"The most amazing thing about stillness is that you lose your whole self."

The moment arrives for everyone. After years of struggling and searching, you stop to find you haven’t traveled very far. Something about life is just not adding up. No matter how much we’ve gained, the yearning has never dissipated. Who am I? I do not know.

The question is asked but never answered. I give up. I finally let go…of thoughts and words and ideas and opinions. The mind is full of conditioned dreams. Where is the meaning in all of this?

I do not know, says the mind, admitting the limits of its power. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know what this is all about. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t frakking know! As hard as it searches for its “self”, the mind finds nothing.

But this is not a worthless sort of nothing. This nothing is different somehow. This nothing is empty, but open. It’s expansive and vast. It’s a nothing of freedom and grace.

With this taste of infinite space, I step forward. I release my hold of preconditions and assumptions, entering with no agenda, no ulterior motive. All substance of things falls away. No need to attain and nothing to lose.

But the mind is not completely finished as it tries once more to grasp for solidity. A fierce panic arises. The truth of this vastness becomes clear. There is nothing to know here. The mind must fall away as well!

This emptiness has no boundary. No beginning, no end. This emptiness is full, including every man, woman, and child. An emptiness of existence that is the ground of all that happens, has happened, or ever will happen. This is the nothing of something, from which all experience is made possible.

I rest in this emptiness, in the vastness, in the freedom.
I rest in existence, and hold my heart open.
I rest in awareness, alone as the One.

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"An Open Invitation" is a multi-part journey from the known into the unknown.

Next post...the conclusion (I promise)