistance to what appears. Honestly, I am interested in very, very little that appears in the time of the human domain, which is quite shallow and ever-changing. But I’m obviously interested enough to continue choosing it. And for as long as I am effortlessly aware of this choice as I am doing it, this moment-by-moment time-making motive of creating distinctions with my attention—in every moment I am open enough to feel this choice to find meaning in time, then in those moments my attention relaxes as love’s knowingness and everything becomes obvious as love’s spontaneous swell, making evident the deep heart-meaning of all happenings, instantly. Otherwise, I feel resistant and stuck, as if in a bad dream—forgotten to have been made by the choice to want something to happen in time. And why would I (or you) want something to happen, to sound out the letters, to feel others come and go, to feel a direction in which to move, to fly, except for love? The mother of time and the home of all ups and downs: love. Love is where up—and everything that can ever happen anywhere—always is, already.

When time is not necessary for meaning, and you are willing to feel before there is any space of directionality, find out what is. Waiting to Love Page 174

17. The Art and Politics of Is Those who will not labor mightily on their own behalf shall be given other masters. —Xenophon As a matter of course, humans find themselves in the middle. For instance, science has been able to peer up to the stars and down to the atoms, with roughly the same order of magnitude of magnification—when it comes to size, human-size is in the middle between the largest and the smallest. It is useful to consider oneself this way, in the middle. A lot of people seem like morons to me, but I’ve also met people who are a lot smarter than I am. For convenience, I’ll consider myself in the middle. I’ll also assume that I’m in between the least and most spiritually developed people who have ever lived. By “spiritually developed,” I mean people who are capable of feeling open as what is— whatever is—without fear or hope distorting their capacity to love, to offer their deepest gifts, or to recognize the mysterious world for what it most deeply and fully is, whatever it is.

So, let’s just assume that we are in the middle, you and I. There are people who are more closed than us—afraid, vindictive, shortsighted, selfish, destructive, unable to feel anything but their own tension, thoughts, and emotions—and there are people more open than us, whose experience we couldn’t fathom. It’s easy to feel somebody more closed than us. Their tension and fear is obvious. Since our capacity to perceive is limited and filtered by our own tension, someone more open than us may remain invisible—except for short periods of time while we consent to be entertained by their openness. Then, we aren’t required to sustain their degree of love’s fearless expression for longer than an hour or two. Most of us aren’t too willing to train, year after year, like a master dancer, musician, or painter does, so that love’s openness can be sustained for longer durations of artful moments. We can only feel as open as we are willing and enabled through our born capacities and our training. Thus, except in moments that entertain us, really open people tend to be much less visible to us than really closed ones. For similar reasons, a trained mathematician is required to notice the difference between a good and a really great mathematician. Without adequate training, we can’t tell the difference—although it is easy to tell if someone is worse at math than ourselves. It’s the same with spiritual Waiting to Love Page 176

development: the heart-closed, cringing, terrified neurotics are easier to spot than those far more open than ourselves, amongst whom it is difficult to differentiate the mildly gifted from those supremely artful at love’s offering. However, we can feel some difference as we resonate with those around us, and we value the effects of openness more than closure. If we spent time hanging around really tense and self-enclosed people—imagine being packed into a small asylum cell with crazy droolers, all fidgety, grinding their jaw, and murmuring to themselves—then we might want to take a shower, have a drink, and shake off the lingering memories as quickly as possible. Spending time stuck in an elevator with the most open, loving, sensual, humorous, insightful and relaxed people you have ever met, might be the best time of your life—if you could relax enough to feel their openness without fearful resistance. You are willing to pay to watch trained dancers or athletes whose bodies are more open than yours, because the artful openness you feel through temporary resonance is worth it. A great performer’s trained body, speech, and mind open you, and that makes for a wonderfully artful experience, consensually acknowledged by an audience willing to pay money for the experience, although each individual has his or her own taste in art—and a certain amount of training is necessary even to be entertained by the more sophisticated styles of dance or sports.

Openness is valued, though few are willing to train enough to sustain great openness— bodily, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. Most people would prefer just to pay and be resonated open by the gifts of somebody else’s training, and then go home, and shrink back to their familiar schlumpy life. Relative to us, there are more closed than open people. To be in the middle is to be, say, halfway up a pyramid—there is more mass below you than above you. Does the greater mass of people seem more open or more closed to you? How many people are you willing to pay to watch dance—or talk or sit or sing—compared to those who you are not willing to pay? Perhaps I’m wrong altogether, but it seems that most people are so closed to the truth of what is, that they don’t even live as if they are going to die. Compared to an emergency situation, most people are rather nonchalant about how they spend their day. Although some people have developed extraordinary art in a specific domain—ballet or basketball, perhaps—few have trained to live an awesomely artful life. Everybody is dying—the whole pyramid of humans can see that. Why don’t we live our brief life as art, so valuable that others consider it a blessing to behold? Why don’t we train so that our life is more capable of resonating others open, rather than spending so much time fidgeting and talking to ourselves, enclosed in our own thoughts and emotions? Waiting to Love Page 178

How deeply do you want to love, what do you want to give, before you die? If you are not living on the basis of this feeling, you are acting ignorant of your impending death. You are acting-out lower on the pyramid than those who are dedicated to living artfully, offering every gesture of love that they can, with the humor of knowing that it all disappears one way or another. Most politics is geared for more ignorant people, encapsulated in their own vicissitudes of body, speech, and mind. The lower on the pyramid, the less lovingly responsible one has the capacity to act, and therefore the more rules and regulations must be imposed for one’s own sake, as well as for the sake of others. Everything from straightjackets and medication to speeding tickets and laws against spousal abuse are for the good of the many whose love-response is limited by their untrained habits and rather ungraceful selfing of body, speech, and mind. People can move up and down the pyramid of openness. Someone’s capacity to feel and act lovingly without self-spasming limitation varies moment by moment and year by year. But, like gauging the heart-touching capacity of an exhibition of nude photography—is it art or pornography?—we can make a majority consensual assessment of where somebody is on the pyramid, in any particular moment, and in the current phase of his or her life, although not everyone would agree with our assessment.

