Heart-Based vs. Rule-Based Life

Heart is eternal and unbound. Rules are provisional.

Heart-based histories

My spiritual traditions have histories of breaking rules in order to more faithfully follow wisdom.

We have histories of pure lineage superseding institutional lineages.

We have histories of magic and mercy and wonder.

We have histories of poetry and medicine.

We have histories of invisibility and living in the gaps.

No matter what the outward display, devotion is the essence.

We respect the profound instructions inherent in each moment.

We value following over leading and leading by following.

Yet all spiritual traditions age.

As spiritual traditions age, they sometimes become more entwined with their dominant cultures. They become more conventional, more bureaucratic.

They become more attached to false narratives of realization and authorization. They become more protective of institutional power, buildings, bank accounts, entrenched narratives, and their own expansion and perpetuation.

No tradition is immune.

But the main thing is and always has been to wake up, and this requires flexibility and adaptability, not dogma or rigidity.

💞Teachers

I was fortunate to have encountered some teachings that revealed the essence of direct realization and some teachers who embodied it in their modesty, their courage, their natural integrity, their devotion, their fierceness, and their playful spontaneity.

They understood that the process of waking up is destructive and unpredictable, not accumulative and prescriptive.

You never know what this alive, aware reality is going to throw on your path, or what direction it will ask you to take.

You can’t plan too far ahead if you want to be ready to respond.

We don’t have to renounce anything as a matter of fixed principle, but we must be willing to lose whatever needs to be lost.

We are offering our habits and concepts, and sometimes our institutions and positions, to be dismantled so that we can become resistlessly adaptable and intimate with all, so that we can be all for others in total devotion. So that, immersed in wonder, we will no longer be holding anything back.

At the heart of reality is a fountain of generosity. Our life is for becoming more like that.

#notrebels

Ideally, we’re not attached to some kind of rebel self-image.

It’s just that we understand each circumstance is a unique and infinite mandala.

All rules are provisional, and the rules we provisionally follow are functional not moralistic or ethicalistic. They also have a game-like quality.

So we can enjoy protocols and manners. We can follow rules until they no longer serve. We can even have fun playing with dogmatic people. Everything is held lightly and adopted or discarded as circumstances arise and subside.

Eventually, we enter into a condition of total improvisation. My Sat Guru Anandamayi Ma called this “kheyal,” a kind of improvisational dance.

Our partner is all of existence and all of its creations. When it calls, we respond. There isn’t anything else to explain or anything to solidify.

Goodness

The only way to participate in the unique conversation of each moment is to learn to perceive and follow the wisdom at the heart of all.

This is difficult to grasp without recognizing it directly through your own experience, but reality is made of compassion, devotion, a vast intelligence, creative impulse, and even humor.

Lord Shiva and Samantabhadra are the personifications of all of reality in Trika and Dzogchen respectively. Among his many other names, Lord Shiva is called “the beneficent.” Samantabhadra is the “all good.”

We ultimately don’t need fixed concepts or “forever” rules because being immersed in wisdom and following that is always the most beneficial course.

And what does “beneficial” mean in a reality that is already all good? It means expressing one’s own nature in its full and unfettered bounty.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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