What awakening is cannot be described – words cannot approach the great mystery.
This mystery has no character and no form. No name will do – and all names will do.
Although words cannot convey this mysterious awakened presence, they work well enough as pointers. The enlightened speech of the awakened one is charged with transformative power. This empowerment serves the one who sincerely longs to awaken, advancing the eradication of ignorance and thus awakening one’s inherent Buddha nature.
Everybody is enlightened, realising this is all it takes. The difference between the seeker and the awakened one is that in the latter there is not a trace of doubt, denial or avoiding of one’s essential nature.
The awakened one – as living stillness – is fully present and allows all of life to come and to go. Peace is their home, since clinging to past, future and even this very moment has been erased. I – the root of all delusion and suffering – is an imagined separation from totality. We have come to see ourselves as an aspect of life, whereas we are life itself.
The ensuing loneliness and constant craving push more and more people into a journey to search for the missing part, while all it takes is a change in perspective, a shift from I to Thou. Rather than viewing yourself as a seeker, ever grasping for a distant horizon, see yourself as an awakening being, allowing the radiance of your wisdom-heart to fully permeate you.
No strategy, mental construction or conclusion will give you what has always been. You need to lay down all sense of doing and improvement. You need to lay down resistance and your inner fight. Allow your mind to rest in your heart, listen within, your heart knows beyond understanding.
Essentially there is nothing to acquire. Self-realisation is beyond any domain of attaining or doing – it cannot be brought about. What you long for is already what you are. No longer deny it.
At some moment, stilled in time, universal Buddha nature will be revealed. This happens by itself, to itself, in you. This revelation is the realisation of the indivisible, all-pervading One. Your point of reference evaporates and you are no longer anchored in I, but in the heart of all.
You realise that I has been an assumption, an idea, the first idea from which all ideas emerge. I has never been. It was only ever imagined.
When the painful sense of separation and loneliness has evaporated and you are no longer ruled by the standpoint of deprivation, your life becomes soft, light and joyful. Nothing needs to be avoided or suppressed anymore. There is no more fight and no more fear. You are simply present, simply aware, merged with all and everything.
You live your best life, with a clear mind and a warm heart, where all your qualities fully bloom. You are free of apparent entanglement and there is no more identification with ideas, feelings or your physical appearance.
What a relief, home at last, doubtlessly resting in the liberating realisation of never having been away from yourself. Your painful sense of a separate self dissolved in the ocean of everything.