"What are you going to do if you’re God?"

    "What are you going to do if you are God?"    

    Ridiculous idea?

    But why would you feel that way? 
    Seriously. Why?

    "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
    Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
    It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." Marianne Williamson

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance & everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998. 

    Alan Watts 65 years ago argued “Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions but very few people know what they are." Below, Alan Watts: "The Constitution of Nature." Philosophy: East and West. Program 28. 1960. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/constitution-of-nature 

    "The high civilizations of the world have produced three different views of the constitution of nature, of the physical universe. I call them respectively: nature as a construct, nature as a drama, and nature as an organism. 
    The first view, nature as a construct, has until very recently been characteristic of the Western world. The view of nature as a drama has been largely characteristic of India. And finally, of nature as an organism, has been characteristic of the Far East. I’d like to compare these three views and point out certain of their advantages, disadvantages, and the ways in which they complement each other.
    Our thinking about the world is strongly influenced by analogies that are almost hidden. They are so far back in the history of the thought of any given civilization or culture that they are taken as something more than analogies. They are taken almost as logical patterns. And they are basic to our grammar, to our common sense, and to our attitudes in ways that often go unsuspected. 

    Why don’t we start with the Western view of the world as a construct. The physical world has historically, in the West, been looked upon as a created or manufactured article; the world of a creator external to the world. And this view has continued in many ways even after the rise of deism in the eighteenth century and the general tendency of the scientist to dispense with the hypothesis of the creator. The idea still remains that the world is a construct, analogous to a machine, and indeed obeying laws or plans in the same way as a machine obeys a blueprint, even though the law-giver and the planner himself seems to have disappeared.
    The basic metaphor, though, underlying this is not so much the machine as the work of clay: the pot or the modeled figure. For, as you know, it is said in the Book of Genesis that the lord god created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And so our language, our poetry, is full of allusions to the fact that we are really, after all, clay. 
    And because of this figure, it is fundamental to our common sense that the world is formed matter — the form being the shape of the pot, the matter being the clay. And thus we think of life as being basically something done to a medium. The medium is stuff: a kind of formless and of itself inert and unintelligent goo, which requires an external agency to give it form and intelligence and life.
    And naturally, because we have thought this way ((materialistically & dualistically)) for so long, it’s a terribly difficult idea to abandon—to get out of our heads the notion that, in the same way that tables are made of wood and houses of stone, so we tend to think that trees are made of wood and mountains of stone and people of flesh, and all of it eventually reducing itself to the primordial goo, the universal clay, the primal matter, the formless original water over which the spirit of god is said to have moved in the beginning of all time. 
    Now, beyond the idea of the world as a work of pottery lies the more sophisticated idea of the world as a mechanism in this Western view of the world as a construct. As soon as men began to understand mechanical principles, it became extraordinarily convenient to make analogies between various types of machinery and things to be found in the world. And it is really upon this analogy that the great achievements of Western technology have hitherto been based. And it’s really very difficult to think that we could have devised our technology, and that our practical sciences could have made such progress, without the idea of the analogy between the world and a constructed machine. 
    You see, one of the most fundamental things about a machine is that it is an assemblage of parts. And the successful measurement and description of nature depends upon the calculus, upon reducing it to parts. You know, the word “calculus” originally meant “pebbles,” and pebbles were one of the oldest methods of calculating: counting pebbles. In a funny kind of association of words, calculus is also calculating in the sense of having a calculating attitude; scheming. And scheming is associated with turning things to calculae, or stones. It is a sort of killing of the world, reducing it from the living to the dead, from the organism to the machine—but nevertheless it has had the most marvelous consequences so far as we’re concerned. And the cultures which thought of nature by analogy with drama and by analogy with an organism did not produce the technology that we in the West produced.  

    Let us contrast the other attitudes: the Indian attitude of the world as a drama. In Hindu thought, the world is not thought of as being made or constructed by god, but as being actually god himself playing a game. The idea of one single divine actor who is playing all the parts of all the creatures in the world, imagining himself to be them —assuming, as it were, myriads of masks, behind which there is simply one wearer of the mask. In "The Masks of God" Joseph Campbell contrasts the way in which the myth of the one who became two, the one that became many, has gone in two quite different directions. Beginning in ancient Sumeria (which constitutes, as it were, a sort of cultural watershed), it has flowed eastwards in one way and westwards in another. 

