The Heart Must Have a Single Yearning

In one of Meister Eckart’s beautiful sermons, he writes that anyone can have God. God is available to everyone equally easily, but you have to want only God. If your mind is divided and you want something else as well, then you can’t have that which is the Absolute. If you want liberation, you can’t want something other than liberation as well. So it does require a great momentous decision as to what you really want. And because the ego is a split mind, it can never want only one thing; it is not capable of being wholehearted. So the wanting must come from the soul, from that level of your being that recognizes that there is nothing else of value. Everything else is temporary and superficial and lacking in essence, except that one true essence of Being.

When we are wholehearted in wanting only liberation, that is when the grace of God’s presence is given. But we have to want it unconditionally—without trying to bargain, without having all kinds of questions and doubts that we want answered first, and without fearing the unknown, because the great mystery cannot be known until you are one with God. It requires great faith and great trust and great ripeness, so that you recognize that you are not losing anything. You must understand that the ego is the mind in exile from God. If you want to come out of exile, you can, but you have to come out of the ego to do it. But the ego doesn’t want to be exiled from its world. It likes Babylon, it likes Egypt, it likes the sensual realm more than the spiritual that it does not know. We have to be willing to recognize the bliss that is present in God-consciousness that cannot be equaled by anything that can be offered by anything in the phenomenal plane.

So the test is whether the ego is willing to give up its most prized possession, which is its narrative—its incessant thinking—in order to know the joy of silence. That silence erases the ego and brings the emergence of God-consciousness once again, without effort. But the mind will only be silenced if there is something you love more than your own textile. If you have any remaining attachment to thoughts, to questions, to doubts, to images, to desires of whatever sort—or even to whatever knowledge can be gained conceptually—all these are temptations that keep you distant from the One Self. So there must be a letting go of everything that you know and everything that you think you know or want to know that is not God. Then you will know all without having to think.

The more that we practice meditation and enter into the silence, the more we receive that vibrational frequency that will bring us peace and the more the value of having a quiet mind and a peaceful heart will become clear—to the point that, when the consciousness matures, it will recognize that this is all that is necessary and all that can save us from suffering. Until we know that internally, the motivation to drop the thinking in order to be in that current of shakti (of energy that is love and the bliss of God’s presence) for a time will be overwhelming—for a time we will feel that we cannot contain any more. But as you surrender to it, you will realize that the container that you thought couldn’t contain it is not what you are, and that container itself dissolves into the energy. The mind has to ripen naturally to be ready for this. It cannot be forced; it has to be learned from experience that there is nothing else that will bring fulfillment. But once we have come to that conclusion, then the realization of God is effortless because it is our nature.

Audio File The Heart Must Have a Single Yearning.mp3