A love letter to your soul

We awake each day on the precipice of eternity. Teetering, yet choosing with every inhale to continue experiencing the world. Even though at any moment we could dissolve back into the immutable sea, back into the cosmic womb, cradled by the final transformational bliss into God, and again have no experience but love...  Instead, remarkably, we choose all THIS. So fertile. So alive in each moment of joy, grief, loss, stillness, and bliss.

Along the way, every thinking being questions what we are doing here, necessarily tripping into the existential pot of purposelessness. Days when we find the questioning futile, oscillating with days when we find the living futile. It can be baffling, stifling, paralyzing... 

But ultimately there is a way to question your purpose for being here without stumbling into ennui. When you discover there's nothing outside your every experience to live for. Any other “purpose” is one you have set for yourself. And it can dissolve in the blink of a revelation. There's no ruler (in all senses) for your life work other than the one you devise. It's not out there waiting for you to find it, or achieve it. It's inside you.  

Understanding the truth of existence does not cancel our purpose. For we are in this life in this world to have this very experience we are having now, to think this thought... and have this feeling... and that feeling... to wonder why Gia is writing this. Yes! Even the questioning and the stumbling! What else could it be for? It is for you to be breathing and feeling and thinking right now. And now. Open your mind. Shatter illusions.

Ask yourself how many lives do you feel you live in just one year’s time? It is astounding how quickly it transforms. Even if not outwardly, in your mind, in your heart. How many thoughts, emotions and shifts do you go through in just one day? Inversely, how many lives do you deny and choose not to live? Only one. One? There is only one life you can deny; and that is your own. We don’t get to do others’ living for them. We can only find our own way in order to discover that...  It is not true you missed the boat somewhere along the way. That you took a wrong turn. It is a fantasy of your mind that you are not living the right path. Or that you missed an opportunity. You haven’t. You took every opportunity you could at that time, with the knowledge you had.

It is no accident we are here and have been through every turn of our lives. Otherwise life would look very different. Why else would we have such a complex, such a sensorily provocative and ineluctably alive, dynamic, and changing world full of other consciousnesses to live in?

And moreover we are here to have the epiphany of finding one another. Of loving. What else could 'experience' -as we know it- possibly be for? Other than your internal feelings and perceptions of the discovery of existence, outside there only exists other conscious beings. Open your heart. Shatter illusions.

The path to transcendence has been travelled by many before you and along with with you. That which is transcendent is not a way out, a softening, or surpassing. But rather an embracing of life and self as they are. You are not going beyond life. You are not going beyond yourself. Rather you are uniting with life and self.  Thus truly it is the path of self-actualization.

And you may not be ready yet. For the road to self-actualization can the loneliest, but is also the most sacred journey. Everyone will eventually come face-to-face with the truth. And each mini-satori, every revelatory glimpse is a full invitation to awaken to the ultimate reality. No matter what form it appears to you as, the essential kernel you will find is thatthe invitation begs your surrender. 

Surrender comes in many forms. Screaming through the search for expression, the thirst for actualization. Plodding through the tormenting shadows searching for integration and the echoes of potential yet unmet...  Don’t turn your back on them. They are they for you. Crying for you, loving you through your pain and confusion. But in moments of clarity, there is nothing but love. Do not doubt that we can animate our entire existence solely through the love drive.

For love is the life force. Which is not to say it is the only catalyst of movement and action. Sure, it can be demented into other forms of energy- when fear, intellect, ego, and base needs instead motivate a life. So why, you may ask, does the force of love remain frustratingly clouded, obscured, denied, or entirely invisible, in spite of every dear soul’s indubitably sincere efforts? There is no one who in his or her most private self does not recognize love’s promise. The answer is this: it requires enormous solitary effort and the risk is high.