The lower on the pyramid we are, the less lived-art is visible through the cage of our own tension. The higher on the pyramid, the less lived-art there is—the human domain seems like a nightmarish vision of jealousy and aggression—since most human expressions are lower on the pyramid. The horde is twisted by tighter habits of closure compared to our mid-degree of native openness, which in turn would seem nightmarish to someone higher yet. Therefore, we tend to recognize only art lived at our level. Below us, we want to regulate their spastic and tension-driven behavior. Above us, we are suspicious of their motives, and we project our own I-am-real needs—superimposing our fearful requirements for self-protection, self-worth, and self-aggrandizement—onto their more spontaneously born behaviors of love. Bluntly stated, politics is geared for the horde, which believes in a world-out-there and a me-in-here, worthy of acknowledgment, love, and kindness. This belief is akin to thinking that the earth is flat and at the center of the sun’s orbiting. Yes, the earth does look flat, and the sun does seem to be circling around the earth. But people who have dedicated their lives to discovering a deeper truth would know these apparent things just seem that way. A round earth revolving around the sun is a deeper truth than a flat earth at the center of the sun’s orbit—but it takes training to see this for yourself. And even when you do see Waiting to Love Page 180

it, not much difference is made in how you live your life, unless you choose to train your appearing self to create a deeper art or science from your deeper perspective of truth. It took humans millions or hundreds of thousands of years (depending on what you call the first “human”) to realize this deeper truth as a horde. There are probably people on earth today who still believe in a different view, lower on the pyramid, unwilling or unable to train enough to understand that things aren’t as they seem, that the earth isn’t flat and is not at the center of the sun’s orbit. And from above us on the pyramid, there has been reported a view in which there are no solid humans on a concrete earth—at least in the conventional way that such fabricated substantiality is assumed. Your spiritual eyes only have to be opened by one experience—perhaps through drugs, meditation, or direct resonance from someone higher on the pyramid whose art is potent enough to bless you—to realize that everything you perceive is an actively arising vision, vanishing in each instant of appearance, while the openness whose capacity to know and feel remains as the essential constancy of every now—even if right now you are dreaming, or awake, or have just died and don’t know it yet. The now-appearing earth of our awake state is more accurately described as roughly spherical than as flat, but a deeper truth is that the earth—as part of the entire universe of our experience—is appearing. A spontaneous

appearance seeming as the light of openness is the basis for all our philosophizing and complaining, all our working and striving. The mechanics of this appearance can be described by a physics, which is also arising in the mindstream of those appearing along with you. Another world would have its own physics, such as the world of a dream, or more subtle worlds that are coincident with our usual waking world, but of which the larger mass of the pyramid is totally unaware— except during bizarre bleed-throughs of eerie hunches and unexplainable visitations of unearned certainty that engender true faith and devotion in a “higher power.” People are dying on this planet because of political policies that regulate power: This power strongly influences who can eat sufficiently and who can’t. Who gets bombed and who receives funding. And all of it is a vision arising as the living light of consciousness. The painful power struggles and the visionary aliveness are both true, although one truth is shallower and more transient, and one truth is deeper and more timeless—true of all worlds, even hellish and paradisiacal dream worlds, not just the waking state world of our usual human perception. How do we create a political agenda that takes both of these truths, and many more, into account? First of all, in today’s world, so few people view this world as an arising, that taking them into account may not be necessary. Furthermore, these few people are difficult to find because they are often Waiting to Love Page 182

invisibly deeper, unless they choose to speak up. Then, the hordes usually kill them or write them off as crazy—unless the mob is sufficiently entertained, in which case rituals born of openness become recognized as art. But let’s assume that in the future, love’s deeper currents emerge through more people, not just a few artful gifters who feel this world and themselves as the living light of an arising vision. Our earth is an appearance, along with all of its peoples, including you and I. It all disappears in sleep and death. Our lifespan on this earth is infinitesimal compared to the time we are not on this earth alive as the person we are now. And yet love dictates our offering, for as long as we appear. When we aren’t giving our lives for the sake of others, then we suffer and create suffering. This suffering is also as insubstantial as a dream-feeling. Still, we are moved by it in this human domain in which we appear. We are moved by love to minimize suffering and act for the sake of others. When we don’t, we feel ungiven and therefore unfulfilled. However, even when we do act for the sake of others, we still feel unfulfilled. Why? Because a deeper truth is that there are no separate selves, only one appearing vision that includes the appearance of separate selves, all of whom are of the nature of openness, cognizant and alive as love.

Acting for the sake of others while also recognizing there are no others is fairly easy, although it requires training. After all, with some practice in learning how to read and navigate, we don’t have trouble with flat maps, and having trained to walk as infants, we don’t have trouble acting as if the earth’s surface were level, even though it is curved. We still say “sunrise” and “sunset” instead of saying that the earth is spinning in orbit so we are gaining or losing sight of the sun. It is easy to act in accordance with lower truths while still holding the view of a higher, more inclusive truth. We can feed our children, knowing they will die any day. We can work to minimize environmental destruction, feeling the entire world as an arising vision, openness temporarily alight as the world. We can serve others with more humor, knowing it is all a ritual of offering in a world that doesn’t last or even exist, apart from its now-seeming as the radiance of cognizant openness, swirling in patterns set in motion by other patterns of appearance, all spontaneously displaying as love’s light, eventually to disappear. We are limited by the habits of the appearance (because “we” exist as an aspect of the appearance), but that doesn’t mean our presence needs to be limiting. We can offer our love and service to others without limiting our view to that of believing the hordes are “other.” The hordes are us. The mass of humanity as it appears is as much a part of this vision—equally as integral to the whole—as our own lofty position in the middle. The “I” Waiting to Love Page 184

always feels as the center, the middle, even in a dream, and thus lower and higher, left and right—the hordes in all directions—co-arise with each “I”. In any case, there will come a time when you remember nothing at all. With consistent practice as a surrendering-to-love artist in any appearing world, you can recognize that you always are this openness in which nothing is retained and all possibilities arise, right now. Recognizing your natural openness amidst all conditions of life, love relaxes as an ongoing offering. Love’s spontaneity reigns even while the suffering of apparent others moves the apparent you to devote your entire life to serving all to your fullest capacity in every dream and waking moment. Your selfing becomes a ritual offering, a living art, receivable by those willing to open likewise, spit upon or unnoticed by others, unless they find it entertaining enough. Politics helps to reinforce its people’s swirling patterns. The largest human mass is swirling with the belief of a solid world in three-dimensional space populated by separate people that we lose awareness of when we fall asleep and gain awareness of when we awake. This is exactly the opposite to what is obvious from a deeper view—the worlds of waking and dreaming spontaneously ripple as the openness that always is, selves are appearing and disappearing in the true “who” of unconfined cognizant luminosity.

