Search for Perfection

All paths eventually

lead to the same place

assuming that when we’ve arrived

we decide to leave the path!

If we don’t leave the path, we can never arrive because we’re always walking and walking and walking. Some paths are very, very long and we get sore feet. We walk and we walk and we walk.

Also we can get tricked along the way. We say to ourselves that there is always somebody else who is so much farther ahead on this path than we are. And then we follow the one we think is ahead of us.

We follow a path or we follow a book or we follow a teacher or we follow an idea. We follow it and follow it and follow it. If nobody tells us that there comes a time when we’ve got to get off the path, then we’re never going to get off.

When we go to places where they have so-called holy teachers, nobody talks. Nobody says anything. We don’t get into big conversations with these teachers because the stage is set that they are some kind of superior beings. It is set up so we feel that they have characteristics we don’t have because we are inferior. No matter what we do, we will never be like them.

But here in satsang with what I am saying, we have anarchy! Everybody’s got an opinion about everything. Everybody has a different idea about how things should be. And how things should be isfreeand without set patterns or definitions.

That’s why some people who come to our satsang don’t like it here. This is not the correct place for them because this is not a place of definitions. In fact, I try to take away all the ideas people have about how things should be. The more precious the idea, the closer it is to their hearts and the harder it is to give up. But I try to take it anyway so that people can have a taste of freedom.

If people want to keep their definitions and their “shoulds,” they can keep them. But these things become a very, very fine chain around the neck which is choking them because they don’t want to let go of it. Sometimes it’s so fine they don’t see it.

We can’t be making this chain thinner and thinner. We have to cut it. We make things thinner and thinner, but they are still always there. And there is no end to it. So the only way to do away with the chain is to cut the chain.

It’s the same thing when we are told by teachers and well meaning people to “clean our mirror”to clean up who we are. They want us to clean our mirror and not to leave any specks on the mirror. They give us all kinds of exercises for cleaning our mirror. Basically they need the exercises to clean their mirrors. They make us clean our mirrors while their own mirrors need cleaning!

But again how clean can we make a mirror? We have to get finer and finer clothscloth with fewer and fewer threads, cloth that leaves less and less lint. We have to keep using purer and purer cleaning compounds. And there is still always going to be some speck there. So this is the same as the search for perfection.

Perfection is impossible.

We are human beings.

But if we do want to get very clean and light,

we drop the idea of a mirror

we break the mirror so that

we have no concepts about how we should be.

And that is freedom.

REST IN IT

What does it mean to rest in the Mystery?

To stop struggling with it.

To not worry about definitions

even though I play in definitions.

To trust that what I’m resting in exists

and to stop trying to prove that it does.

To accept that it is there

naturally there, intrinsically there.

I don’t have to earn its being there for me.

It simply is thereperiod.

To rest in it means

I can take a deep breath and relax.

The “something more”

I’ve been trying to find

simply is

and it is there, in me.

I belong.

I am home.

Shivakti

WHO IS THE BELOVED

Within myself I asked, who is the Beloved?

There came this knowing reply:

How many days over the eons

have you asked that question!

If you multiplied those days

a million times a million,

there would not be enough time

to say all the words describing

the Beloved.

Better for you to tell me

who you think the Beloved is not

and there we shall see

your own

divine

limitation.

Thank you for asking.

I love you.

Shivakti