    To the East, the idea that the one (the godhead, in other words) split itself and dismembered itself into many parts quite voluntarily, and thus became the world as a play. 

    To the West, the theme of the one who became many is different, because (as he points out in the Book of Genesis) it is not the divine who becomes male and female, it is the creature. In the Upanishads—say the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—the divine Self is described as saying in the beginning of time, “Let me become two,” and he splits into male and female, and thus generates the world. But in the Book of Genesis it is not the godhead who splits, it is man, the creature, who is split into Adam and then into Eve. But thus, in the Eastern world, we have the dramatic view—in India in particular. And although it’s interesting to note that in, say, the writings of the great philosopher Shankara and others, you very often encounter the analogy of the potter or of pots as representing the world. The roles are reversed. Clay is used as the symbol for the divine reality. Just as pots are all made of clay, or as jewels are all made of gold, so all things in the world are of one divine substance, which is of the nature of the godhead, or Brahman. It’s interesting, the different use of the simile.
    And so, from the standpoint of the dramatic view of the universe, all the divisions & distinctions of the world are looked upon as being a kind of as-if. They are in play. They are not quite serious. 
    And this contrasts very sharply with what has been the characteristic ((dualistic)) Western view: that the distinctions in the world are the most important things about it, that they are deeply serious. The distinction of good and evil is an eternal distinction, as is the distinction between the creator and the creature. The world in this view is not a drama. It  is played not by actors, but by what we call real individuals, even real persons—although, funnily enough, as I suppose you know, the word “person” is originally persona: the megaphone mask worn by actors in classical Greek drama.

    Then, thirdly, there is the organic view characteristic of China. In this, there is no real thought of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world, but rather the world is thought of as being self-moving & self-creating. The word for nature in Chinese means “what is of itself so.” When, in the West, a child asks its mother, “Who made me?” and she replies, “Darling, god made you,” and the child asks, “But who made god?” she has to say, “Nobody made god.” And that is a great puzzle to the child who thinks of the world as a construct. And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that god makes himself; he exists of himself, because he is existence. 
    There is a certain sense in which the Chinese view is fundamentally almost anarchical—or, if you don’t like that word, you could call it democratic. A world which is self-governing—not even through a president, but self-governing in every way. ... which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we’re doing and how we move them (we don’t)."

    NOW, 65 years later, we have an EXCEPTIONALLY FINE summary of how we have evolved beyond rule by barbaric force to all individuals (potentially) living in attunement with the cosmos: 
    A few excerpts from Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/

    "The world was viewed as inert, mechanical, & mute. In such a cosmos, control becomes necessary—an external force imposed upon the otherwise unruly. 
    But if the universe is alive, conscious, & self-organizing — as mystics, complexity theorists, and post-materialist scientists increasingly affirm — then governance as enforcement becomes obsolete. A deeper model must emerge.

    Order does not require laws. It requires resonance. This is evident in the natural world: ecosystems, galaxies, human consciousness itself. There is structure, but it is not forced. There is hierarchy, but it is dynamic, fractal, and non-coercive. These systems organize through patterns of self-similarity, feedback, & relational intelligence. 
    Therefore, any model of governance that fails to reflect the actual metaphysical conditions of the universe is not only oppressive—it is inefficient. It is maladaptive. A politics of force is the symptom of a civilization that does not yet trust its own source. 
    If we accept that the cosmos is psyche — structured consciousness — then the political must become the art of attunement, not the science of enforcement.

    This is the paradox: Anarchy is not the breakdown of order, but the maturation of it.

    In the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called pirate utopias—from Madagascar’s Libertalia to the floating cities of the Caribbean—offered living examples of anarchic coherence. These were not lawless zones, but radically self-organised societies governed by codes of mutual agreement, shared spoils, elected leadership, and often racial and gender egalitarianism unthinkable in the empires they subverted.

    Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey resurrected these spaces as what he called Temporary Autonomous Zones. The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is a fleeting pocket of liberation—a territory of freedom in time & space, where hierarchical control is momentarily suspended and replaced by spontaneous, decentralised order. The TAZ is not a static utopia—rather, it is ephemeral, ecstatic, emergent, and arises in the cracks of empire—in festivals, secret societies, pirate enclaves, desert rituals, rave cultures, and sacred gatherings***. It resists capture because it is non-cartographic: a zone of resonance, not regulation. 
    (((*** On a week-long silent meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, 20 years ago or so, early on somebody had found a solid gold wrist watch and pinned it on the announcement board. It stayed there untouched for the entire week. 
    While entirely silent, with even eye contact generally avoided at such retreats, a remarkable sense of intimacy spontaneously arises between all participants by the end of the retreat, despite the fact that most participants had never met.  
    To really test this phenomenon, at the end of one such retreat, I once intentionally went over to two specific people to chat & get to know them. I picked them because at first glance, at the beginning of the retreat, I had judged them as the least attractive. Now, chatting with them at the end of the retreat, I couldn't believe what fine human beings they were. We are capable of INFINITELY more intelligent, wise, loving & effective way of relating to ourselves, others & the cosmos!)))

    In this sense, the TAZ is a model of anarchic advent—not a total revolution, but a sovereign moment. A glimpse of what becomes possible when we stop waiting for permission and begin to live from coherence now. 
    As Bey writes: “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere.” 
    In biology, we see similar nodes of coherence in swarms & flocks—patterns of grace and coordination emerging without a single commander. 
    This is not chaos. It is emergent order—a coherence that arises from within, not imposed from above. In complexity science, such systems are called self-organizing. Their intelligence is not centralized but embedded in every node. The mycelial network, the blockchain, the ant colony, the neural net: all are examples of distributed intelligence that outperforms hierarchy. 
    In an anarchic society, the leader is not the one with the most control, but the one with the most alignment—the one who is so attuned to the deeper frequency of the Real that others orient around them effortlessly, not out of obedience but recognition. 
    This is how the cosmos leads. Not with domination—but through radiance.

    ... when beings are unshackled from repressive systems, and attuned to the inner source, they act in service to divine order.
    Christ was not a revolutionary against Rome—he was a vibrational insurgent, subverting the very metaphysics upon which empire rests. His leadership was anarchic in the truest sense: not the assumption of power, but the disruption of its necessity. 
    In this light, Jesus becomes the prototype of the Anarch—the figure who dissolves external rulership not by force, but by rendering it obsolete through the radical coherence of divine being.

    To live anarchically is to live from kairos, not chronos—from the sacred time of right alignment, not the mechanical tick of the clock. It is to act, as Christ did, from impulse, not from protocol—from the soul’s timing, not the calendar’s. To live from kairos is to become temporally sovereign. One ceases to move through time as sequence, and begins to modulate time as frequency—a vibratory reality shaped by alignment, not duration. When time is understood in this way, individuation is no longer a psychological journey within time—it is a re-tuning to time’s deeper structure.

    Individuated, anarchic beings are not merely free—they are temporally generative. Their presence carries the power to dislodge timelines, to open unexpected pathways, to bend probability. In this sense, they function like strange attractors in a chaotic system—subtle but catalytic forces around which reality reorganises itself. Not through force, but through the coherence of their inner architecture.

    They do not push history forward. They change the pattern altogether.

    In anarchy, freedom is not deferred—it is not something granted by the future, but something activated in the now through resonance with higher-order time. The anarchic subject becomes a temporal node—a being whose very presence rewires the causality of the world.

    This shift in time is not abstract—it is the scaffolding of a new civilization, one rooted not in deadlines and duties, but in destiny and divine attunement."
    Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/ I HIGHLY RECOMMEND READING this ENTIRE SUPERB ESSAY.

 

    "I am, by the sheer complexity of my structure, far more evolved than any system which I can imagine. ... you (too) are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos and you can’t figure you out." Alan Watts "The Process of Life" (https://www.thealpinereview.com/articles/alan-watts-the-process-of-life )

     We have a GREAT DEAL to learn. 