So, what do you say in an appearance where people believe in a solid world that exists out there—or a flat earth around which the sun revolves—when they ask you about anything? One feels surrounded by well-meaning, fidgety dolts, for the most part—and that feeling arises as rippled openness, also. One can laugh. One can put on a straight face and answer as if one were replying to a child’s question of why his or her doll doesn’t like green pea soup. Or, one can engage a ritual of offering, the shape of which is more-or-less artfully enmeshed within the human habits whorling as love’s light, seeming like thought-twitching, lovelorn, politically active, jaw grinders asking questions to a “me” in the middle. Waiting to Love Page 186

18. On Cornflakes and Free Will It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes. —Bernard De Fontenelle We look at our cornflakes in the morning and consider our day. Perhaps we are having breakfast with our lover and children. Had we been born as a fly, with compound eyes and wings, we would not be sitting at the table eating with a spoon. Had we been born malformed, our arms may not function sufficiently to feed ourselves. But here we are, eating, another day of normal human appearance. The streaming of our physical body feels denser, more solid, than the streaming of our emotions or thoughts. Moving our arm to bring the spoon of cornflakes to our mouth feels more concrete than moving our thoughts. Yet, the streaming of our thoughts is more persistent and prior to the streaming of our bodily motions. Okay. Time to get out of bed. Where is that cereal? Pour the milk. Remember to take the turkey out of the freezer to defrost.

Without the movement of our thoughts, our body is less motivated to act, although the opposite is less true—our body can remain motionless without decreasing the actions of our mindstream. Our thoughts and emotions are prior to our body—even our dream-thoughts are prior to our dream-body, perhaps motivating our eating motions in the appearance of a dreambreakfast. Behind our thoughts and emotions are even more subtle—more persistent and motivating—currents, which are prior to the mindstream of which we are aware. We are moved by depths and dimensions of currents far beyond our capacity to perceive, given the limitations of our appearing self. The so-called, “mind-body problem,” or the “hard problem,” philosophically speaking, is how do the mind and body influence each other. The answer lies in the mechanics of their mutual arising, and the physics or laws by which the usually-invisible underlying currents give rise to both biochemical changes in the appearing brain and simultaneous psychological changes in the appearing mindstream. One character in an animated TV show doesn’t influence another character at all; both are arising by the unseen mechanics of the animator and the technology of television. In a dream, the mind and body are being dreamt—they are arising simultaneously, lit up as parts of the inner and outer dreamWaiting to Love Page 188

world—although the dream mind does seem to influence the dream body from within the dream. By normal human habit, we pay greatest attention to the most superficial aspect of our currents of being, getting out of bed, eating cornflakes, and going to work. Meanwhile, a riot of subtle commotion is burbling beneath the surface. These unseen currents are actually causing us to rise from slumber, pour our cereal, and chug through a work day—as well as remember yesterday, understand English, and secretly aspire to whatever private perversions most enthrall us, in our dream or waking worlds. In our waking world, some of these burbling subtleties—currents associated with our basic urge to have sex, build a home, and secure food, for instance—are shared with all primates, even all mammals. Some of our undercurrents were set in motion by the activities of our human ancestors, racially and historically, shaped by the economies of agricultural production in Eastern Europe or the vagaries of Saharan droughts. Our mindstream also flows with eddies that are more personally swirled, as we think about our close friend, dying of cancer, while we chew our mouthful of milk and cornflakes. We are moved in our pattern of eating by mammalian, ancestral, and personal currents of motivation, as well as by subtle currents of which most people remain unaware. We think we have a choice, but our surface-selfing—the appearance of me in a world—is merely expressing these currents. Your

motivation to read these words has been swirled into being by countless effects, including the sensation that you have made a choice to read this, which is included in the swirling. Anything you try to do you are trying to do because these currents are moving as the appearing you-trying-to-do. At breakfast, trying to decide between grape or strawberry jam is the rippling of your mindstream swirling in the shape of that decision. Any change you achieve in your self or world—say, through NLP or Rolfing or surgery or medication or feeding the homeless or building satellites—is simply a result of your mindstream motivating you to enact a behavior. And your mindstream is quite superficial to all the evolutionary, ancestral, and subtle forces that motivate its flow. Limiting your attention to the surface of appearance makes the story of your life stand out from infinity. If you allowed your attention to relax more open, your personal life would be subsumed in the depths of sublimity. Your self’s adventure—seeking love, freedom, and success as a human—would seem like a barely intriguing dream, lingering a bit as it evaporates. Your sense of a self in a world, the cells of your pancreas, the algae that helped create oxygen on this planet’s atmosphere, the extinct predators of proto-primates, the invention of written language to tabulate grain overstock, Waiting to Love Page 190

the ever-evolving archetypes of the collective human psyche-pool, your deepest insights into the nature of God—these are all spontaneous and habitualized swirls of love’s openness, arising as the noticeable aspects of unfathomably complex currents below the surface of appearance. We can relax, because our motivations are going to happen whether we want them to or not. What determines the depth of our life is the depth of our attention, not the motivations that do or do not swirl. These currents are more or less congealed as habits, like the shape of a growing tree, ever changing, but often imperceptibly slowly, appearing dynamically whole as the same tree streaming as a recognizable form. The speed of light seems even more stable, unless we look closely at data coming from trillions of light years away. Then we find the very laws of physics are habits slowly changing through time. As usual, humans find themselves in the middle of the appearing-world’s variance. Neural synapses in our brain are firing in patterns faster than we can notice with our naked eye, the tree is growing slower, and the appearing habit of the waking world we call the “speed of light” is changing even more slowly, so that it seems to be an unchanging “law” compared to our human level streamings, the realm we call, “our life.” For instance, an assemblage of streams, fast and slow, subtle and obvious—including everything from the influence of our sister’s preference for a certain

brand of cereal to the way our Asian, Jewish, or African digestive system has evolved to metabolize milk—adds up to the breakfast part of the story of our life, today. Attending to our life’s story day by day—eating, working, birthing, aging, dying—is only interesting for so long. For most people, we are motivated to attend to this story right up until about the time we die, or when we become so tired at the end of a day that sleep is more interesting than our waking story. Some people become uninterested in the habit-made story of their life before death or sleep occurs. If you are reading these words, you may be a person who has outgrown the swirl of your so-called life. Your life feels empty to you. You are going through the motions, but so what? If the appearing you in your world feels vacant and your life is no longer heart-moved, then it may be time to reverse the direction of attention. Relax your attention from the surface of seeming solidity to the depth of your heart’s motivation. Feel into why you do anything. Feel into the place that makes you want to live at all. If you think you want to die, feel where that motivation is coming from. Feel prior to all motivation, be willing to suffer your heart’s deepest yearning, and relax as openness without resistance to feeling anything. Feel everything as deeply as you are willing to open. Waiting to Love Page 192

