Recognize Your Refusal
From Bluetruth
Unless you are opening, everything you do, think, and feel is actively refusing openness.
You want so badly to be accepted as you are. You want to feel worthy, acknowledged, and loved. These desires to be seen and felt as worthy are symptoms of your closure. The self-reflexive tension you call “me” is trying to sustain itself. Your emotional sustenance is grounded in this need to be mirrored, to know that you are seen, felt, and loved.
In truth, in depth, you are the openness of love. But as a separate “me,” you are the refusal of this openness. You are the tension of self-sustenance, fidgeting to touch yourself, masturbating, filling your mouth with food, thinking about yourself, self-concerned. Even your desire to grow spiritually is self-concern. Everything you do acts to sustain the felt sense that you are a separate self, hopefully on the road to greater love and freedom.
Sustaining your sense of separate self is the refusal of love. For most of every day, you are actively refusing to be the openness that is love. You would rather be a closed someone with a personal life of pain and pleasure than openness alive as all beings and things.
There are two major phases in spiritual growth. During the first phase, you actually believe you want to grow more open. You believe that you want more love in your life, more caring. You want to give your love and help others. You believe that your thoughts, feelings, and actions can actually lead toward getting and giving more openness and love.
The second phase begins when you can feel, moment by moment, that you are actively closing. Every thought, feeling, and action is reinforcing your sense of separateness. You are doing unlove. In fact, “me” is the very act of unlove. “Me-ing” is the process of holding back, protecting yourself, hoping to be cherished, hoping to grow open, thinking to yourself, strategizing for your success. You are utterly self-involved. Everything you do is an effort to sustain this sense of me that is hopefully loved, loving, and successful. When this second phase of life begins, you realize that you absolutely do not want to grow in openness. Truly, you are terrified of being open. You want to be a little bit open in order to feel comfortable and safe, but total openness—without any “me” you can point to—is terrifying.
In truth, you are love, not a “me” that wants to love and be loved. The me-ing that wants to be separate and loved may continue with momentum from the past, but you can treat this me-ing with the same care you would a bowel movement. It is something to be felt as it occurs, sometimes enjoyed, sometimes suffered, and naturally released, as time will have it.
If you want to obsess about the movement of “me,” about your emotions, thoughts, and actions, about who loves you or whether your career or spiritual practice will succeed, you can do so for as long as you want. At some point, you realize that all this movement is natural, but it doesn’t go anywhere profound.
Why be obsessed with your own do-do? When you reduce yourself to this process of me-ing, you are actively refusing to be the love who you are, open, boundless, and free.