    “In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
    There is an infinite array of choices.
    One alone brings happiness -
    To love what is.” Dorothy Hunt

    "When you know you’re the ocean, you’re not afraid of the waves.” Tara Brach

    "Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present." Alan Watts

 

Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com

Wise Hope

    Many today feel hopeless & try not to think about the desperate state our world is in. This is entirely understandable, but like many of our other behaviours, hopeless resignation is recklessly unsustainable.

    We must remember that we are no longer unloved, abandoned, afraid & helpless children. We may appreciate how that feels BUT now realize we are so much more than that! We are the wise, peaceful, spacious source of safety & unconditional love, and are now in the powerful, privileged position to join together to nurture & help ourselves & others flourish in this critical time in human history.

    Messages of wise hope:

    “Wise hope includes the aspiration to manifest our full potential, individually and collectively, and the trust that this is possible. Especially in stressful times, this hope gets clouded over by fear. When it is alive, wise hope energizes and guides all spiritual transformation. Three practices help us nurture hope:
    Aspiration for what we love,
    Attending to what we love, and
    Actively serving what we love.” Tara Brach - please watch her wonderful short video below.

    “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right inside it, under its roof. What I want is so simple, I almost can’t say it. Elementary kindness.” Barbara Kingsolver, quoted by Tara Brach

 

"Notes from My Couch this Morning" by Joan Benner

"Let me hold you said the couch
    As you re-member yourself into loving awareness.
No more than this is needed.
    You, present to this moment is enough.
It has always been this way.
    You just forget,
And allow confusion, delusion, and frustration move you
    Into the false dreams of who you are.
The very presence of loving awareness is so much more than the illusions
    You so often crave.
Sink into this now
As you honor yourself by not getting caught in your thoughts.
Treasure them, then let them fly by,
    Refusing to allow yourself to be dragged or tossed by their fleeting visits.
Welcome the truth that this awesome awareness itself is more than enough.
    Embrace the expansiveness of clear boundless loving awareness.
Rest in the truth of this, my precious love.
    Rest, only rest will lead you to your healing.
The need to shine outward is over.
    Melt yourself back into the timeless space of loving awareness,
And dance in the knowing that you have come home.

Breathe in the comfort of this place,
And when ready, circle back as a wave in the ocean.
Rest here in this new place where the shimmering hologram of life shines though.
Take the hands offered by those who know this seamless mandala of wholeness,
And acknowledge together the beautiful core of loving awareness you all share.
    Nod to your sameness in suffering when you forget who you truly are.
Reach out to all as you bow to the deep equality you share.
    And pray as one that all beings truly awaken
And live fully in the joy that is beyond sorrow.
    The dance of loving awareness is meant for all.
May this be so…

    Terry Patten inspiring, energizing (62min) interview, author of “A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries - A Guide to Inner Work for Holistic Change.” : https://drmichaelwayne.com/leadingedge/terry-patten-author-a-new-republic-of-the-heart/

    Steve McIntosh (63min) a bit scholarly but excellent interview, author of “The Presence of the Infinite - The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” : https://drmichaelwayne.com/leadingedge/interviews-with-the-leading-edge-steve-mcintosh-author-the-presence-of-the-infinite/

 

“Please may I live from love.” Tara Brach’s prayer

 

 Tara Brach's WONDERFUL (50min) video : Three Practices for Nurturing Wise Hope

 

First, Self-Compassion

“I was meditating with my cat the other day
and all of a sudden she shouted,
‘What happened?!’
I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged
her to say more – feeling that if she got it all out on the table
she would sleep better that night.
So I responded, ‘Tell me more, dear,’
and she soulfully meowed:
‘Well, I was mingled with the sky. I was comets
whizzing here and there. I was suns in heat, hell – I was
galaxies. But now look – I am
landlocked in fur.’
To this I said, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
What to say about conversation between mystics?”
    Tukaram “Landlocked in Fur” in: “Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West” Ladinksy, 2002.

    Don't we all feel 'landlocked in fur' - trapped in our imperfect body & imperfect life? Perhaps we all have a vague memory of being not just stardust, but the Source itself.
    But for this very brief life ...

 

“Forget about enlightenment.

Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, and the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be.
Not the saint you’re striving to become.
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You’re already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, touch in, let go.”                  John Welwood

 

    Tara Brach has a wonderful talk about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcb2UNwOKEA 

 

    Then, we're able to greet ourselves & others with 'Namaste':

     “A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension -- seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are.... A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.” John Welwood

PRACTICING The Heart of Mindfulness

      In one of Tara Brach's fine guided meditations, she suggests: “… with the out-breath, let go of any unnecessary holdings in the heart.” https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-loving-what-is/

 
     What a wonderful suggestion!

     Of course we all have protective armor of varying thickness around our hearts due to all the traumas we've been exposed to, perhaps even before birth. Even the process of being born is traumatic to the child, no matter how smoothly it goes. 

     So what are unnecessary holdings in the heart? If we've become resilient, balanced, mature adults, and have forgiven those who may have harmed us, and have learned to consciously face & accept even life's harsh realities, we likely will still continue to carry some habitual armoring in our body, but especially around our heart. This is now completely unnecessary, and something best to intentionally work on releasing.

     A much greater challenge is if we're continually traumatized in some manner, be it racism, sexism, domestic violence, homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment, etc, etc, etc. Even here though, armoring the heart is - somewhat like the "freeze instinct" - a necessary survival tactic of the very young, and for those not yet able to respond more maturely & effectively to trauma. An armored, frozen heart is not capable of vibrantly engaging in life. So even here, it is best to adapt more effective adult responses to end & mitigate the damaging effects of trauma AND intentionally work on releasing these holdings in the heart.

     An armored heart becomes such a natural part of us, that the suggestion to release the armor to some will sound completely insane - as if being asked to immediately become a heart organ-donor! And even if you've reached a point in your life when the idea of shedding defenses around your heart sounds appealing, even urgent, in real life, it's actually a slow, cautious process, mostly out of your direct control. The heart is, after all, our most vital organ!

     So even though we're hard-wired for self-preservation & conditioned to fear, at the same time, our life feels whole & meaningful only when we have open-hearted connection to ourselves, others, the world. So how can we resolve this potent pull in opposite directions?

•

     A meditation PRACTICE I've found beneficial is holding a beloved baby in my heart. It can be your own baby or grandchild, baby Buddha, baby Jesus, a puppy, kitten, baby bird - whoever feels closest for you. The key is to feel directly sharing the nurturing warmth, peace & protection of your heart with a tiny, beloved, helpless little innocent being. We are holding this beloved innocent & our own innocence together, in nurturing safety & unconditional love, so both are thriving in real time. Allow yourself to rest in the physical feel of nurturing & being nurtured, embodying our true nature.

• 

     Immediately after writing the above, I listened to an excellent interview in which Dorothy Hunt answered a question about desire - to have something or to get rid of something. "This awareness, this awake nature of ours, it’s moving from inside the thing that we’re trying to get rid of, rather than trying to get rid of it. We just let awareness come inside – it begins to liberate it from the inside. Whereas the mind tries to pry it open, or get rid of it. Awareness is like the sun that melts these frozen things. So much of what feels like a block is just some kind of frozen feeling, frozen experience that hasn’t been allowed to simply be. So when we allow our inner experience to be what it is – the Buddha once said, ‘Hold your anger as though it’s your only child’ – bringing that compassion, that embrace, that intimacy, bringing it close so we can see ‘What is this?’ instead of ‘How do I get rid of it?’ The mind wants to know, ‘How do I get rid of it?’ But this awake space, this awareness, has no judgment, it just shines the light on what is. And then we begin to see desire for what it is.”
        Dorothy Hunt interview: https://batgap.com/dorothy-hunt/

 

“In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
There is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.”                                           Dorothy Hunt

      “Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.” Jack Kornfield

     “When we stop tensing against life, we open to an awareness that is immeasurably large and suffused with love.” Tara Brach

 

 

Restless Souls, Acorns and Wisdom

     First, a true story from Cynthia Bourgeault:

