This, right here, is your life. Sinking deeply into now, here, into life as it is, liberating all hopes for it to be anything else, you are free. Freedom cannot hold out for something new, for anything better or it is not free. It imprisons itself with the surviving optimism.

Have you noticed the habit, the innocent tendency to justify life as it is, to make it more palatable, to say that if your life hadn’t happened exactly that way, you wouldn’t have experienced what you needed to get to where you are? That sweet little tendency is a little trickster. Well-intentioned, it is hope, subtle, repackaged, but hope nonetheless.

Mind is really good at costuming itself, allowing the stripping to commence while it slips into the next room to don new clothes. This particular hope hangs onto a greater purpose, one that works in your favor, that only has your good at heart. It, at its core, says you will be okay. Whatever happens, you are being cared for. It maintains a future where you will be fine and a you to be all right.

It prolongs the pipedream.

THIS that only Is doesn’t have you in mind. You aren’t; only This Is. You, the finite self are a compression of This. This assumes a finite expression and subjectively experiences the finite, you, me and the world, all the objects of perception, sensation, feeling and thought.

Doing so doesn’t make This, the Infinite, finite. This simply compresses Itself and experiences time and space, and within that sense of moments and place appears to exist for a little bit. This you are is always unwinding, decompressing, bound to return to This Itself, no different than a tension spring you squeeze together, flattened compressed, but only for a moment or two.

The ache within you is decompression in action: you returning home. The return momentum cannot be stopped. Some expressions of This will return while still in a body, others will return as they die, as the inner compulsion to hold it together is extinguished. Why some and not all, why some at all, who knows? It just is.

What holds it together? Anything that supports the sense of self … anything. Hope. Desire. Preferences for something else, something other.

What loosens the density of compression? Love. Love is what you are: unconditional, infinite, eternal, non-dimensional YES. Love is YES to life exactly as it is. It is pure willingness to be what you are, as you are. Funny, it’s the greatest act of self love possible and ironically, the most powerful act of self relinquishment in the known world. In love, as love, the separate self comes undone, bounces back, returns to its authentic innocence, its stateless state.

Spring forth.