Leave your self out there

 Go ahead, climb up;

on the velvet top

of the highest stakes table.

Place yourself as the bet.

Look God in the eyes,

and for once in your life,

finally, lose!

 

(Adyashanti, enlightenment is a gamble)

 

 

Everyone is driven by the same evolutionary make; we follow what we feel will give us pleasure and avoid what we reckon will makes us worse off. This applies to the Wall Street broker as well as the hard-core spiritual seeker, the drifter as much as the farmer. It’s just that conditioned mind has fabricated a different story to follow for each of us, but the optimization process at work is precisely the same for everyone.

 

Can we step out of our mind dominance. A few have, but most of us fool ourselves about our available free will until the end of days. Adyashanti’s poem alerts us to the necessities of leaving all that we consider self—consciously as well as subconsciously—on the table. How exactly, if we can’t even see the problem statement which is hard-wired into our dna? Well, open up to the present moment and just look. The answer presents itself.