     “Long ago, back in Maine, I worked for a small marine publishing company, where I had the pleasure of editing A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast by a man named Hank Taft. When I met him, Hank was one of those exuberant, restless souls, sixty-one going on thirty, filled with life and passion. A member of the distinguished Taft clan that has contributed to American history a president and a pioneering educator, he bounced around in a variety of careers, from business executive to president of Outward Bound. He’d rowed the entire Maine coast in a twelve-foot Peapod and was now making a fine debut as an author and a cruising sailor.
     ‘Stunned’ was the response of virtually everyone who knew him when we learned that Hank had contracted pancreatic cancer. And Hank himself was no less stunned, but he quickly regrouped. Characteristically, his first response was to give it the ‘old Yale try,’ taking command of his treatment program with the same panache as if planning a transatlantic cruise. The pieces involved an eclectic blend of physical workouts, diet, light chemotherapy, and – new to a staunch rationalist like Hank – visualization meditation for an hour each morning.
     I remember the day very clearly: February 4, 1991. The sun was just rising over the islands of Penobscot Bay, and Hank’s wife, Jan, had cooked us a hearty lumberjack’s breakfast. As we sat overlooking the cold, brilliant ocean partly obscured in winter sea smoke, conversation came around to the topic of Hank’s plans for the upcoming sailing season. Somehow we got from there onto the subject of fog, and we all shared our uneasiness about making passages in zero-visibility conditions.
     ‘But there’s a lot of ways to keep busy so you don’t feel your fear,’ Hank observed cheerfully. ‘You can keep precise time checks and enter them in the log. You can stand out on the bow and every minute do a 360-degree scan of the waters. You can watch for changes in ripple patterns and identify passing lobster buoys …’
     ‘Yes, I said – and then, volunteering some of my own work-in-progress on the subject of fog passages, ‘or else you can just let the fear come up and fall through it to the other side….’
     He looked at me as if I’d just pierced him with a sword. How I wished those words had never been spoken!
     Over the next few weeks Hank became decidedly more inward. He quickly gave up the visualization and the lumberjack breakfasts, then the workouts and chemotherapy. He gathered his family, made his final reconciliations, settled his affairs, and waited. It did not prove to be a long wait. Within three weeks the rapidly spreading cancer had obstructed his lower intestine, and he faced the choice of eking out a few more weeks of life in a hospital or dying at home. Wholeheartedly he chose the latter.
     Hank had never been a religious man (in fact, he held religion primarily responsible for the bigotry and violence in the world), but in those final weeks a change so extraordinary came over him that none of us could fail to notice it. As his physical body withered, his soul grew large and luminous. Friends gathered by his bedside could feel the energy of love radiating from him almost as a force field. He faced his death with open heart, utterly trusting and utterly serene.
     Three days before the end, I went for what was to be my last visit. Hank was curled in bed, his body totally broken yet somehow radiantly powerful. We hugged each other and said farewell. And then his last words to me – so muffled and unexpected that I did not at first catch them: ‘Are you fearless yet?’
     ‘Not yet, Hank,’ I said. ‘I’m trying.’
     ‘Fall … fearless … into … love.’
     In those final mumbled words, Hank conveyed more to me of the essence of who he was and what life was than could have been done in a lifetime of spiritual teaching. … From a force greater than our own lives, we are made for this, and when we finally yield ourselves into it, we are born into a meaning that is never known as we struggle on the surface with our acorn reality.”

     Even if we sort of like Hank's final advice to Cynthia, without the 'help' of impending death, most of us cannot deeply understand it, because we live in "acorn reality" - our society's shallow, hyper-rational mental prison.
     Cynthia's story about "acorn reality":

     “Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, baby-boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called ‘Getting All You Can out of Your Shell.’ There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.
     One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped ‘out of the blue’ by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, ‘We … are … that!’
     Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: ‘So tell us, how would we become that tree?’ ‘Well,’ said he, pointing downward, ‘it has something to do with going into the ground … and cracking open the shell.’ ‘Insane,’ they responded. ‘Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.’ ”

     Most of us are so armoured-up against life due to all sorts of traumas, that we're 'hard nuts to crack'. And yet ...

          "There is a crack in everything
           That's how the light gets in ..."          Leonard Cohen

     “Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.” Thomas Moore

      Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     One of Tara Brach's fine guided meditations: https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-opening-hearts-life/