Complete Acceptance

What does complete acceptance of everything as it is look like?

Complete acceptance is not something that starts to happen at some point after not happening for awhile. You can’t get away from it. It is embedded into your every experience, or actually it’s the other way around. Everything in existence – including all that you experience – is embedded in complete acceptance. Complete acceptance is what allows your experience, and everything else, to appear in awareness.

Simple awareness by its nature accepts everything as it is, does it not? If you look through a 3-inch hole in the fence into the neighbors’ yard, does that hole accept some things and not others? Does it accept the tree only if it has green leaves, or does it accept the bare winter tree and the man who chops it down in the summer? Does it accept the stump and the children playing on it and the adults who are fighting about whether the trees should be cut? That hole accepts everything. By virtue of its emptiness it manifests complete acceptance.

So what does that hole look like? The hole itself is nothing really. We could say it is made of wood or that it is round or that it is large or small, but that describes what is around the hole, it doesn’t really describe the substance of the hole itself. We could say that it is empty, that’s getting closer to the point. But when we look inside it up close we find pretty much the entire universe on the other side of the fence – that’s pretty full! We could say that it’s nothing, but again, we find everything inside of it. Empty and full. Nothing and everything. Hmm… starts to sound a little like Zen, doesn’t it?

Basically, if the hole looks like anything, it looks like what we see through it. We can’t say what it looks like except that it is empty or nothing, but that wouldn’t do it justice for the great function it provides in spying on the neighbors!

So, complete acceptance looks like you. It looks like that guy who goes about his life enjoying some things and not others. It looks like everything you see in your life, including people and nature and pollution and beautiful sunsets and ideas and thoughts and experiences like resisting some things and not others. It’s like you have a built-in peephole that allows everything of your experience into awareness — like it or not. That’s complete acceptance.

But then as people (pronounced “peep-hole”) we try to make ourselves transform from partial acceptors to complete acceptors. It doesn’t work that way. There is some-nothing that is already and has always been in total and complete acceptance. As people who want to experience the freedom of total acceptance we don’t need to change ourselves. All we need to do is become aware of this open empty window on the world, give our attention to it, and stop believing that we are separate from it. The truth is that we already are aware of it in every moment, but we don't realize the significance of what we are seeing. Start giving your attention to this all-embracing view, and it's all-embracing significance will gently reveal itself to you.