With training, and especially with the help of someone who is more stable in feeling deep than you are, your life turns inside out. For example, “you” no longer eat breakfast, but an appearing-self eating cornflakes ripples in and as the openness who you are. Your nature as openness ripples with motivations that appear and disappear, along with appearing selves that seem motivated—just like the cartoon TV selves that have no intrinsic motivation yet are moved by the animator’s hand and the television’s technology underlying the show. Even the mindstream that lights up as your thoughts becomes obvious as a burble riding the same currents giving rise to all other appearances, from a tree to the speed of light. Repeatedly feel and relax open as the space that shows and knows. Then, the virtually infinite influences that result in appearance become obvious. So do the “future” effects that co-arise with the entire appearance, but are yet to be seen by the “you” included within the appearance: perhaps blithely chomping on toast or agonizing as your body rots in disease while your spouse dallies with a potential tryst-partner that he or she happened to meet at a grocery store check-out counter. Within any appearance, it seems like there is a choice; evolutionary and personal habits seem open ended, ever-emergent, and unpredictable, yet containing the potential for both free will and unforeseeable accidents. From outside the appearance—from the “view” of openness itself—any world of

space and time arises already complete, as a whole, spontaneously showing and unfathomably complex, so that no appearing self can have access to the entirety of which it is a part, giving the illusion of evolution, open-endedness, free will, and accidents from within any appearance. At death, or in deep meditation, released of attention’s focal limitations, the entirety appears at once, and you will know it is all as it has to be. Your spouse, the lemurs, the Spaniards conquering the New World natives—all are intermeshed parts of a whole, seeming to unfold in time when the you-focal-point is stuck inside the apparent motion created by conscious light folding back onto itself so there can be a “me” in here and a “world” out there. Relaxed as the openness that holds all wholes, time and space are as if they had never occurred. From this view of openness, all events and every self is appearing spontaneously, pastpresent-future as a whole that doesn’t need time or place to unveil. I can only communicate to you as a local self, so I can’t tell you what is going to happen in the future, nor can I tell myself—I can’t even describe how my appearing-self’s desire to move my fingers results in their motion. However, prior to the localizing of an individual point of view, it is obvious how everything inside and outside, near and far, arises simultaneously upon subtle Waiting to Love Page 194

currents of habit. And relaxing even deeper as openness, everything that can and will happen is happened, already. Again, you will see this at death, or in deep meditation, if only briefly. Eating cornflakes seems to take time to any individual, and the next moment is unpredictable, although habits make certain outcomes highly probable—and the more re-enforced the habit, the more predictable the outcome. Your entire morning can become a fairly predictable routine, as can cycles of war or ice ages, or big bangs. The whole show—including the breakfast journey and the evolutionary formation of the earth’s atmosphere—is spontaneously arising as a whole, and disappearing instantly, for as long as the habit of attention is interested in this show. Arguments about free will and predetermination, debates about the open-ended nature of the evolution of human consciousness versus the kerchunking inevitability of a preexistent ladder of metaphysical realms—these discussions are most entertaining for individuals still quite riveted by attending to the show, in which a physical body and nonphysical mind seem ontologically separate. All such arguments ease open in obviousness as attention relaxes prior to any world and its selves. Ancestral memories, biological urges, personal whim, product availability—attend to your cornflakes for as long as it’s interesting to do so.

Then, surrender. Surrender to be lived by whatever moves you, if anything does. Your fear to find out what happens when you surrender to be moved only by love’s deepest openness is what motivates you to attend to the surface story, which feels empty and hollow of meaning, because it is. Moment by moment, remember as soon as you notice that you have forgotten: open to be lived by whatever is left when you cease chasing or avoiding anything in the appearance. Eat your cornflakes, until that stops. Then, find out what you do from your deepest heart. Dress your children and send them off to school. Then, find out what you do surrendered as a willing devotee of openness. All the while, feel into the deepest openness that your fear allows, even while the surface show continues, It took hundreds of years for humans, who required millions of years to evolve from nonhuman primates, who spent tens of thousands of years to slowly migrate from Africa to the New World, to eventually domesticate tiny corn nubs into today’s larger edible variety. With every morning mouthful while chewing your tasty flakes, you can continue attending to the stream of this human-domain story—at the expense of noticing its unsatisfactory, never-ending, superficial, and love-meager grind—for as long as you are afraid to relax open and feel deeper. Waiting to Love Page 196

Once history has arisen, you can only go with the flow, which includes your choices and all possible emergent properties of the seemingly open-ended stream of appearances. But if you relax attention, right now, before the appearance of history tumbles you in its cycle, you will discover the openness that is. This openness always knows, feels, and appears as whatever seems to be happening. In the case of any individual consenting to relax thusly, love is free to express spontaneously as grace, arising as a force of blessing within every history-bound stream of seemingly open-ended appearance, unnoticed by those who find cornflakes or the body-mind problem more interesting than the source of love’s animating light.

