You can have the sky or you can have your ideas, but you can't - have - both.
I'm not talking about creative ideas that jazz you up and inspire the eventual beauty that flows out of you–those you can have forever and ever and still have the sky. Cause those come from the sky. Those are the sky, capsuled into nuggets of possibility.
Rather, what I'm talking about are the ideas that parse and eschew your understanding of the world and the things within it. The ideas about other people, about situations, about how things are or how things ought to be. The ideas that say this moment is anything less than perfect.
This moment might be painful, and this moment he or she might be homeless or diseased–and while we wish for the best for all and do see that certain things could perhaps go in a direction more aligned with ease, simplicity, and love–that does not make this moment or any situation wrong. Somehow, this moment and all the things it are one seamless, perfect whole.
I'm talking about the ideas that masquerade as intelligence, but are really nothing more than ceilings, boxes, steel walls around the heart. The ideas that say you already know what that person is like, before you really do. The ideas that say those other people are awful, because they're talking about "superficial things." The ideas that say life is or ought to be this way or that.
You can have the open sky, or you can have your ideas, but you can't have both. Because when you're engaging with those ideas and deciding that they're real, you're moving out of that union with that vast unified sky and into a field of separation. In that space, you know too much. In that space, you have too many ideas. In that space, you are already full of selfhood, and so there is little room to perceive the ubiquity of love and its shifting forms. Empty your cup to know what is real. Let yourself be filled from there.
And then, you realize you can't have the open sky, because you become the open sky. You, now, are the open sky itself. Only the possessive, identified self belieives it can have that open sky, achieve enlightenment, become an idealized version of itself. Rather, as we allow our orientation to once again rest in that vast space of oneness and love, it is a merging and a beingness, a beingness of that open sky–and we know, there is nothing to have, and everything to be.
And then, something miraculous happens: we discover we can be the open sky and have our ideas, but only in that order. From that connection to unconditional love-to Great Spirit--those pure ideas of inspiration arrive and flow. And those aren't our ideas; there's no ownership in them–rather, they're the ideas that come from that one pure universal mind. What a gorgeous paradox! What a journey!
Before, we believed we WERE our ideas... we didn't "have" them, we were not a house to them, rather we were totally identified with them. Now, resting in the truth and the simplicity of our awareness, ideas are free to come and go, and we interact with the ones that are loving, creative expressions and solutions to life.
The ones that reflect the wholeness of ALL.