We are so accustomed to accumulation. We live in houses full of objects that are supposed to take our discomforts away. We live in bodies full of junk and disarray. We exist in minds full of input and reactions, worries and desperate dramatic hope.

Life is not so bad. It is painful, inherently. It is challenging or why else would we be here? It is apparently the gravel upon which we hone our essence. It is essentially what it is meant to be – a school for soul(s), a way for the universe to learn and expand.

The universal mind seems to be sparse and expanding, and expanding in its sparsity. Our essential minds are sparse and expanding. My essential mind watches and listens. It does not clap or complain. It is not particularly wise – no more wise than any other being’s essential mind, and no less wise than the essence of the universe.

All around us in our human world, accumulation beckons. We should have and we should want. Marketers of all sorts push us toward desires that will line their pockets and fuel their own accumulation. Even much of what passes for spirituality turns out to be a means to someone’s gain, or a promise to teach us how to “get what we want.”

But what about the deeper want? What about the desire within, what about the desire of the great without? Our essential selves sit watching us struggle, aware that all we could ever have is here now. We have always been just our selves, complete in the universe, sparse and expanding, stamped with the essential desire to Be.

It is when we allow this sparsity of mind – in those moments between our suffering – that we begin to understand.