The path of poverty is the path of the heart. Intellectual understanding won’t do it. The insight and understanding are important, but on the path of mystical poverty the soul must completely feel and live the richness, the poverty, the deficiency and fear, the loss and pain, the attachment and the longing for freedom. The more the heart leads the way, the more possibility for insight to arise.
You feel the poverty in your heart. You feel the pain of letting go of things you love. You experience the poverty as deep suffering and sorrow. It is not easy for the heart to let go and be poor. It lets go with a lot of pain, a lot of tears. When you think about it, your mind says, “Okay, let’s do it. This makes sense. Let go now.” But the heart doesn’t work that way. Your mind can say, “Okay, I’m making a vow of poverty.” That’s fine and some paths do that, but it must come from the longing of the heart.
The Sufi dervishes, for instance, give away everything they have to their neighbors. If they get a gift, they offer it in a spirit of sacrifice. When they feel enlightened, they offer their enlightenment to God. It is a heart attitude, an attitude of generosity that is not easy to grasp. Of course, it has to be a heartfelt, genuine giving away. You cannot say, “I’m going to have less and less so I can be free.” That is the mind talking and that does not work. It cannot be a strategy; it has to be a living longing. When the impulse comes from the heart, there is some kind of surrender, of giving up, of learning a lesson after difficult and painful experiences. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, Ch. 1
The understanding of detachment, and recognition of the things I am attached to, are deepening into the realization that I have to let go of even subtler and more basic things. The understanding is making it imperative for me to let go of things I have never thought one can let go of. The letting go has to be total. I need to let go of practically everything: a state, a station, fruit of work, contribution, position, recognition, everything.
With this realization I begin to be aware of a deep, deep sadness and grief. The depth of the sadness feels infinite, an endless dark ocean of tears. This letting go allows me to see that I must let go of everything because none of it is mine. I, as the individual consciousness, own nothing, have nothing, am nothing. I feel so empty, so impoverished, so lacking that I cannot claim to possess anything, not even existence. This is not a state of ego deficiency or self-devaluation, and there is no sense of self-pity in it. It is a heartfelt, immediate realization of a fundamental truth of the individual soul. It is the recognition of the objective situation: the individual self owes everything to Being, for Being is the true source of everything. It is Being that possesses existence, reality, intelligence, qualities, capacities, and so on. I, the individual self, have these available to me only when I am open to Being. On my own, I am absolutely indigent, totally helpless, completely hopeless, thoroughly inadequate. I am nothing but a limp, empty bag. – A. H. Almaas, Luminous Night’s Journey: An Autobiographical Fragment, Ch. 8