Author: Manisha

Joy is a natural outcome when you’re untouched by the memory of experience and the experience of memory. You remain untouched by experience and memory by being fully present to everything that arrives. By being here. By embracing the multilayeredness of experience including resistance in all its forms. There’s no distance between you and anything except the one imposed by Thought.

Contrary to popular misunderstanding, being free inwardly doesn’t really mean not to feel anything or reaching the state of a dull and dry Mind, which by the way many seem to be after these days.

It means to be so free inwardly that all feelings and experiences are welcomed without resistance. That life can move through you without your interference, which is to say, without the interference of the Thought/Thinker. So free that you are entirely surrendered to Life.

I don’t know how one could perceive escapist dullness as freedom. Where is the freedom in that? This is where things start going wrong and we see the emergence of smug followers confident in their delusion.

If and when you really get it, you appreciate everything. Cry looking at a leaf, laugh like crazy because the Life that you are is finally exploding in you now that you’re free of thought-delusion, your story of ‘me’ that kept you from recognizing Life’s immensity.

We don’t have to make liberation a long drawn-out process, which we end up doing again and again by having ideas about it that are always held within Time simply because this whole movement is that of Thought, which is never Now.

If you were fully here, would you wish for liberation? No, you wouldn’t, for there is no one to do the wishing in the Now. Be fully in and engaged for there to be no trace of you. Don’t be split between here and there. Give it your all, to the point of ‘your’ annihilation.

There’s nothing outside of here.

Free from experience and memory—an innocence that welcomes everything like it is coming in contact with it or experiencing it for the first time.

All in. Vulnerable. Surrendered. Childlike. I-don’t-know-ness. Always open to being hurt (experience) but cannot be hurt.

Silence, where there’s no one to be aware of it but just an awareness of Everything happening. A silence not cultivated by Thought forcefully. A natural silence that can only emerge out of absolute awareness, when everything in the range of awareness has been included all the way.

Being ethical is not hard when you are honest about all the stories you create to deceive yourself and why you do so. The fire of self-honesty and clarity burns through all nonsense and leads you nowhere but action with involvement. Clear the garbage pile. That’s the answer.

Everything is intrinsically and infinitely connected. There are no standalone events. No standalone phenomena. No standalone anything. So you know everything technically is just the same thing, from within to without.

Not separate. Not different.

Hope you see it for yourself soon enough that you’re never not on the path. But there’s nothing like soon enough. You’re neither late nor early. It’s just a matter of time before you begin to see this. But there’s no Time. But there’s Time and all this until you see it for yourself. And it’s okay either way. In essence, keep following your sincerest bliss. Be guided by the intelligence of the heart. Abandon all worries. Be surrendered.

If you really want something (like self-realization, which is another ‘goal’ or shiny thing for the Mind these days), you have to be willing to let it go and see what happens without wanting to see what happens! There can absolutely be no tricks that you might play around it.

You have to give up the whole thing for the thing, meet Life with complete surrender, and then forget all about it genuinely. There can be no sneaky trace of it in you, no fooling oneself into anything, no ideas, no goals whatsoever of getting ‘there’ or anywhere, no bargaining with anything. You have to unlearn all the garbage, genuinely penetrate the nature of paradox, and find for yourself that there is essentially no paradox, and just learn how to dance without really being here or there. You have to know that you are neither here nor there and yet, here you are.

You have to deeply know that ‘there’ is ‘here’, that Samsara is Nirvana. That the road is the destination. All goals and purposes are inventions of the Mind to quench its perpetual need for becoming and therefore cannot be IT, that to stay caught in them is Duality deluxe—one thought competing for or against another thought. Such a Mind will not reflect Truth. The one who perceives no difference knows that if there’s a purpose of it all at all, it is to Live entirely, honestly, and vulnerably here and now.   And that’s all it takes. This is how grace descends. When all seeking, trying, and becoming end.

When everything is done well without doing and when nothing else matters. When you don’t care about ‘there’. When ‘here’ is fully lived. Understand, realize, let it be. Be innocent again, be foolish enough to be surprised. Don’t be fooled by ideas especially that of Enlightenment.

It’s not necessarily important for everything to make sense, for us to understand everything. We must be able to let our grasp loose on this self-imposed condition for things to make sense in the way we want or in our Minds if we really want a direct perception of things for what they truly are, if we want to really know, which one could only feel and be. No personal interpretations, or conceptualizations whatsoever per our ‘preferences’ that we mistake for our ‘needs’.

Be comfortable with not knowing, with uncertainty, with unpredictability. Do your best and then some, and leave the rest. Let life surprise you, amaze you. Thrive in the spaces in between, in the unknown, and then you shall truly see It.