Evolution of love

SPIRITUAL WINTER TIME

In a real sense, self-inquiry is a spiritually induced form of wintertime. It's not about looking for

a right answer so much as stripping away and letting you see what is not necessary,

what you can do without, what you are without your leaves. In human beings, we do not call these leaves.

We call them ideas, concepts, attachments, and conditioning. All of this forms your identity.

Wouldn't it be terrible if the trees outside identified themselves by their leaves?

These are very flimsy things to be attached to.

Inquiry is a way of inducing a spiritual winter in its most positive sense,

stripping everything to its root, to its core. When we have allowed ourselves to be stripped

and really enter into the interior winter, into all the leaves or thoughts falling out of the mind,

then we may find ourselves falling backward into, as we say in Zen,

who we were before our parents were born. This is a falling into the most essential root of being.

I think there is nothing we, as human beings, resist more than a spiritual winter.

If humans did not resist the stripping away of their own identities and allowed themselves to experience

wintertime, we would all be enlightened. If we just let wintertime dawn in us,

there is a natural stripping away, more like a falling away.

When you are very still and quiet, falling away happens naturally.

If you are not trying to control anything, you feel certain thought patterns

and energetic qualities falling away like leaves or snow falling; it's a delicate falling.

This is what spiritual inquiry is for.

Asking "Who am I?"

is being present in the space of not-knowing and questioning

all your beliefs and assumptions.

The realization of eternal truth comes at the expense of all of your illusions.