19. Spontaneous Disinterest People like to say, “Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil.” But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful; hell is already contained in the dream of paradise. —Milan Kundera Habits are whorls set in motion, continuing due to their own momentum—you call one collection of these whorls, your “life.” Try talking, but not with your own accent. Try brushing your teeth with the other hand. Try not thinking unless thought is necessary in this very moment. We ingrain habits through repetition—the more years we spend hunching our shoulders the more difficult it becomes to unhunch them; the same goes for toothbrushing, sexuality, and linguistic whorls. Our life is styled by habits that we perform over and over. Habits are developed through training, consciously or unconsciously. We can counteract our habits through replacement. Training in a new style of language—Slovenian, say—eventually results in a new linguistic habit, after Waiting to Love Page 198

long practice. Even so, our old habit—English, perhaps—remains latent, because the old grammatical and semantic whorls are well worn in the whorls of our selfing. Similarly, we may learn new sexual styles, but lingering in the secret closets of our unlived indulgences are the same old desires swirling. Thinking is one such habit we have grown accustomed to. Assuming that you are a solid self, moving around in a world that occupies space—this is a style of thinking. From this basic flow-style of our mindstream, we develop other whorling momentums of selfing, building comfortable houses to protect our possessions and tensions to protect our heart. All styles of selfing are styles of sustenance and protection. We may scheme to win lotteries, develop careers, or try to predict our spouse’s next emotional up or down—all for the sake of securing the ongoing habit of our selfing, which we ingrained through years of reward and punishment since our helpless infancy. We have been coddled for pleasing our parents and pained by poor business investments. Should I invest in mutual funds now, or are bonds a better choice? I think the kitchen would look much better if the cabinets were stained a darker shade. I really should get around to repairing the roof; if it starts leaking, some serious damage could be done. Well, there’s a parking place. I hope my first appointment is late and I can take the time for some coffee and a muffin.

The habit of our thought stream is no different from the habitual beating of our heart. One occurs in the domain of mind, the other in the domain of body. Both heart beating and thinking are ongoing streaming habits, without which we would die. Unless our mindstream indicated where to find food and how to put it in our mouth, we would stop feeding our self. Since most people are rather self-centered, even pre-nuptial agreements and written business contracts are useful for retaining a sense of future security, and so our mindstream motivates us to write up such agreements. Habits aren’t bad, they are just habits. One habit begets many more. Motion continues in motion, generating offshoot currents: the ancient habit of sex inherited from millions of years of evolution, generates nursing babies, paying mortgages, picking up milk and bread, fixing the broken car, washing clothes, and so forth. We all intuit there is more to life. But if we look at how our life is actually spent, moment by moment, we will most often find our mindstream strategizing for comfort and security with regard to food, money, sex, family, and a sense of self-worth and protection. We put a fence around our pool so the kids don’t accidentally fall in, and we Waiting to Love Page 200

make sure the water is chlorinated so swimming is safe. We take vitamins and exercise with the hope that our body will remain strong and healthy long enough to carry on with our habits into old age. We sense our self-importance through doing our good works socially, feeling we really are making a difference. We arrange regular meetings to reenforce our relationships with family and friends—most of whom we secretly cling to for security of one form or another. For decades, we spend countless hours shuffling people at home and papers at work, taking care of our garden’s spring blooms, playing with our children before they grow up, leave, and die. We forget our mortal suffering by absorbing our attention—the focal point of infinite consciousness—in TV, movies, ice cream, conversation, sports, daydreaming, reading a magazine in the waiting room or on the toilet. I hope nobody walks in while I’m masturbating. Now, where is that chocolate I hid deep in my purse? Ah, just another hour before the kids are in bed, and I can have a nice, cold beer. Without recognizing the unconfined openness that knows and feels, we are only habits perpetuating themselves. Without suitable distraction—a fine dinner, a stiff drink, a sensual dance—we suffer a droning momentum of habitual selfing. All of our actions—the doings

of virtually our entire human culture—are an effort to fabricate tolerable habits to sustain a self in a world that everyone could enjoy between infancy’s waddle and our last breath. Cognac, roses, and oral sex may distract us for a few hours, but soon we are reabsorbed in the love-thin, shallow whorl of doings—changing the sheets on our bed or sending food in airplanes to help feed the poor of the world—decade after decade, except when we are asleep, refreshed in the depths where no fear makes doing necessary. Long ago, in what is now South and Central America, Spaniards invaded and conquered civilizations that had existed for thousands of years. The Native Americans there had never seen horses before, had never felt metal as hard or sharp as steel. Imagine giant beasts galloping around you as dust swirled with the cries of men, women, and children dying in agony. Thousands of years of habits were abruptly replaced. Imagine turning your head and looking to your right as swords slice the necks of your loved ones, your daughter is beaten and sexually tortured, and your husband’s head is held high on the staff of a marauder whose language you can’t understand. Your divinely ordained emperor is unable to stop the slaughter. Your skin is stained with blood as you run for your own life, knowing your family and friends are gone, clubbed over and over in paroxysms of anguish or stabbed to death, their limp bodies trampled by Waiting to Love Page 202

horses ridden by men who would kill for gold while destroying everything you know, forever. If you live in the Americas today, then the descendents of those horses helped build the world you now inhabit and work so hard to maintain, and hopefully enjoy. Your spoons and forks—whether they were thoughtful wedding gifts or hastily purchased at a neighborhood discount store—are probably built by means of the metallurgical knowhow first brought by the steel-wielding Spaniards to the New World, as are the engines of the airplanes that carry your donations to the poor. Your capacity to read these words was handed to you from a lineage of murderous, disease-carrying invaders—languages originating in the Americas have all but vanished, along with most truly native peoples. Your whorling self, your leisurely masturbation, your generous donations, and the airconditioned car you drive with a CD playing tunes derived from African rhythms transmitted from slave hymns to blues, jazz, and rock and roll, have been paid for in centuries of blood. Every romantic moment you enjoy, every Christmas gift that lights up your child’s eyes, is appearing in the stream of a crimson river created by people just like you and I, whorling in the habit of securing self and world amidst an equally motivated opposition. Earthworms have their own life story; ours is uniquely human. It is formed by paying human-style attention to the whorling patterns—washing clothes and

