The only way to achieve maximum openness is to arrive at every moment
without a single preconception. Otherwise, we resist what doesn't fit
our model. Regardless of how much we know, or how evolved we've become,
we must put every bit of that aside. We must step into the mystery naked
and undefended.When we truly hate what's happening, our instinct is to
flee from it like a house on fire. But if we can learn to turn around
and /enter/ that fire, to let it burn all our resistance away, then we
find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of power and
freedom. Sometimes, without any answers to hold onto, it seems like
we're nothing at all. Other times, overwhelmed by life's roaring
torrent, it seems like we're everything at once. These two impressions
are actually flipsides of the same coin. They're a taste of what happens
when the barriers of our personality become porous. We encounter life
directly, without anything to mediate its intensity. We see clearly, in
those moments, how the self we carry with us is no more or less than a
tool of our organism, a system that allows us to function, but that
also, miraculously, we have the ability to step right through.
--Raphael Cushnir, from /365 Nirvana, Here and Now/
<http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001TgcRar4N08qaN6KAcA3vz2mpYYK6X6R4nm3C7_WGVTyniOCZqRYnbG_2i0VggwJHnU0xWvppEilvw3kBBtzcdB1xjyIZ5UxAubvfUO_4u7XGrWrLvaJEH2NOi6h1UXLtfKUvx8dyWaAFDMcvTZz7kymrW_2GQ-xVHDAu_hlTYV5r6-QH4PyztKnidWpFn53c-qf17ZBkUAsdzITXfgF_OQ==>
by Josh Baran
