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Face Everything
The 3rd of 5 tennants.
Date: 5/21/2006 6:20:53 AM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 2829 times The Third Tenet:
Face Everything and Avoid Nothing
The third tenet is the ultimate form of spiritual practice. It tells us that if we want to be free we must be willing to Face Everything and Avoid Nothing at all times, in all places, under all circumstances.
Most forms of spiritual practice are ultimately about the cultivation of awareness, and facing everything and avoiding nothing means cultivating a capacity for awareness that is profound. The ego is deeply attached to self-image and is always manipulating its environment in such a way that it will only see the reflection of itself that it is seeking for. The ego’s tendency is to avoid, deny, and reject any information that it receives, from the outside world or from our own internal experience, that would in any way contradict that self-image. So as long as we are identifying with ego, we will choose to be blind to the less wholesome aspects of our self, and inevitably will act out of those conditioned and unconscious impulses and wreak havoc all around us.
The liberated relationship to life is one that is free from ego. It is only the ego that has a self-image to protect, and that image creates a barrier, a wall that shields the self from too much reality. The authentic self is already free, radically unselfconscious, and only interested in what is real and true. It has no image to protect and no motive to avoid anything. So the reason to practice the third tenet is to shatter the ego’s defenses in every moment. Facing everything and avoiding nothing is the practice that removes all obstacles to the spontaneous, uninhibited emergence of the authentic self.
Only an individual who truly wants to be free will be prepared to abandon the pretense of the ego and to see things as they are. Only one who strives for transparency, authenticity, and emptiness of self, and who is deeply motivated by the impulse to evolve, is going to be able to face reality in this way. Anyone else, in the end, will find that they are too invested in maintaining the pretense of a separate self to even begin to practice the third tenet in earnest. But as we begin to identify less and less with the fears and desires of the ego and more and more with the evolutionary passion of the authentic self, we will experience less fear, hesitation, and resistance to seeing what is true. We will find the strength and the moral courage to be able to bear whatever we need to bear in order to face everything and avoid nothing, at all times, in all places, under all circumstances. Why? Because we want to be free more than anything else. We want to liberate the self from the grip of ego so that consciousness itself will be free to evolve through us. Our capacity for this degree of awareness and self-knowledge is completely dependent upon our intention to be free, because in that we align with the pure passion of the authentic self, and the very motive to avoid is transcended.
Andrew Cohen
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