“I’m inviting you to discover what is deeper than any pattern, deeper than personality, deeper than success or failure, deeper than worth or worthlessness. This radiance that is undeniable is always present. It’s the truth of who you are.”
Experiencing Worthlessness All the Way
We lie to make ourselves look like we’re worth something, or we dramatize our worthlessness to seek support for it. But what is being avoided is actually experiencing worthlessness. Real worthlessness. Not worth anything. When all the lies are uncovered, you are left with this raw, ugly, unlovable, worthless thing. Then you can tell the deeper truth. If you stop there—I am this raw, worthless, unlovable thing—it is intolerable, so you begin lying again, or you go to a self-help class, or give yourself some good affirmations. That’s all fine. It’s all part of animal behavior, too.
But what I am inviting you to is the experience of this seemingly essential worthlessness all the way. Without that, you cannot know the absolute truth of who you are. You may have glimpses of it in moments of grace, or in nature or meditation, or being in love; but to realize the truth of yourself, you have to tell the truth all the way down, to where it exists as who you are. Not exists as something you’ve learned you are, or hope you are, or have written out a hundred times that you are, as in, “I am worth something. I am God’s child. I am worthy of love.” What has to be faced is the worst of what you think yourself to be, and without the lies you have told to cover it.
No Thing at All
If you’re willing to tell the truth all the way down to the depths, you meet the abyss, the huge hole that you have been running to avoid all your life: the intimation that really you are worse than worthless, you are nothing at all. The extraordinary discovery at the heart of this is, in reality, you are nothing at all, and everything about you as a something has been a lie. Your identity, whatever it may be, based on your body, your intellect, your emotional depth, or your spiritual attainment, is a lie. When you get down to this abyss, you are no thing.
This is the point at which most people flee back up to the top, back into the lie, because the lie is more comfortable. The lie has more hope. It has more promise. But if you are sincere in your intention to really know the truth, even though knowing the truth gives you nothing—no happiness, no release, no universal love, just itself—if you want the truth that badly, then you will be willing to fall into the abyss. When you meet that abyss with your full attention, you discover the truth is that you are nothing. And this is a great revelation.
In our minds, nothing means non-existence, absence, death. In our minds, when something becomes nothing, it is vaporized, gone. If we are nothing, that means we don’t exist, and that is terrifying. So, we would rather exist as something worthless that could perhaps someday develop some worth than to exist as nothingness.
That is the challenge of this invitation: to see the lies, and drop your consciousness through them, to feel the burn, the pain, the ache, the horror, the delusion, the lie, the cheating. And to think, “Oh my God, I’m worse than all of that. I am nothingness.” And there is the secret. This is full circle.
The extraordinary report from everyone who has met that abyss of nothingness, including myself, is that no thingness is who you are, awake, conscious, in love; it is freedom, self-recognition, everything you have been looking for in defining yourself as somebody worth something. What you have been seeking is right here in the depth of your being and has been here all along. This is coming home.