feeding the poor—while not relaxing open as the love that shine’s as every whorl’s form, be it a sword, rose, or our lover’s nipple. Horses and steel aren’t the problem; our attention is already flowing in streams habitualized by past victories and losses, our best intentions inhabited by horrors now unseen. Every life story is self-creating, self-serving, and self-perpetuating. An innocent infant sucking milk from a mother’s breast, courageous Spaniards crushing heathens beneath the hooves of charging beasts for the sake of God’s dominion and gold’s power to secure their family’s future—self-perpetuating selfing is the justification of its own momentum. All aspects of us—our heartbeat, our language, the way we have sex, our persistent hopes and fears for our family’s future—are streaming aspects of human-habit whorling. As appearing selfings, this is all we are, a swirling of habits enmeshed in history, being made visible right now by your attention, which re-enforces and adds a thicker sense of a potentially threatened solid self to the swirl, which you will pass on to future generations. There is no way out of this situation. This is the human domain. Earthworms will never tap dance, as long as they remain earthworms. And humans will never stop seeking comfort and security in opposition to those who are doing the same, as long as they remain humans. A rapist (seeking a sense of self-power, just like an Olympic athlete fighting the competition to be worthy of a gold medal) mounts your lover; a madman (seeking to earn money through Waiting to Love Page 204

ransom, just like someone leveraging a business deal) holds a knife to your child’s throat, an oncoming truck (driven by a birthday boy, celebrating life, who has had one too many drinks) sways into your lane at high speed; you are not an earthworm—you will react in opposition to these threats as humans do. You will perpetuate self-empowerment, dealmaking, and life’s celebration by adding your momentum to the human-style swirl. Although there is no way out of the habits that compose our selfing, we can relax open beyond these habits. At depth, we are the openness that knows and feels, regardless of the habits that swirl, earthworm, human, or otherwise. We can do nothing without trying to do nothing, simply by recognizing the openness that is the nature of every possible whorl, alive as the appearance of love’s light: masturbating, arguing, changing your baby’s diaper, using a computer built by people who earn less money in a year than you do in a week. These are the whorls of human life. You can try to change them, but their momentum is strong. You will surely spend a lifetime to see the slightest shift toward less suffering for all humanity—and that shift could be destroyed by a single terrorist act or by inevitable global warming. Selfing can win temporarily, but the crimson river flows too deep for a few millennia of human goodness to make much difference, although it is still

worth trying. In fact, it is the only way to live: for the sake of others. Just don’t expect it to reduce the sense of failure or lack of love you feel in your life. As long as your attention is absorbed in your selfing and its ripples of effect, you are missing the deep openness, showing spontaneously as the whole whorling picture. If you feel the whole picture of how sausage is made—from pasture, to processed organs and intestines, to plate—it’s likely you’ll lose some interest in eating it, and thus your attention can more easefully relax open because it is less absorbed in sausage. The severed heads of those whose land you are now living upon are inexorably churned within your enjoyment of popcorn while sitting on your sofa surrounded by those you love. By feeling every aspect of the whole, your attention is loosened through spontaneous disinterest: tasty popcorn, slaughtered Native American families, your children’s toys made in the same Japan whose children your elected government chose to annihilate with nuclear weapons. Ignoring the whole, things may feel pretty good right now, cozy, homey, a comfortable moment of simple delight. The whole whorling human domain of habit is arising and disappearing spontaneously, along with your attention, this very moment. Feel everything right now. At least practice to feel as much as you can. Your attention can barely track the whorl of your spouse’s words, the position of your left ankle, Waiting to Love Page 206

the TV newsman’s commentary, and the pace of your breathing, at the same time. You are being bombarded by neutrinos, electromagnetic radiation, gamma rays, all invisible and unnoticed. You can only attend to so much, which is so little. But whatever small collection of whorling appearances you are able to attend to, that is the circumstance of your training. Earthworms have their circumstance, we have ours. The limitation of our attention—being absorbed in our human-style whorling of appearances—helps us feel comfortable by narrowing our domain of responsibility. However deeply and widely your attention can reach, train to feel the whole—death and life enfolded in the blood-red, love-white baklava of this moment’s whorling. By feeling the whole, the agony and the ecstasy simultaneously, your attention is loosened from excessive indulgence. As it relaxes, allow your attention to open onto its source, the openness that knows and shows as all. If you are like most people, your capacity to sustain this relaxed openness is limited by how quickly your attention gets swirled back into the human habits of selfing. You may have a moment of silence, before your thoughts begin streaming again: you want more sausage, the garbage needs to be taken out, your lover doesn’t appreciate you.

You can try to pull away from the whorling—effortfully sustaining a kind of unaffected witness—but this, too, is your selfing, re-enforcing its security and comfort. If your incessant mindstream seeks or opposes any appearing whorl, or if you effortfully pull away as an untouched witness, you are re-enforcing your habit of selfing, which gives reason to other selfings to shore up their security in response to you. To undo the suffering that your selfing causes, relax open in the middle, without needing to attend to anything, without needing to be free of anything, but opening as everything. Sway to one side, and you are swirled into history’s momentum of personal selfing, chock full of your significant yet unfulfilling story, enmeshed in the opposing flows of human history’s river. Sway to the other side, and you are selfishly securing a personal silence, a private no-flow in which to hide in peace, clear water afraid of the river’s whole. The momentum of attending to the crimson river styled by human concern instantly vanishes when your interest weakens enough for your selfing to relax as openness. You, as openness, are free, although the show must go on, paid for by the blood and love of those whose attention got whorled into the flow of their inherited mindstream. Waiting to Love Page 208

We can choose to perpetuate or to evaporate our human-style inheritance of attention’s focus, right now, even as our appearing-self slides between soft bed sheets made of toil that we can barely imagine.

20. The Glass of Suffering Even the voice of conscience undergoes mutation. —Stanislaus Lee Some people are your friends because you choose them, and you can’t get rid of others. It’s the same with lovers: throughout decades, you may truly love a number of sexual partners, but not all of them are yours for life, no matter what. And the one you spend most of your life with, you may not even want. I can’t stand him. Why do I put up with him? I must be weak. I’ll give it a few more months, and then I’ll have to put my foot down and say it’s over. I know I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work—I couldn’t leave him. But this time I really mean it. You probably have experienced something like this—losing, gaining, or keeping friends and lovers, even though you don’t really want to. Or, you may have had a premonition, intuiting a sense of inevitability about a certain relationship beginning or breaking up. You just know that a relationship “isn’t going to last.” Or you can feel, “Even though we have divorced, we will never be unmarried. Nothing can pull our hearts apart.” Waiting to Love Page 210

From our individual view, we may suffer unwanted separations and seemingly inevitable unions. But what we usually see are only the surface waves; the currents underneath are what connect the waves and make their shape through time. By relaxing our attention open, we can begin to feel this underlying and usually invisible webwork of connection, rather than just its expression as individuals moving closer together and further apart, apparently separate waves on the surface changing through time. If you have never relaxed your attention wider than the usual sight of people moving near and far, then the notion of an underlying structure of currents that determines each person’s life sounds like a metaphysical theory, or perhaps a mystical belief. But enough people have opened to view the deeper whole so that this perspective can be confirmed among those who have trained sufficiently to read the obvious currents of formation, prior to what we usually see. Air is usually invisible, but we can see leaves blowing in the swirls of unseen wind. If we could dye the wind, so we could actually view the currents of air as colored swirls, we could then see the obvious pattern of flow underlying the movement of the wafting leaves. We might see a large gust of dyed air approaching the leaves, and thus predict their sudden dispersal, although to someone who couldn’t see the dyed air, our prediction would seem like a lucky guess.

