BURNING IN LOVE’S FIRE
Sometimes [God] cleans your house gently,
dismantling it room by room.
But often, she just comes in with a torch,
and you feel in your gut the fire burn
in the center of your separate comfort,
and you watch the contents of your house
melt and turn to ash,
and the roof blow off.
And just when you think
there is nothing more that she could take,
she opens the ground beneath
the barely intact shell of your house,
and all the levels of your being
fall into the space that has no name,
and you are left alone in all the world,
without a map, without a path, without a point of view.1
This description of part of the awakening and embodying process does not sound appealing, does it? For some there may be very little resistance and hence a smoother ride, of course; but for strong egos with a great attachment to the “I can do it myself” mentality, there may be many things that need to be dismantled—arrogance, resistance, self-centeredness, separation, and the intellectualization of spirituality, to name a few. Divine Truth has many ways of subtracting what is not essential, of wearing away our attachment to a false self.
LOVE’S FIRE
The love-intoxicated Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi frequently spoke of love as a fire, an invitation to be “cooked by God.” Thinking Truth only looks like pleasure often misleads us, and so we avoid the fire that is the agent of our transformation. We are the fire and simultaneously the wood that is burning. We are the flame and simultaneously the moth flying into it, scorching its wings, giving itself to light.
It may feel like the opposite to our mind, yet it is love itself that consumes our illusions, burns away our sense of separation, and melts egoic identification in the radiant light of the Divine. The action of love is the action of Truth. Initially, what begins to melt our habitual resistances to life and attachment to separation may seem to manifest as suffering. Desire, longing, betrayal, grief, pain, illness, woundedness—all can lead us inside ourselves and open the heart to its inward journey. Of course, an experience of love in human form or our spiritual practices can do the same. Whatever breaks open our heart, mind, or body can be the very invitation we need in order to look more deeply and be surrendered more thoroughly to the process that transforms our illusions. Love can use anything, including suffering, in the service of awakening. Whatever begins to melt our identification with what we are not could be called “Love’s fire.”
This is sometimes experienced as a very thorough housecleaning, and the places of our separation—whether they are experienced as ideas, images, stories, memories, feelings, or body sensations—become the fuel for the fire. When these places of resistance are pulled into the action of Love’s fire, it causes friction. We feel the heat. And yet the more we resist, the more intense the blaze.
BECOME THE BURNING
The best advice is to become the burning. Welcome resistance as fuel for the fire that purifies, refines, transforms, and ultimately surrenders us to Love itself. Yet, like any fire, at the beginning there is smoke, crackling, heat—experience that is not always comfortable to the parts of ourselves we have determined are separate from Truth. Whatever we have rejected or defended against, held apart from Love, or tried to hide from our own clarity is invited into the fire. But make no mistake, this is not the action of an ego; it is the action of the fire of Truth. Eventually, nothing can remain outside the heart; nothing is separate; nothing is unwelcome. To live in Love’s fire is to be open to the moment as it is, to surrender to the greater knowing present inside our heart, to become a lover of reality.
Love’s fire can ignite both before and after an initial awakening, once the green wood of our egoic ambition has been dried out and readied to be the tinder for Love’s flame. Sometimes our wood burns very slowly; sometimes something is seen clearly and burns up in a flash. Some of us have much more to see through than others; this is just the way it is, and there is no use complaining. We have been given what we have been given. We accept our starting place, which is always the reality and truth of this moment.
Concepts, points of view, anger, blaming, shaming, hatred, grief, prejudice, fear of death—whatever creates the pain of separation—is invited into the fire. But it is not invited into the fire to be “rid” of it, but rather to transform it, to allow it to be seen clearly and melted into Oneness, becoming one with the fire, one with the Truth. This is Love’s way. It totally accepts whatever is arising and invites it to return to its true home.
The peaceful waters of Truth can sometimes become a raging fire that consumes our identities, sacred images, and every single idea we’ve held about how Truth should move. It challenges our long-held positions and flushes untruth from all its hiding places within us and within our relationships. It can crack open our hearts and unwind our bodies. Love returns for the whole of itself—including our suffering, illusions, and unloved places. For some minds, this process can feel blessed; for some, it can feel very messy. Sometimes it can feel like a blessed mess. Often our pain in the process seems to be in direct proportion to our refusal of it.
Identified mind does not react kindly to this heat. But that is the point of the fire of Truth; it dismantles our identification with what we are not—the stories, the separation, the false self. As most of you know, the ego does not let go willingly. It holds on for dear life, because it imagines its separate life is what is most dear rather than the glorious wholeness of one’s being.
If, in an attempt to rid ourselves of something unwanted, we are trying to let all things pass like clouds in the sky or trying hard to hold on to an identity we have made of a concept called “awareness,” we may not yet know that the clouds and the sky are of the same essence; illusions and Buddha nature share the same ground; heaven and hell arise as concepts that are seen by a single light.
