Sunday, May 11, 2008

Daily Dharma: Maximum Openness


Saturday's Daily Dharma from Tricycle.

Maximum Openness

The only way to achieve maximum openness is to arrive at every moment without a single preconception. Otherwise, we resist what doesn't fit our model. Regardless of how much we know, or how evolved we've become, we must put every bit of that aside. We must step into the mystery naked and undefended.When we truly hate what's happening, our instinct is to flee from it like a house on fire. But if we can learn to turn around and enter that fire, to let it burn all our resistance away, then we find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of power and freedom. Sometimes, without any answers to hold onto, it seems like we're nothing at all. Other times, overwhelmed by life's roaring torrent, it seems like we're everything at once. These two impressions are actually flipsides of the same coin. They're a taste of what happens when the barriers of our personality become porous. We encounter life directly, without anything to mediate its intensity. We see clearly, in those moments, how the self we carry with us is no more or less than a tool of our organism, a system that allows us to function, but that also, miraculously, we have the ability to step right through.

--Raphael Cushnir, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran


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