Return to innocence

Live from the heart; with an open heart, you can feel things as they are without the burden of past conditioning, writes Paula Horan

Happiness is something we all unconsciously seek and more so when times get tough. Ironically, I have discovered, after many years of trial and error, that happiness is not the ideal objective. Life is fraught with ups and downs, even in the best of times. There will always be periods of happiness and periods of pain, comfort and discomfort. Thus the equanimity which fosters contentment is perhaps a wiser aspiration which when pursued, requires us to wake up to who we are, minus the veil of ego.

It is eminently more practical, to get in touch with and anchor ones attention with the true self - the awareness within us which is unaffected by life's ups and downs - than to try and "fix" the mind and make it happy. Fixes are always only temporary. It behoves us to discover the 'beingness' that we are, which rests in a perfect state of equanimity, no matter what outer circumstances may be; whether they are good or bad.

Shed your ego
It is ultimately who we are, minus ego identification. This presence is always with us, for it is our essential nature, yet while we are identified with a busy mind, we fail to notice it. A certain shedding of mental burdens has to happen so that it can be felt and directly experienced. The most direct way to do this is to shed the burdened one with all of its various masks. For this to occur, the illusory experiencer (ego) has to be unveiled.

From this perspective, the problems and challenges of everyday life take on a whole new meaning. All at once, nothing changes and yet everything changes. We cease to take life so personally because we realise there is no "personal" self to begin with. Instead, we begin to perceive the vastness of who we are: wholly indefinable, wholly unknowable.

As we begin to feel and experience this vastness, it is clear that we can never know with the intellect the unlimited spaciousness of That. You begin to notice what quantum physics has made very clear, that there is only one vast continuum of energy. There are no real boundaries between us. Even the body's sack of skin, which seems to set us apart and separate us from other similar bodies, is ultimately a formless vibrating frequency of energy when viewed with a subatomic microscope.

Ignore past conditioning
As we begin to peek through the boundaries of the conceptual mind, our previous comfort zone, bound by our encyclopaedic memory of the past, with continued noticing, loses its hypnotic quality. The freshness of living a true present, unaided by past programming, gradually becomes more appealing.

To remove the veil of ego is not easy. All of samsara and its fantasies beckon us to remain complacent and to settle for far less. It requires fortitude and a kind of fierceness which is willing to surrender again and again to the will of the heart and cut through the slothful meandering mind, to make it through the mire of conditioned thought. Ultimately, an intense degree of vigilance, a willingness to stay open and present with what is, is necessary to regain our sanity. No less than a fierce sort of innocence is needed to cut through the bewilderment of an ego identified with what isn't really so.

Live from the heart
What is called for now, is a return to innocence, an innocence which must be intensely present with what is. Fierce energy keeps us in the present. The fierceness is not to protect our innocence, for it needs no protection, but to make it come alive, to fuel an open heart. Contrary to what we normally think, true strength lies in the vulnerability of an open heart; not in a heart which is closed. With an open heart, we can feel things as they are without the burden of past conditioning.

When we are fully present in our heart, we cannot be fooled. Unlike the ego-automatic mind which can easily be conned because it cannot feel; it can only think dualistically. The heart can easily tune in with the hearts of others and feel their motivation and their real need. When we can feel the motivation behind others' actions, which are often, fear based, we are less likely to fall prey to the same fear ourselves. Instead, we can choose to react in a loving way which often disarms fear, or if needed, we can use tough love which can also produce the desired effect. Either way, a return to innocence enables us to circumnavigate the illusory ego's clever roadblocks and live from the heart.