The open secret
The Open Secret makes no compromises with the needs and expectations of the seeker. Nor does it attempt to attract or please with promises of an easy and pleasant experience of liberation. Who could promise that and who would experience it?
Because the idea of individual free will and choice is seen as an illusory dream, there is no agenda or intention to help or change individuality. As far as the apparent individual is concerned, there is nothing for sale here. The feeling of being a separate individual feels very real and affects every part of that apparent experience. It is a state of contracted energy that becomes embodied and brings with it a sense of restlessness and longing.
The ‘I’ seeks peace and fulfillment, the ‘I’ seeks self-improvement or purity, presence or detachment. The ‘I’ seeks clarity or a formula that gives the ‘I’ what it thinks it wants or needs. But the ‘I’ not getting what it wants is not the dilemma. The dilemma is ‘me’. No amount of effort, process, clarity or belief can ever produce anything other than more ‘I’, seeking that which the ‘I’ cannot have or know. The suggestion that separation is merely a thought or concept that comes or goes in the presence is initially an attractive idea to the seeker who dreams of an easy answer that is not personally challenging and will bring lasting happiness.
Thoughts of separation are merely individual stories of an already held state of limited and separate feeling. If separation were just a thought or a belief, it could be seen through or turned into its opposite, and then there would be “BINGO” liberation. . . you would think! Such idealistic communication often goes hand in hand with a relentless repetition of the idea that separation is ‘fine’ because there is always only unity. This is like telling a blind person that blindness is “fine” because only seeing exists. Of course there is only unity. But what apparently arises in unity is a deep sense of separation, which does not feel “nice”. These conceptualizations speak only of symptoms and do not recognize the source of the apparent dilemma that can fill every part of the feeling of separation.
I then returned as ‘someone’ and tried again and again to rediscover that unconditional love that I could not know. It is that love that is alluded to in literature, music and art. The most fascinating love stories are about unrequited love, because they point to that absolute love that the individual cannot possess. The powerful fascination of falling in love comes from the primal feeling that you could be lost in that love. It is that overwhelming love that is in all our desire and that is the fullness in the emptiness, the all in the nothing. It is unconditional love that also appears as its opposite. Miraculously, it is also that same love that continually sings to us through our senses and in every part of the aliveness that takes place.
Liberation is a word used to describe an apparent liberation from the illusion of feeling trapped and separated from love or wholeness. That shift is essentially an energetic release from the contraction into limitlessness. Wherever and whenever there is a deep and uncompromising sharing of the very real paradox of being, a tangible resonance can arise. From that openness there can be a liberation from that contraction towards limitlessness, and what arises is the miracle of simply being.