We are, as always, positioned to be Awakened by all things. The degree to which we recognize this is the degree to which we recognize that everything must be thus viewed and used. Everything, everyone, everywhere, everywhen. Otherwise, our relationship to -- and appreciation of -- Life remains partial, superficial, anemic, insufficiently intimate.

To be Awakened by all things is to be intimate with all things, including our resistance to such radical intimacy.

The key is in our hands but out of our grasp.

Our habits infiltrate, occupy, and surround us like monstrous children, overfed appetites and spoilt automaticities squatting upon the throne of self. But they’re just kids. Your kids, my kids, our kids. We let them keep us busy keeping up appearances.

Everything is all we’ve got, so we might as well stop expecting something else to do it for us. We need to stop making ourselves the pawn of salvation games. What’s needed is not a new script, a better role, but undreaming eyes.

It’s all about attention. Attention usually is allowed to fasten to apparent objects, inner and outer. Something we see, hear, want, think about. Things to attend to, to get fasten-ated with. This may be deliberate, but much of the time it isn’t. Observe how easily attention gets hooked to plans, judgments, fantasies, inner gossip, and other mental formations even when we desire otherwise. Attention as such -- inattentive attention -- makes its objects seem more real than they actually are. But attention can also be withdrawn, to varying degrees, from its objects. It can even be completely withdrawn, its sole focus being the very awareness of which it is but the focussing function.

The trick is, at least some of the time, to keep attention in-between its objects and its Source. In so doing, Being becomes primary, and perception secondary. It’s all about attention. When Being pays attention, it feels very different than when the usual us pays attention.

This is not about imposing a discipline on ourselves, but rather about yielding to a discipline that emerges from Being. Along the way we have to traverse the warring territories occupied by the various “I’s” that literally make us up. The ultimate dream journey. All that we meet, however alien, is us. Habits galore, addictions, longings, people and qualities and behavior that catalyze every kind of emotion and reaction in us. So much hurt, grief, anger, shame, numbness, and also so much joy and love, arising in the very same zones.

Let the painful assist you. Get intimate with what hurts and bugs you. Date your loneliness, cuddle your grief, dance with your anger, cradle your shame. Stop making such a virtue out of comfort. Stop expecting spiritual practice to make you feel better. Get intimate with discomfort, without becoming an ascetic or devotee of diseased renunciation. No flagellation is needed. There’s no overseer screaming at the sperm to swim upstream. They don’t know where they’re going, but they’re going there anyway, running all the red lights in an eggistential ecstasy.

Everything can serve your Awakening, including the doubt or distractions with which you may now be flirting.

The perspective of Being offers a view unpolluted by any “I”. Let it possess you. Let It mess and undress you, and look through your eyes. Such a takeover will so fully empty you of yourself that you’ll be more you than ever before. Then you’ll recognize yourself to be not just an “I” -- or coalition of “I’s” -- but also Being, at once unbound and individuated. The perspective of Being does not stamp out differences, but rather clarifies them, even as it simultaneously renders them transparent to What-Really-Matters.

Being -- the language of which is Truth -- has no position. So long as we insist on maintaining a position, including that of having no position or of being “nobody”, we will not significantly recognize Being.

Let your understanding of this be like a ripe fig still sun-warm and juicy and purple-plump, softly split open upon your appreciative palm, awaiting your lips and tongue and rising desire. This is not an understanding of the mind, but of the heart’s depth, streaming through the body with a welcome too real to have meaning. So simple this is, lover-simple. It’s the everfresh sublime Simplicity of the naked Real, effortlessly revealed through every shaping of Itself, every modification, every body.

If we look down upon the crippled or terminally solid in our flight, we will become unwinged, so that we might become more intimate with others’ crutches and the dark side of our ascent.

Recognize -- and remember to recognize -- the Real in all that you see, hear, taste, smell, feel, and think, without reducing it to an undifferentiated cosmic pablum.

What we seek is forever unconcealed, hidden only by our insistence on devising or having maps for it, paths, beliefs, rituals, spiritual ladders, as if It were actually out of reach. As always, what we seek is already here, inside our looking and outside every exterior, at once nowhere and everywhere, camouflaged by the apparitions of perception and self-deception.

Allow perception to become functionally secondary to Being.

The dragons guarding the Treasure ask not to slaughtered, but to recognized. Through the gates we must go, leaving name and fame behind, passing through dark labyrinths, unravelled by the Minotaur’s bleeding howl of recognition.

Do not pretend that you don’t recognize that which would wean you from your delusions, so that you might cease suckling the breasts of the familiar. Do not pretend that you do not know the Stranger at the Gate, your lover’s face in one hand, yours in the other, erased, ready again. And do not pretend that you are not pretending.

Homeward bound are they who, already brokenhearted, do not go to pieces, for in their woundedness, their lucid vulnerability, the Real obviously pulses. Homeward bound are they who, wronged or hurt, choose not to invest in righteousness or revenge, for in their openness, their willingness to fully forgive, they obviously resonate with the Real. Homeward bound are they who, ripened beyond conceit, are not trying to be anywhere other than where they are, for they not only are standing their true ground, but are it.

We don’t even need to know what to do. It’s more than enough to know what not to do, just so long as we don’t make it into a program. The unmappable does not need cartography. Don’t take this essay as instruction, regardless of my instructions. May my words, now staggering on fast fading legs, be of benefit to you. May everything serve your awakening.

Everything.