By relaxing as openness, you can begin to feel that the appearance-realm in and around you is actually a world made of swirling, luminous consciousness, arising as a whole, including all selves, thoughts, emotions, objects, and the space between. With practice, you can feel the pattern of the swirling currents moving you and others like leaves in the wind. The bottom line is that you are stuck with some people for life, and others are bound to drift away from you no matter how hard you try to keep them. This goes for your friends, lovers, children, acquaintances—everyone that comes “close” enough for you to experience in your life. What am I going to say to her when I see her? Why is the traffic so slow? C’mon already, move it! If I’m late I just know she’ll think I don’t love her enough to be on time. God, how I hate those conversations. I remember my ex-wife was never like that. She was always late like me. But she had her own problems. Overall, I think this is a better….man! I just about hit that car pulling in front of me. I better pay more attention to driving. Many spiritual teachers and teachings emphasize being here now: remaining in the present, rather than drifting into memories of the past or imaginings of the future. The titles of several best-selling spiritual books concern the power of being right here right now. Waiting to Love Page 212

Why is being now so important? Because the power of now is otherwise spent attempting to change what is already patterned, if now is seen from a deeper perspective. You are going to marry who you are going to marry. You will remain with certain friends for life, whereas you will drift apart from others. You can think about your relationships—hoping, dreaming, and scheming—and you are like a fly trying to get through a windowpane. Just like we can’t see the gusts of wind but only the leaves that are moved, a fly can’t see the clear glass that stands between where the fly is and where it wants to go, so it keeps flying headlong into the invisible barrier. The fly doesn’t understand why its attempts fail. It can’t see the glass, and it can’t see the opening in the window a few feet away from where the fly is trying to enter. You are doing and feeling the same anytime you are not open as now—attempting again and again to move in a direction not available to your appearing self, although the barriers—the underlying currents that are already moving as you—remain invisible. You feel up against a limit that you cannot perceive, while failing to relax your view open enough to make obvious the whole interflowing of currents, including all the possibilities that evade your current appearance. If you are not relaxing completely open as now, and you are seeking any change in your currently appearing relationships or your professional life, then

you are like the fly, smashing your head again and again against an invisible wall. The feeling is simply, “I’m really trying, but the relationship (or job) just doesn’t seem to be working out.” Of course, sometimes the fly and you do manage to stumble upon the opening in the window, and things do go the way you want them to. But mostly, you are dissatisfied with your efforts and outcomes. Believing these words, you may decide to just surrender and go with the flow, which is not the same as opening now. The currents that constitute the underlying pattern that seems to be happening as your life are deep and multidimensional. “The flow” that you might choose to “surrender” to may be only a very superficial flow, like the flow of your thoughts. But there are much deeper currents that would move your life if you would let them. These deeper currents include the more shallow flow of your ongoing stream of decisions. Therefore, if you try to not make choices in order to “be now,” then you are again like a fly trying to do the impossible, and you will fail. If choices are part of your mindstream, then choices are going to occur. “I’ve chosen to write a book.” “I’ve decided to leave you, even though I love you.” The choices you appear to “make” are determined by deeper currents, all of which seem to be evolving due to uncountable influences, and all of which are already done from a deeper perspective outside of the “time” of any particular depth of current. Waiting to Love Page 214

The fly is less evolved than you, and so it might require hours for it to finally discover and fly through the opening in the window that you could see immediately. You might watch the fly with sympathy, feeling its futility, as it flies into the windowpane over and over, until it finally moves far enough to the side that it can fly in through the opening. If you wanted to, you could compassionately cup the fly in your hand and help it move over to the window’s opening. You could save the fly hours of failure because your greater expanse of vision allows you to see, right now, what the fly can’t; it must discover the window’s opening, often accidentally, in time. A fly philosopher might write about the evolution of fly knowledge; how lifetime after lifetime was spent by intrepid flies, most of whom died on the windowsill after unsuccessful attempts to find the opening. However, through the sacrifice of many great flies through time, the knowledge of flykind has evolved; the latest generation of fly philosophers and scientists can now admit the existence of an opening through which flies can escape the boundary of the invisible window, measurable only by each fly’s suffering and failure to penetrate it, but never able to be seen directly. As humans, our essential suffering is virtually the same. I’m not talking about the suffering we experience when we stub our toe, which is natural and inevitable because we are sensitive beings. Most of our suffering is the effect of trying to do something that can’t be done, although we will never be able to

directly see the boundaries that guide what is and isn’t possible, which marriage will last and which won’t, which friend will betray us and which will be holding our hand in old age. With persistently relaxed training, we can deepen our capacity to encompass a greater view. Or, we can skip the training that would reveal why things are the way they are, and simply do our best to “be here now.” If we are successful at fully feeling now—fully feeling our pain, the rain, the hate of our enemies—without pulling away into past or future thought, we will be riding the currents that appear as the visible now of our life. The past, future and even the present—time itself—is a windowpane in the appearing human domain. Apart from accidental breakthroughs, we feel bound by something we can’t see. The feminine feels time as a potential for more love and the masculine feels time as a potential for more freedom and success. And so we bump our heads against time, over and over. If only I write one more chapter, then… If my husband will just learn to communicate a little more, then… If my child stops using drugs and gets serious about school, then… “Then” never comes without being replaced by waiting for another “then.” That is, the invisible windowpane that limits our getting what we want is waiting. Waiting to Love Page 216

