Take a breath.  Feel the air enter your body.  Embrace every sensation, thought, and emotion coursing through you in this moment.  Right now, blissful awakening is being handed to you freely and unconditionally.  You don’t need to go anywhere for it.  You don’t need to change yourself in any way in order to receive it.  You don’t need to meditate for ten hours or become “more spiritual,” heal, grow, or even open your heart.  (That happens naturally.)  Nothing inside of you or outside of you needs to change.

If you think things have to be different, that is exactly what obscures it.  How could the unconditioned, the eternal sweet consciousness that you are, require a change in circumstances?

Awakening is a continual gift.  Bliss and ecstasy is intrinsic to existence.  You don’t earn it.  You don’t fix yourself up until you’re well enough or good enough to receive it.  It does not matter who you are or what you’re doing or what you’ve done right or wrong, or what is going on around you.  Right now, in this very moment, blissful awakening is being given to you on a silver platter.

(It is a new moment now… and it was given to you again… did you notice?)

The only difficulty lies in receiving it.  Here is what happens.  You take a breath, and for a fleeting moment, you know it.  It comes to you.  It enters you completely.  You feel bliss coming from nowhere, freedom, release, a heightened awareness of everything as it is.  You know that absolutely nothing else is happening, and you do not end at your skin.  Thoughts dissolve.  Nothing else matters.

Simply, you are bliss and awareness.  Nothing else.  And you are everything… the emptiness and the form, the space in the tai chi room, the hardwood floor, and the dancing and movement and string lights.  You did not exist a moment ago, and you will not exist in the next one, but you encompass all moments.  It pours in.  In one sliver of awareness unencumbered by designs on the “outside world,” it all pours in.

No journey.  No pointing.  All the things that seemed to stand between you and wholeness fall away.  Everything is whole exactly as it is, in a way that defies logic but satiates intuition.  Even pain and injury, disease, sin, and separation are whole.

In the next split second, you make an assumption that immediately squanders your gift. You assume that the bliss is coming from the thing in front of you. The lights and sounds impinging on your senses, the beautiful music, a person, a conversation, a warm tea or nice walk through the park, the sun, or the broader situation floating in abstract pieces in the back of your mind.  Being loved or accepted.  Belonging.  You assume that whatever is in front of you in that moment was the source of the gift.  It’s not a conscious thought, just an impression that follows from our tendency to attribute sensations to objects whose actions are correlated with them.  If you touch a saucepan and feel pain, it makes sense to assume that the pan is hot.  If you feel bliss opening out into space, however, the object in front of you is just an alibi.

After we make the assumption, when the thing in front of us passes, we respond as though blissful awakening has been torn away.  To get it back, we must make that thing come back.  What a recipe for torment!

This makes awakening seem conditional, and thus begins the spiritual “journey.”  The journey itself is the path away from awakening.

We have to keep making the assumption over and over again in order to keep blissful awakening at bay.

All of spirituality is geared towards unraveling this assumption.  Christianity: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God.”  Buddhism: “Form is none other than emptiness, and emptiness is none other than form.”  From this perspective, it becomes clear what a gift suffering is.  Suffering happens when everything we poured our heart and soul into is suddenly ripped away, but then we feel the deeper current and regain the capacity to feel the bliss circulating through everything.

One logical way of reversing the assumption is to look at the thing in front of you and say to yourself, “That’s not it,” and turn away from the external.  This is only partially effective.  When you try to negate the value of everything external, you push away what you are and reify the illusion of separation, so this is confusing and a little self-flaggelating.

Instead, imagine that the treasure, the finish line, divine blissful awareness, is being placed in your hands over and over and over again, and just receive it, just like that.  Just open your hands and enjoy!

The assumption that awakening is conditional is behind attachment.  In Buddhism, there is this notion that we need to overcome attachment in order to awaken.  The only thing that needs to be overcome is the assumption that the gift of awakening is being evoked by something external, or that it is ever revoked, then attachment fades naturally, without effort.  Good god does it fade.  It is really weird and a little disconcerting, but it feels amazingly good.

So we don’t actually have to give anything up in order to wake up.   Renunciation is only required to the extent that we must turn away from the dance of light on the outside in order to see the light on the inside.  But it is all the same light, and the whole point is not to find bliss on the “inside” in order to destroy everything on the “outside.”  It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it too.  But in this metaphor, everything on the outside is not “the icing on the cake.”  Everything on the outside is just the reflection of the cake in the bakery window.

Something that I keep noticing is that, with all the trendy emphasis on the eternal now, there is a sense that when you enter the now, you lose everything in the past and everything in the future, or you cut yourself off from everything happening miles away from you.  This could not be further from the truth.

Again and again, when I merge with it, the center of my own awareness, everything right here in this very intense point in time and space… I find everything!  I feel everything!  It is all just sitting there waiting for me to place it in my mouth, savor it, and swallow it whole.