Sometimes Love’s fire feels like a wildfire raging through our being. Sometimes it just gently melts something back into its Source with the utmost tenderness. Masculine and feminine, Shiva and Shakti, form and formlessness, light and dark, strength and vulnerability, teacher and student, ignorance and enlightenment—all are being returned to the nameless ground where, as Meister Eckhart noted, “distinction never gazed.” Life, or our teachers, will provide medicine for our illusions, for our attachment to a separate self. But this medicine differs depending on where and in what ways we are holding on to our egocentric views, our center as a supposedly separate self, our selfish actions, and our fear of Love. The medicine of the Divine appears to deliver exactly what is needed into our lives, but this cannot generally be seen except in retrospect.
EVEN “REALIZATION” IS BURNED IN THE FIRE
If ever there is a time you may feel you have been delivered into the jaws of the tiger, this time of burning is it. There is fire inside the tiger’s mouth. And eventually, the fire will take away even “realization.” It is the action of Love and yet can sometimes feel like an act of destruction. The only things that are being destroyed, however, are our illusions.
I once described this process of being surrendered as akin to giving up after fighting a very long illness. There was the feeling that the mind was totally spent, the body exhausted, as both were finally surrendered to fate. There were so many tears, so many years of trying to “get it,” so much resisting, so much emptying, so much seeing again and again how separation keeps finding more and more subtle ways to maintain itself. While there is an end to seeking, there is no end to love’s fire of Truth or its action within us. There is no end to the ways the Infinite might show itself as life.
The mind is like a spark that keeps jumping out of the flame until it finally knows that its peace lies in remaining at home, home in the darkness of not knowing the next moment, not knowing the next response, not knowing what words or no words will pour forth from our home ground. In the deepest burning, there is no trace left of wood, not even ash. Yet here we are, here is the “I am” once again. Here is an ordinary being living an ordinary life, content in knowing that the wind of grace and the flame of Truth are moving from the Heart of Awareness as its own expression as this moment, this question, this dissolving of the question.
There is no claim to perfection. The process of being surrendered in Love’s flame is, in fact, very humbling. That is the point: to empty us of all that stands in the way of being a true and authentic person, not a perfect person. Perfection lies in the wholeness of Being, yet that Being is you, is me, is this very life with all of its apparent imperfections.
THE BEAUTY OF IMPERFECTION
The description of being burned in Love’s fire sounds very poetic, but you may wonder: What about my imperfect life? What about my faults, my flaws, my weaknesses, my unskillful moments, my doing and feeling things that I know are not aligned with Truth? What am I to do with all that? There is a form here, a body here, a life here as a person in the world. And what about this very imperfect world of ours—filled with wars, greed, poverty, hunger, slavery, racism, global warming, inequality, broken political systems? What about this HUMAN thing? Aren’t these concerns real and important? Will my passions for justice, peace, and equality be burned in the fire?
We don’t know, do we? We do not know how life will express itself in us once the Infinite has awakened within. We do know how it is moving in this moment—the only one where we are truly living and the only one where we can be awake. What are you moved to do? What does your heart open to? What is it afraid to open to? What do you love? What is your deepest desire? How might you live if Love instead of fear were living your life? These are questions that may help us open to the Truth within and how it wants to move in our lives. When we want Truth more than fleeting forms of happiness, Truth will show us the way to a deeper dimension.
We may imagine that we cannot awaken to Truth until we have perfected a “self,” until every conditioned illusion is burned in the fire. In our desire to try to be a better, more peaceful, loving, or wise person, we often find ourselves locked in an ongoing inner battle, feeling anxious about our own and the world’s imperfections. In taking ourselves to be a separate entity, we do not see our wholeness.
In my first private meeting with Adyashanti, I asked to hold his mala. As I did so, he told me that in Buddhism the 108 beads of a mala can stand for the 108 illusions, but that those beads were the same as the Buddha bead (the so-called guru bead that begins and ends one’s counting of breaths or mantras with a mala). He spoke of a passage from Seng-Ts’an’s Verses on the Faith-Mind that describes how the one and the many “intermingle without distinction,” and that to live realizing this is to be without anxiety in the face of imperfection.
Our resistance is melted in many ways; this continuously delivers us to an acceptance of the moment as it is. To be without anxiety in the face of imperfection is to know that there are myriad interconnected causes and conditions for life moving as it does, but that ultimately life moves as itself, as a single unfolding in a timeless reality. To accept life or ourselves in the impermanence of any given moment says nothing about what will occur in the next moment. Openness gives us the ability to remain open, not simply to the suffering and insanity of our world or the seeming imperfections of our reactions to it, but to how our deepest nature might want to move in response.
We begin to see the beauty of imperfection—like the chipped cup that we love in our cupboard or the misshapen bowl that seems somehow soulful and beautiful. There is an entire Japanese aesthetic, known as wabi-sabi, that celebrates imperfection, incompleteness, and impermanence. Perhaps it is our imperfections that make each of us unique and deeply loved exactly as we are by our true Self. What is perfectly whole is simply seeing its own expressions, its own reflections mirrored in the Heart of Awareness.