Stop waiting, and feel what is now so deeply that no end is felt, and you will feel as the luminous consciousness that is. This is the “sudden” way to train. It is sufficient to realize the depth of openness that knows and shows as the deepest, most true you. Practice feeling as openness, resisting nothing, feeling all now, without getting lost in the past or future or even holding to or avoiding the present. Simply be. But this sudden, instantaneous recognition is not sufficient to develop the art of surfing the currents at various levels of appearance. The sudden way to train is complemented by the “gradual” way of learning, through apparent time within any appearing world, how to live as love’s most full expression. How can you play guitar as love’s expression? How can you parent a child as love’s deepest offering? The sudden realization of the deepest truth does not confer upon one the ability to paint colors like Vincent van Gogh, perform open-heart surgery, or read Chinese. If the deep currents move the appearing you to express love through the currently appearing form of the world, then persistent, love-imbued practice through that world’s time is required—gradual training. Sudden and gradual training are two aspects of one recognition: All is conscious luminosity, and you can relax wide open as love’s light feeling all, right now, suddenly, without waiting another moment. And if you are moved to

develop artfulness of expression, then you must train in time, you must participate in evolution, even though sudden realization vanishes the very time in which you appear to be training. Most great musical composers, if you ask them, will tell you that they hear the music they are composing. It is already obvious, like dyed choruses of wind made visible, like noticing the window is already opened. A truly great composer has the capacity to notice the music that is already here, invisible to you, but visible to them—they are simply transcribing it. But to do so takes time, and often corrections and an evolution of style. The music already is, and a great composer has sudden access to it. Such composers are openings through which music spontaneously flows, obvious and already whole. Yet, these composers often spend days or years tweaking notes here and there, experimenting with harmonies and arrangements. This gradual development of their capacity to create art is equally important in determining how effective their final product will be in evoking similar openings in their audience. Consider sex. You can open to now with or without sexual play. However, if you are moved sexually, why not train as a sexual artist through gradual practice? In the midst of sudden awakening, you can practice, like a true maestro, to evoke divine opening with your partner sexually, even when you both feel Waiting to Love Page 218

stuck behind glass: you can practice to find the openings in the windowpane, so to speak. You can practice feeling and more gracefully surfing the underlying currents of love’s flow together. Gradual training allows you to more fully articulate the underlying patterns that emerge as now’s sudden appearance as consciousness alight. You don’t have to stay stuck at the glass or blown by the winds of prevailing habit. You can learn loves curvature, and how to navigate open to be moved by deeper currents of love. Sexually, you can practice allowing subtle energetic currents that are more open as love’s light to shine in the move of your rhythm, like a master of jazz improvisation who is so relaxed and highly trained that his or her art reveals the “Oh yes!” of just so—rather than the usual clumsy thrust and squeal of untrained animal habits, whether in sex or on sax. Relaxing as now suddenly allows your sexing to be more transparent to love’s emergence, while training through time develops skill, so you can masterfully navigate what would otherwise be windowpane-like barriers of sore vaginas, premature ejaculation, crying babies, and a personal history that may contain trauma and abuse. Ever deeper currents of archetypal form—flowings that are more transparent to the unpatterned openness that is the substance of all showing—can be allowed to emerge, with proper training, in the art of sexual union.

The sudden awakening to the always-now openness of being is not sufficient to cultivate these more sublime arts of lovemaking—although this sudden awakening may make the need for such cultivation obsolete. You may no longer be moved to make love sexually—that depends on the mechanics of the spontaneously appearing currents, whorling as your appearing self and world. In the midst of sudden awakening, these currents may cease to urge you sexually. Or, you may be naturally moved to make love more deeply, more skillfully and artfully. If you aren’t moved, then don’t move; now is sufficient. If you are moved, then gradually develop the skills commensurate with the particular currents that swirl as your appearing self and world of others. If you are moved to pick up a guitar at all, why not train to make heart-opening, divinely emerging music, instead of irritating noise? And in the meantime, don’t forget that both music and noise are the same conscious luminosity that is always now. Again, gradual training is based on the always-present relaxation as sudden, timeless, being now. Without the sudden now-hearing of the piece-as-a-whole, the composer would be a mere craftsman molding music with time-developed skill, rather than allowing his or her self to be an opening through which deeper, unseen currents can be allowed to spontaneously manifest as love’s blessing. But without gradual training, one would remain an arbitrarily Waiting to Love Page 220

skilled composer (or dancer or race-car driver) even if you opened as now, always. Even open as now, there is nothing wrong with wanting a better intimate relationship, a more refined art, or a more successful career. It is for you to decide whether merely crafting your life in the realm of appearances—and thus butting your head against the invisible pane of time—is adequate for your sense of fulfillment. Most people settle for this, and suffer throughout their life, until they die, and then the entire windowpane is seen at once, if only briefly, and life’s adventure is seen as a tragic joke of release just as you forget that it ever seemed to happen. Another option is to train in sudden recognition—without waiting for anything or anyone—by feeling to the depths of appearance right now. Open with no protection, feeling everything and everyone without pulling back. Feel your own thoughts and emotions without drifting into mind’s past or future imaginings, and without holding onto or avoiding what you are feeling now. Feel what is, as it is, wide open, right now. And also spend the time to cultivate the art of allowing love to express itself through your appearing form in ever-more effective ways: playing music, raising children, breathing, speaking, creating public policy, crafting architectural designs—whatever you, as an appearing self, are moved to do.

But only do what you are moved to do by the deepest currents of your heart. This capacity—to surrender to be lived by love’s deepest impulse—can also be cultivated through apparent time. Altogether then: Suddenly open to now, gradually develop your capacity to offer love’s gift, and always relax without assuming an endpoint, so evolution can live its potential through your ever-expanding capacity to allow love’s craft to bless every world in which time appears. No matter how open you are or how deep your realization is, you are still like a fly bumping its head on the invisible glass if you have bothered to read this, and are still waiting to love. Waiting to Love Page 222

About the Author David Deida is renowned internationally for his work in developing radical, practical and transformative spiritual practices for women and men. He is the best-selling author of Intimate Communion, Finding God Through Sex, It’s a Guy Thing, The Way of the Superior Man, The Way of the Superior Lover and Blue Truth. David teaches all over the world and his program includes professional trainings, residential intensives and public workshops.