Rest in Effortless Presence

Abiding in the present moment is abiding in the presence of the moment. It is a living radiance, a vibrancy that can happen nowhere else. The only place where you will ever be alive is this present moment.

Take your hands, for example. To witness the hands, you do not have to run towards them. You do not have to catch them. To experience your own hands is to see them as they are. You don’t need anyone to tell you to look at them in order to see them. You don’t need to read a book, take a workshop, or use psychedelics to see them. Right now, you can look, right now you can feel, and see that sight and sensation is a miracle. That having hands is a bewildering thing.

Look at your hands and forget what they are. Let astonishment take you by the heart and return you to the wonderment of life.

What effort is needed there? It is like looking out at a tree and appreciating that it is there. You don’t need to wait for an appropriate time. You can do it now. Appreciation is also a key to joy.

Joy does not take effort, peace does not take effort. Rather, it takes one away from effort. It illuminates an effortless resting in openness. That is how joy and peace can happen, naturally like a leaf leaving a tree.

Investigating the natural mind is an effortless task. It is just to look and look at what is looking. It should not strain. It should take away the strain, unbind the tension built up from always looking outward.

So much tension is added by our ideas about it. We become contracted because of contraction, and so much of our suffering is psychological. So begin by relaxing the mind. Just notice the sensations around the head, and let those sensations—like a knot—gently loosen and untie. 

When you are relaxed, open, and receptive, you are in a state of allowing. If you have attachment traumas, it can be difficult to allow life as it is. Sometimes we have restrictions and constrictions that prevent us from fully allowing the moment to be. But the moment will be as it is, with or without us, and so our resistance does not affect the moment but only our perception of it. When we have difficulty allowing or accepting, there is a hypervigilance that hurts the host. 

Acceptance can accept resistance; however, resistance cannot accept acceptance. 

Do you see? 

Allowance and acceptance usher us to realisation or awakening to true reality. 

Allowing is a type of freedom. Acceptance is an embrace that makes beauty visible.

It is, of course, silly to think that nonduality needs your acceptance of it, or that your resistance makes any difference. On the one hand, you perceive the intimacy of allowing life in its totality: in its messy beauty, in its ugly wonder. On the other hand, you know that you do not allow life anything. The allowing just unwinds certain aspects of the psyche that are bound in tension. How could you allow reality? You only allow parts of yourself to be free from the need to allow or deny. The culmination is to be free—no tension, no release, no acceptance, no denial. Then what? 

You can rest. 

You can rest the time-bound mind from its relentless conquest.

You can rest this one body, just as it is.

In rest, there is no destination.

Resting where you are, you become where you are.

Taking rest is allowing the world to be just as it is.

When you allow the world to be just as it is, it presents itself to you, and your rest becomes the presence of receiving that gift.

Rest in this presence because when you rest, you see that this presence has always rested in you.

When we are busy trying to go this way or that way, stirring the pot, wanting to get somewhere, wanting to achieve something, this presence becomes obscured. Quality rest is about clarity, and clarity is one of the most valuable currencies that you have. Because if you see clearer, if you see with a certain light, you see farther, you see the world as it is. And in that light, you come closer to who you are. 

Rest as who you are—nothing more and nothing less. 

Resting as who you are is not trivial. It's a simple process, and it's just to be.

Rest is receptivity to receive this presence.

Invest in rest.

Rest in peace, rest in peacefulness.

Wake up and rest in peace.

Rest in peace.