To the ego or personal sense of self there is enormous and instinctive resistance to the possibility of liberation. Liberation is intuited by the ego as annihilation and tremendous fear and a scrambling for survival is generated in the face of it. And for good reason. In liberation the ego falls away or falls into the background and is replaced by the Self. Liberation is liberation from the ego as the dominant, controlling identity. Nothing of value is lost however and ever

I discuss with Amir Freimann the sense of the personal self falling away and being replaced by the impersonal or universal Self.

What changed absolutely everything was the recognition that the peaceful, timeless expanse I experienced in meditation was not an aspect of me (the personal self), but was instead the Ground of Being, my own Self, the very thing I had been seeking. This peaceful, timeless expanse was not a special experience for the contracted small 'I' but was the infinite, fulfilled Self I had always been, my true nature. All I had to do was to recognize it and surrender to it.

If you have ever felt a sudden calm or a quiet place open up inside you, if you have ever found yourself in a subtle space of silence or stillness, then you have found the doorway to your Self and your own liberation. We don't pay enough attention to this doorway, we don’t honour its significance. We are too busy waiting for 'the big experience' to transform us that we overlook the 'Way' that is inviting us in. Pay attention to this subtle space that is at once new and yet so

I love that the tree is not over there but in here I love that a medieval shoe is not history but current life I love that all the animals and stars belong to me and I love that the maelstrom of simultaneous arising is all mine.

When you are swamped with emotion when you can see no way out when the fragility of your humanness lies broken open before you There is nothing to be done except be there without running or justifying or explaining or avoiding Just be there and allow life to shape you and mould you and change you and refine you and burn away your falsehoods in the only way it can.