Express who you are

Every day you want to do many things, from hugging your lover to earning money. Why? What feeling underlies all your hopes and dreams? This feeling is the tension between who you really are and who you assume yourself to be.

Consider your desire for intimate relationship. There are many reasons for engaging in a relationship. But you only feel utterly fulfilled in intimacy when you and your lover trust each other so much that you are willing to let down your guards, open your hearts, and love. This is your deepest desire in intimacy because, in truth, you are open as love—but you assume yourself to be a separate, isolated individual. So you scheme and dream to experience in your relationship what, in truth, you already are.

You want to enjoy financial security because, in truth, you are abundance, although you assume only effort will provide a feeling of ease. You enjoy dangerous sports because in every moment you are at the edge of death—the ultimate edge of winning or losing—and yet your assumed security makes you seek risks. You want to eat chocolate because, deep in your heart, you are blissful fullness, though you often close to its pleasure and so seek its taste.

Through your daily round, you seek to approximate the truth of who you are that you have lost touch with. This drama of approximation is the story of your life. You never quite succeed like you hope to. You never quite get the love you really want. And so you either try harder or give up trying. In either case, you are missing the point of existence.

The open expression of who you really are is the only thing that will free you from the stress of feeling incomplete. In truth, you are what you want.

The farther you wander from who you truly are, the more you crave the qualities you miss. Since you can’t feel the love that lives you, you look to your lover to cherish you. Divorced from your home of unlimited openness, you seek to expand the sphere of your power, the size of your portfolio, the borders of your country. Desiring the freedom of inherent ease, you try to discharge stress through masturbation, conversation, and secret habits of release. You miss the simplicity of being, so you seek it in the warmth of a heroin rush, a fluffy bed, or a ritual cup of coffee.

At times, you fret over your appearance, seeking to find the radiance you truly are. You think to yourself constantly, providing a reflection of your own presence. Yet, in truth, you are utter presence, whether or not you reflect yourself by thinking.

Whenever you are ready, you can stop trying to find what you are precluding and start being who you are in truth. To surrender so completely to be who you are is terrifying—your self-image instantly vanishes. Yet it is the only way to live that is real. Otherwise, in every moment of missing who you truly are, you create a self-image that isn’t the real thing. You feel a lack. This tension of deficiency can wind into an intense twist of desire. Eventually, you can become quite warped.

Craving the depth that you miss, you may find yourself engaging in crime, lying, self-abuse, and terrorizing others—or perhaps just sitting in front of the TV and eating cookies. No matter how extreme or mediocre your misplaced efforts become, you can always open as your source. In the midst of stealing, for instance, you can open as the abundance of life-force that you are. How will you act as abundant fullness? Open as you are, your twist unwinds.

In your most wound-up, naughty moments of sicko indulgence, as well as in your common round of daily drudge, you are only missing who you truly are. Through years of moment-by-moment practice, you can open as every twist and hope. You can live open as love, alive as spontaneous blessing.

What you want is who you are. Open as you are without hesitation.

From Blue Truth by David Deida, Chapter 17.