If you run from it, how will you ever attain it.
If the world is a form manifested by God and, if we run from the world, then how can we find God?
You must get to know the world, and you know the world by knowing your self. You know yourself by observing yourself. In your objective observation of your feelings, desires and experiences, you discover what is true and what is false.
What is false is what you have learnt and accepted as real and permanent when it is only acquired and temporary. What can be changed is not real. If it changes into something else, then it is not what it was any longer, it is now what it has become.
What is there about you that is real? Are your views, attitudes and opinions so real? If you find a personality trait in you as natural as eating or sleeping, then you may have found something real.
What is a good sleep, 8 or 5 hours, what does your body really need? How much of your life has been taught of what is correct or incorrect? In learning these differences you will find what is real and what is false, but what is real changes as you go through life, from day to day. What is real today is not what was real yesterday nor what will be real tomorrow. Finding what is real at each moment is living in the present, but finding what is real today and expecting it to be real tomorrow is living in imagination.
Imagination is not where you will find God because it is avoiding reality, it is not the real world. You must find what is real in each moment rather than as your society or upbringing has created and formed you into being. By living fully in reality of each moment you can discover the source of all things by being involved with it rather than avoiding it.
This means to hold but do not grasp, to have the raw egg in your palm but never grasp too tightly that you will break it. In this way you can possess the world forever without it possessing you.
Every spiritual person knows that to be free in heart we must have no attachments, desires or fears. Possessions or desire for possessions, things or money, cause no end of trouble and prevent a heart from becoming pure and at peace.
It is not the material things that cause the disturbance, but the desire. Desire is what muddies the heart and mind, things cannot do that. Our work is to clean the heart of desires and opinions.
That is a very difficult goal to achieve directly, and so the first step is to eliminate the duality of gain and loss from your heart. Gain and loss, success and failure, these dualities are the cause of desires. The fear of loss, the desire for gain and success, this must be discovered and all things brought to equality. When you do not differentiate between gain and loss and find the truth that they are both the same, then your heart is becoming pure. They are the same in that they both change. The changing nature makes them the same as one day what was gained has become what is lost.
How can you do this if you have nothing? That is not possible. To have nothing, to be the hermit in the cave, you possess nothing so you have nothing to lose, and imagine your heart is free from duality and attachments.
If you have a fear of water and live in the desert, then you can say that your whole life, you have had no fear of water. Certainly, you never went on a boat. But your fear resides within you, hidden and unseen.
It is this that we must understand. To conquer the fear of loss, we must have things to lose, and we must lose or face losing them. Watch your possessions and material value go up and down until you become immune to the swings. Build a fortune then see it disappear, how will you react? Do it again, and again until finally there is no thought about your material possessions. Go to sleep without the thought of what your position will be in the morning, and you will not wake up thinking what your position will be later that night.
The Tibetans spend days or weeks creating a mandala, an intricate drawing out of sand. When it is complete, they sweep it away. The starving artist starves because he will not let go of his artistic creation. Is this how to find God, by possessing that which you cannot eat in place of good food?
We hold our imagination, our thoughts and dreams of what a spiritual person should be like, and as we hold those dreams, we starve. That is the meaning of the spiritual Fakir, a person deep in spiritual poverty, possessing a heart filled with desires and ego but empty, poor of God. The true Fakir is one who knows the truth of his real wealth and real poverty and works towards the release of his attachment to the false wealth to gain the real lasting riches of the heart and soul.
You cannot give up what you do not know you have. Live in the world, find what your heart craves, what keeps your mind active, then release yourself through practice and tremendous self efforts to discover what you have so that you may remove it. Then you will find God in your heart, because you will have finally taken a good long look and discover what is there.
Learn by your own direct personal experience the reality of gain and loss, growth and decay, rather than just mindlessly repeating sayings like what goes up must come down, thinking that you understand and are above the feelings when in truth you lie to yourself and stay bound by hidden desires.
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