Original Love

1. Original Love is Our True Home

You are already home. The foundation of your psyche is an indestructible, unstainable love.

All sickness is homesickness. The core premise is that human suffering stems from a feeling of being exiled from our true nature, which is an inherent, boundless love. This "original love" is the unseen bedrock of life, a pervasive, primordial love that underlies everything we experience. It's the most reliable home we carry within us, accessible through stillness and quiet.

The universe loves you. This isn't a romantic or selfish love, but a deep appreciation, cherishing, and compassion that is unconditional. The universe is continually giving itself, making you, and giving you life and awareness. To experience this love in our hearts is to unwrap the gift of life, even amidst challenges.

Meditation is the path. This book serves as a guide to finding this "original love" through meditation. It's a clear, deep stillness that meets our profound spiritual yearnings without rituals, doctrines, or institutional power, allowing us to feel spiritually fulfilled in our ordinary lives.

2. Mindfulness: Coming Home to Yourself

To discover and develop mindfulness is to learn to inhabit and occupy the present moment in ways that can certainly help greatly with stress and anxiety.

Slowing down to live. Most of us filter present-moment experience through habitual internal chatter, compromising our awareness. Mindfulness, or sati, is about slowing down, parking the "car" of our busy minds, and walking through life at a pace where we can experience its rich sensory details. It's about coming home to this moment, now, and recognizing it as already complete and a treasure.

Loving our obstacles. The journey begins by settling down and clearly seeing what's happening, including our inner turmoil. The "five hindrances"—desire, aversion, dullness, restlessness, and doubt—are common obstacles. Instead of resisting them, we learn to welcome them with warm, compassionate attention, finding their sensation in the body and allowing them to be present. This act of welcoming transforms them, fostering self-love and expanding our awareness.

Mindfulness is heart-centered. While often perceived as a mental exercise, mindfulness is fundamentally a matter of the heart. When the heart opens, even a little, practice becomes easier and a "treasure house of warmth and love." This self-love, or "loving awareness," is crucial for healing and developing a positive attitude toward life, allowing us to appreciate the wealth given to us in any moment.

3. Embrace Support: You Are Not Alone

To recognize our infinite dependence is to awaken to the support and interconnection we are necessarily part of.

Beyond self-power. Meditation is not a solitary pursuit; it's deeply intertwined with support and connection. While "self-power" (jiriki) involves our individual effort, "other-power" (tariki) encompasses the guidance, community, and unseen forces that aid our journey. This includes the "Three Treasures": Buddha (example), dharma (teachings), and sangha (community).

A web of dependences. Our existence is an intricate web of reliance on elements like air, heat, water, and earth, as well as our ancestors, families, and cultures. Recognizing this infinite dependence lightens our load and shifts our perception from isolated individuals to nodes within a vast, interconnected system. This can awaken a profound sense of being loved by all creation.

Unseen powers and soul work. Beyond tangible support, we can open to immaterial forms of connection through "depth psychology," dream work, shamanic ceremony, or religious archetypes. These "imaginal realms" offer guidance from archetypal figures (like the deer, skeleton, or Father Zosima) that can catalyze healing and growth, fostering gratitude, humility, and compassion—a "holy triad" that connects us to a deeper, soul-level love.

4. Absorption: Falling in Love with the Present

To fall in love with the moment at hand is a blessed thing.

Merging with the moment. This stage, known as absorption or samadhi, involves entering deeply fulfilling states of mind akin to "flow states" (selfless, timeless, effortless, rich). Here, the distinction between ourselves and the world blurs and dissolves, leading to a profound sense of peace and joy that arises simply from being present. It's like falling in love with life itself, where the moment seems to have been waiting for us to notice it.

The gold standard of meditation. Jhana states are a series of progressively refined absorptions, from rapture and joy to profound equanimity and formless experiences. These states are not externally induced but arise from the practice itself, offering a "healing balm" that can mend psychological polarization and connect us to an "amniotic fluid" of peace and subtle joy. They are a "river of cream" that nourishes the soul.

Beauty as a gateway. Absorption often manifests as a heightened appreciation for beauty, whether in a sickroom, a pelican's flight, or a plane taking off. This experience of beauty takes us out of ourselves, opening a channel of connection where "me" and the object become intimate, even fused. It's a recognition of the inherent beauty of being, a profound love for the world that dissolves our sense of separation.

