When we allow the fear of the ego mind or false identity to live in us, it creates the illusion of aloneness, the very opposite of what we most want.
Love of Existence is All Around Us
When we have the courage to open to the expanded reality that supports our existence, we are visible and connected with everything. We are seen and loved by Existence itself. Everything about us is instantly transparent and visible to the immense consciousness of Existence. Of course this is true whether we open to it or acknowledge it.
However, the ego or false identity is exceedingly uncomfortable with this level of transparency and intimacy. Its own self attack believes in an unworthiness that is intolerant of being seen. It believes its own self judgment, a self-judgment that it is also highly defended against at the same time. The ego mind or false identity is enmeshed in the constant duality of good and bad, or self-assertion and self-attack. It is always shifting between the inner rebel and the inner judge.
In its fearful defensive stance it has walled itself off from the fundamental primordial love that the Existence has for us all. That love, the very basis of all Existence is patiently waiting for us to truly receive it. It is waiting for us to recognize our true selves, our essential being, our place in this family of living, loving Existence.
Our soul, our true Self is ever hungry for that experience of love, that spaciousness, blissful peace and freedom from the noise-filled trap of the repetitive thinking ego-mind.
It is an irony that the fear of our false identity keeps us from the very thing that we most want. It keeps us from receiving the love of all of existence. To receive that love we need to allow ourselves to be received, to be fully received as who we truly are as our Soul. As long as we go along with the pretense of being this illusory self of the small ego, we keep up a wall of defense against a very love that we are so want.
We just need to let in the beauty that is all around us.
During yesterday’s, Come and Receive Day, after lunch we were sitting on the deck. As the teaching began I felt all of us open to our Soul, that silent expanded state of connection with everything. Suddenly to the surprise of some of us, a bird flew right through us very close within a few inches of the heads of a several of us.
It felt completely natural and was a bit surprising. Surprising because it’s so rare for a bird to feel safe enough to come so very close to a human being. I’m sure that bird lives in the spacious, wordless, alert consciousness of the Existence. In that moment, it felt safe because it didn’t detect the noise of our illusory minds, which to the bird’s alert consciousness is like a siren alarm warning it of toxic mental energy to avoid.
In the silent presence in which we were enmeshed in that moment, the bird felt a natural safety coming so close to us. This is physical demonstration of how when we drop our mental chatter, drop our judgmental duality, when we drop our fear – a deep connection is instantly available.
Coming from the presence of inner silence doesn’t mean that we have to be physically quiet. In fact, I was speaking at the time it happened and I was one to who that the bird came closest too, but what I was saying was coming from my Soul, not my ego mind. That bird came so close because it sensed inside of us a deep primordial stillness, vibrant with life, that the bird recognized as the vibration of love. What else would explain its behavior in that moment?
In fact it was a kind of culmination to what I had noticed throughout the day that there were an unusual number of birds singing, flying about, actively engaged, all around us as the teaching was happening.