Devotion Without an Object

On a love that no longer reaches

Devotion is often imagined as movement toward something higher—
a god, a teacher, an ideal state.

It implies distance:
one who seeks, and something sought.

In clear seeing, this structure loosens.
Devotion does not disappear.
Its direction dissolves.

What remains does not reach outward.
It rests.

Not as withdrawal,
but as a settling into what has never been absent.

Many feel this tension without naming it.

One impulse longs to surrender—
to bow inwardly, to love what is true.

Another senses that any object of devotion
quietly preserves separation.

Clarity does not ask us to choose.
It reveals a devotion no longer divided from understanding.

Devotion remains,
without distance.

At its root, devotion is not belief or ritual.
It is orientation.

What matters.
Where attention rests when it is not being managed.
What we are willing to release in order to remain true.

Seen this way, devotion is simply
the willingness to let false ground give way.

Devotion is not something added to life,
but what remains when resistance softens.

From Effort to Ease

Most paths begin with effort.

We practise.
We refine.
We learn to turn toward what feels meaningful rather than habitual.

This effort has its place.
And it has its limit.

At some point, it grows quiet.

What ends is not devotion,
but the one who imagined itself responsible for awakening.

Surrender here is not submission.
It is the easing of resistance to what is already the case.

The belief that something essential is missing loosens.
Experience no longer needs managing.

What remains is openness—
unforced, unprotected.

Attention returns to itself.
Life is allowed.

Devotion is no longer an act.
It is the absence of obstruction.

Fidelity to What Is Seen

One of the subtler traps on any contemplative path
is devotion to explanation.

Ideas can be elegant.
Frameworks reassuring.

But loyalty to concepts is still attachment.

Clarity asks for a different fidelity—
not to what is understood,
but to what is seen.

Truth is not something held.
It is something stayed with.

This honesty has a devotional quality.

It requires a willingness to be undone.
To let conclusions fall when they no longer align with lived experience.
To choose clarity over comfort, quietly, repeatedly.

In practice, this is simple.

Immediacy over interpretation.
Feeling over commentary.
Presence over narrative.

The body often knows first.
When something is true, there is settling.
When it is premature, there is strain.

Devotion listens for this.

Attention as Offering

Here, attention itself becomes the offering.

Not attention shaped by effort,
but attention that is relaxed, inclusive, unmotivated.

Free of agenda.

When attention rests this way,
experience reveals a natural intimacy.

Sensations arise and pass.
Thoughts move through.
Emotions swell and subside.

Nothing needs to be owned.

Life moves.
Awareness remains.

This attention is devotional
because it asks nothing of what appears.

It meets what is with quiet respect.

Over time, something changes.

Listening deepens.
Action simplifies.
The urge to assert or defend eases.

Not because the human is transcended,
but because the centre around which it strained has softened.

Care remains.
Control loosens.

Devotion shows itself as care without grasping.

The Heart Without Distance

It is sometimes assumed that clarity leads to detachment.

In lived experience, the opposite is often true.

As separation thins,
feeling flows more freely.

What falls away is not love,
but possession.

Not devotion,
but projection.

The heart no longer orients toward an ideal.
It turns toward what is present—

this moment,
this person,
this simple fact of being.

Ordinary life becomes sufficient.
Sometimes luminous.

Devotion appears quietly here:
in patience,
in restraint,
in the refusal to turn experience into a story.

A devotion that does not seek recognition.

Nothing Added

The implication of all this is unremarkable.

We notice where we are still insisting—
on outcomes,
on identities,
on progress.

And that insistence softens.

Devotion becomes sincerity rather than intensity.
Closeness to what is true now,
rather than allegiance to what might be.

In daily life, this may look like very little.

Fewer arguments with reality.
Less inner commentary.
A growing ease with not knowing.

Nothing special is gained.
Something unnecessary is released.

What Remains

When devotion is freed from objects,
it does not vanish.

It becomes ambient.

Like gravity—
unnoticed,
yet everything moves within it.

This is the still point named across traditions:
a devotion without effort,
a love without direction,
a surrender that was never chosen
because it was never absent.

Here, life does not need fixing or transcending.

It only needs meeting.

And meeting it fully
is devotion enough.

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A small number of these reflections exist in physical form on Etsy.

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Until next time — may you find your Still Point today.