5. Awakening: Seeing Through the Illusion of Self

To “awaken” has much to do with this illusory sense of self. It is to see that the sense of “I, me, mine,” has been an illusion.

The great reversal. Awakening is a radical shift, a "leap out of the skin-bag" of the separate self. It's the direct, experiential discovery of "non-dual" reality, where the distinction between "me" and "not me" vanishes. This isn't an intellectual understanding but a firsthand realization that our sense of a fixed, isolated self has been a mirage, a "cosmic joke."

Oneness and emptiness. Awakening reveals that all things are part of a single fabric, a panoramic union where we are inseparable from everything. This "oneness" is often accompanied by a profound sense of love and belonging. "Emptiness" (sunyata) is not a void, but the recognition that phenomena lack inherent, independent existence; they are transparent, evanescent appearances, like a "controlled hallucination."

A mind-eradicating change. This experience is a "revolution in the heart," a "mind-eradicating change" that transforms our relationship to everything. It's like waking from a dream, where all elements are seen as part of a single dream consciousness. While disorienting, it's ultimately a liberation, revealing an unassailable truth and an absolute love at the core of our being.

6. Emptiness is Boundless Generosity

What blazes forth is utter “absence.” And what it pours forth as is all phenomena.

The source of all. Emptiness, far from being nihilistic, is the ultimate source of all existence—the "plenum" of Christian mysticism, the "pleroma" of Neoplatonism. It is infinite creative generosity, continually "blazing forth" as this moment, as all phenomena. To experience this intimately is to find that we are not separate from it; we are this boundless, creative love.

Profound relief and joy. Touching or tasting this fundamental emptiness brings profound relief from suffering and triggers an eruption of joy. It's the discovery that bare existence itself, stripped of all show and disguises, is an unalloyed goodness. This unassailable truth is an absolute love—perfect, untouchable, and the ultimate core of our being.

Heartbreak and love. Awakening, particularly to emptiness, can be a kind of heartbreak, as our hearts open wider than imaginable to encompass both the world's beauty and its suffering. This spaciousness can hold all our pain, and sometimes, profound grief itself can be a gateway to realizing the universe's silent, embracing love.

7. Integration: Returning to the Marketplace with Love

Here we come back to ordinary life with a simple, spontaneous wish to serve this world and its beings the best we can, as servants of original love now, spreading the love however and wherever we can, the best we can.

Beyond awakening. The journey doesn't end with awakening; it's about integrating these insights into ordinary life. The "Ten Oxherding Pictures" illustrate this path, moving from seeking and glimpsing the "ox" (original love) to taming it, riding it home, forgetting it, and finally, returning to the marketplace with "gift-bestowing hands."

Ordinary life, transformed. Awakening doesn't require abandoning our lives but reconnects us more intimately with them. It fosters a "prosocial" shift, where our efforts are joyfully directed toward the well-being of others, becoming less self-centered and more "allocentric." This is about living a perfectly normal life, but with a heart full of love and an intention to serve.

The glory of being fully alive. The ultimate goal is to embody original love so completely that it becomes second nature, an "unconscious competence." Like the elderly couple in "Short Friday" who were already living in heaven, our lives can become so aligned with this boundless love that the distinction between the sacred and the mundane dissolves. Our greatest gift to the universe is to be our fully alive, unique selves, radiating this love.

8. The Path is a Blend of Effort and Grace

Enlightenment is an accident, and practice makes us accident-prone.

A natural state. Awakening is a natural, innate property of consciousness, not something we can reliably induce or construct. Practices are methods that increase the likelihood of stumbling into what is already awake within and around us. It's a revelation, a "grace" that "falls" on us, often requiring a "reversal" of our usual understanding and a letting go of control.

The "sound barrier" analogy. Just as pilots had to reverse or release controls to break the sound barrier, awakening often involves going against our natural tendencies or letting go of our grip on what we think we need. This paradoxically leads to a deeper, more dependable fulfillment, freeing us to appreciate life's joys from a place of appreciation rather than need or attachment.

Patience and surrender. The path is a long project, requiring patience and a willingness to let go of the wish for self-transcendence. It's about allowing the "wish for self-transcendence quiet down, letting it settle, letting it go quiet, letting it quietly die its own sweet death." This surrender, cultivated through consistent practice, prepares us for the moment when, paradoxically, we may no longer "need" awakening, and it reveals itself.

Last updated: January 15, 2026