The Naked Truth
by Kosi

Around the world different spiritual perspectives, teachings, lineages, practices, ideas, realizations, and thoughts about freedom, self-realization, enlightenment, and the vast consciousness described as God, or pure being, are bantered about like a ping pong ball bouncing from one side of the table to another. This esoteric tug of war between different perspectives has evolved into an epic struggle to explain the unexplainable. Often witty mind twisting rhetoric leaves students simply scratching their heads at worst or at best leaves them in total awe of the mind stopping moment of self-realization. But just hearing a mind-twisting phrase ultimately leaves you in the limbo of conceptualized understanding with no real direct experience of the living freedom you truly are.  

Seldom do teachers have the courage to stop beating around the existential bush and speak the naked truth—with no attempt to sugar coat the rugged, ruthless, intensity required for real spiritual evolution. How many teachers are willing to stop trying to captivate an audience with their seemingly all knowing cloak of guru wisdom, personal charm, or mind numbing rhetoric, and simply tell the truth as the infinitude they are pointing to? How many teachers are willing to stand up in front of their students and allow themselves to be stripped totally naked of their precious role of teacher, master, enlightened one, or self-realized fluff, and simply lay it all down and be nakedly human? How many teachers have this kind of courage? Or for that matter, how many students have this kind of courage?

Only the truly courageous demonstrate the uncommon courage necessary for entering the infinite cave of the heart—the eternal realm from which no one ever returns. Only the truest of the true have this kind of naked ruthless courage. Any teacher, no matter how many years they have meditated, or how much they have inquired, sweated, cried, or realized, is not extraordinary, but rather is simply an ordinary human being. After all, who is the teacher really? Is the teacher an inflated ego or personality? Is the teacher limited to a physical form? Or is the true teacher something more eternal, raw, naked, and deeply intimately here as something far reaching—something intangible and indescribable—something deeper than any words could ever hope to convey—something that can never be encapsulated with any thought or realization no matter how profound. What is this something? Who is this something? Who is the real guru—the real teacher?

The answer lives in the direct discovery of the eternal radiant master within you that never says a single solitary word and, at the same time, is the source of all words—the solitary one from which all words emerge and vanish into—the unknowable intelligent radiant void of the heart. Only those who have the courage to be naked of every role, strategy, desire, or attachment—only those who have surrendered fully and vanished into the unknowable realm of the heart—possess the humility, honesty, and clarity, necessary to speak the raw, uncomfortable, naked truth—you are nothing—and even this says way too much.

All words crumble into dust at the feet of this holy master who is waiting silently to be discovered in the void of your own heart.  The radiant silence within you that never speaks, never sleeps, is always aware, and silently receives what you are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, deeper than any identity and much deeper than your senses that are sensing. It is the realm of unknowing that reveals the eternal knower—the timeless eternal realm of your own heart—a wisdom so vast and all encompassing it defies all attempts to describe.

The teddy bear cuddly spirituality of lovely pink hearts and pastel bluebirds flies out the window with this kind of rugged and real honesty. The ferocious truth is; the lion of consciousness within you is waiting patiently to devour any idea of you, shred any concept of enlightenment, teacher, student, or any myth about what enlightenment will give you or how it will transform you. It quite literally is the end of you that reveals the truth of you. This death of you is essential in order to discover the eternity that is you. It is a return to the ordinary wonderment of life within you and all around you—the bliss of perfect wisdom that remains untouched by anything that flows through your life.  This kind of raw and real truth telling is simply essential for any real evolution of your spiritual development.

Ultimately, no idea, thought, or perspective touches the untouchable presence of God that lives within your own heart. This untouchable one is here with nothing added and nothing subtracted—period. No circumstance, feeling, or thought produces this presence or changes it—the living eternity is simply always here and now—free of any circumstance, feeling, thought, or storm that emerges in your life experience. Freedom is never ever about getting anything, fixing anything, or changing your circumstances—it has nothing to do with your circumstances—period. Freedom is free of the mind and its endless stream thought—freedom has nothing to do with any thought no matter how wise or enlightened words might seem—silence is the essence of the real guru.

Freedom has nothing to do with all of your strategies to get whatever you think you want, keep whatever you think you have, or any idea of how you might generate a newer better transformed you. Your mind and ego, infused with your genetics, or the genetic mind, will always conjure up various strategies to protect your body, and whatever you imagine your body to be, which is the deeply ingrained egoic identity that keeps you feeling like you are separate from everyone and everything. Just one deep look into the void of emptiness in your own heart cuts through this primitive primal mirage and ruthlessly reveals your life with all of its apparent ups and downs is totally and completely empty and meaningless. This might seem a bit depressing until you realize how totally free of any meaning life actually is—a deep realization that life is completely empty and it is absolutely meaningless that it is empty and meaningless—in other words no words can imprison this eternal formless reality that you are and always will be.

Freedom is free of all desire and attachment—free of happiness and sadness—free of the paradox of life. No words can ever adequately describe the living eternal presence, which can only be intimately discovered in the willingness to die to the idea of you so you can discover directly the living truth of you—a peace and joy that surpasses all understanding—the clear awareness that is unaffected by anything.

The uncommon courage of freedom lives in the willingness to be stripped naked of everything—and vanish completely into the unknowable river of consciousness within you that can never be transformed, killed, burned, or destroyed. The direct discovery of this presence that is not a presence, emptiness that is not emptiness, and freedom that is not freedom—is the essence of a much deeper realization—the clear awareness eternally untouched by anything is the real guru.

Ultimately, everything that is born must eventually die. The great key to real spiritual evolution is your own direct discovery of the living presence within you that can never die simply because this presence was never born. Nothing is more naked than That.

Nothing is more mind stopping than THAT and THAT Thou ART. This is the real and ONLY GURU.

Those with ears let them hear. 

Tat Sat

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