For when truth bursts forth, it feels like madness! Because it is madness, judged by anything else we have ever known. So we must prepare ourselves for our leap into the flames. Because when the time comes that our karmas have ripened and the universe is ready to awaken us- it will. If we are unprepared and shaky, we will try vehemently to repress earth-shattering reality shifts. And it very well may unhinge the entire circuitry of our beings. 

It takes a great deal of courage to face the world, even as you are unsure of where you are heading, and present yourself in this shifting form. But the path associated with not taking the chance is known and well-trod. It is the same one you have been on and that all souls traverse. 

It absolutely leads you to back to every desire unuttered, every memory unrecollected, every need your soul, mind, heart and physical bodies have ever cradled, entertained or harbored. But if you remain sleeping and not choosing- the desire will not appear in the manner or time you choose. Though they are right and true, you will remain blind to their presence and push away even the brightest of opportunities. Repression is the surest way to disease. Disease begins with the mind. As does enlightenment. Open your eyes. Shatter your mind.

Love is the life force. Understandably, not everyone feels the freedom to retreat, rebel, and reform. Beyond the self-tolerance it requires (which can be the most excruciating part), it inadvertently demands cooperation from your environment. Understanding, trust, and a certain latitude are asked for. You absolutely will be momentarily lost in the last remnants of the illusion of control. You may feel that expectations around you are running rampant as your boundaries stretch, transform, and fall. Families, jobs, and responsibilities begin to feel intolerable, confusing, and lose meaning. 

But Aham prema crosses all human, material, mental, energetic, and cosmic skins. With eyes of divine love, every being and thing appears so sweetly true to its karmic moment. Constantly moving one breath further along its dharmic path- always just one moment of revelation away from vibrating at the frequency of infinite potential.

Truth resides. Bliss awaits. 

Reacquaint yourself with ahimsa. It may be a bit much to ask to immediately expel all thoughts of fear, anger and harm, to ourselves or others. A retraining is necessary. When struggling with the overwhelming task of purifying and coming back to our original bliss, simply replace any stray conflicting thoughts with feelings of love directed to any or all, or mantras of peace- whether personal English mottos or ancient sounds. 

The principles of ahimsa (nonviolence) are waiting for you to experience them. Only you can know if you are truly living by them. The state of contentment, quiet and ease will shower your being. No one is judging you for your failures to remain with the total state of nonviolence. If they are, remember it is only their own lack of peace they are disturbed by.  Anyone who lives in the essence of ahimsa has complete compassion for your every attempt at life. 

It is easier than you may imagine to engage the truth of ahimsa. Do not focus on the unwanted thoughts or behaviors. Instead, displace them with compassionate, helpful actions and words. By doing so, you are not distracting yourself from conundrums that need to be attended to or “resolved” in order to move forward. Instead you are actively becoming who you always were. Blissful, true and at ease in the world, ready for anything with your truth intact and expressible.  

So now, my Beloved, what else is left but to create? Now that you've seen all else is maya, as dazzling or terrible as it is- distracting and sweetly divine fodder for us human gods. From this state, any other arising purport is secondary to the finality of creation. The creative moment is complete; it has exhausted itself by outliving itself, and has destroyed even the concept of potential with new life. Burst out of itself.

Rest assured that when that time comes, my arms will be as open as ever. As will your heart. Surrender into the madness of freedom and choose to take the rest of the world along with you. The incessant throb of eternal union is present and real, pulsing just under the skin of every thought and situation and being, animating our apparent reality, deep within the kashic turntable of time.

Even the grand act of loving to the point of completion is a fortification process that we find together in order to create. Even that is not an end unto itself. It may be what we are born from and die back into, in the end; but in between those points, we must ascend the voluptuous trunks of each others' souls, allow for and sublimate the erotic force, and scatter the petals of the love lotus into the mouths of the willing and unwilling alike. To each other we will always return.

I know nothing but this: I am so in love with you. Yes you. 

Make soup of the red herrings. Create life and have a life.

Open your self. Shatter. 

June 2012