THE INVITATION OF OPENNESS
“I invite you to reject nothing, welcome everything, and surrender into the deepest falling of the open heart.”
Falling into openness—a dissolution of the psychological knot of ego—is the doorway to freedom.
While the invitation of openness is a timeless one—it is the essential pointer to freedom that cuts through all cultures, all ages, and all traditions—it is also a very timely one.
As collective consciousness exhibits an increasing polarization leading to increased fear of those with a different worldview, it also mirrors the underlying grip of egoic consciousness that fears its own demise. Nations go to war with each other; the ego goes to war with the present moment.
The resolution to both the inner tension of ego-self and the outer tension of the world is the willingness to surrender the argument with what is: to meet reality without resistance. This willingness to surrender is a falling—moment to moment—into silent awareness. And it is up to each one of us to take responsibility for this.
Silent awareness is an undivided state in which the dream of separation comes to an end. It is a falling open into our essential nature—a falling into the infinite silence of consciousness that is here prior to the birth of any inner or outer worlds. It is only when we act from this inner silence that there can be right action in the world.
But first we must be willing to lose our world.
The world—inner and outer—is always falling apart. When we get right up close and intimate with our experience, we see that every thought is like a drop of rain falling into the ocean, every feeling is like a brush-stroke that fades in the sunlight, every breath is a fleeting whisper.
Just like a flower bursting into the glory of a temporary bloom, so our individual lives are a temporal blossoming. Perhaps humanity in its current manifestation is also one flower amongst many, destined to be a blip in cosmic time, blossoming and then dying to make way for the next flower.
Without grasping for certainty or meaning or hope, we can meet life without trying to save it and come to rest in something much deeper than the vicissitudes of the world.
It is only when we meet life from the unknown—and that is what silence really is, an open-ended unknownness—that we can really listen to what is true.
And only the truth will set us free.
(From the book ‘Falling Open in a World Falling Apart.’ )
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