NO PREFERENCE

This afternoon, a friend reminded me of the great spiritual principle, "Have no preference."  Walk through the world and your life without desiring this or that, labeling good or bad, running away or running toward. Surrender all evaluating and judging. Be only a neutral filter of experience.
     I understand no preference as something different from acceptance. Acceptance is what I come to after the fact; it's the step beyond experience when I process what has happened. Inevitably I label it as bad or hard and difficult and I work to find a way to be all right with it, with whatever happens no matter what.
     But no preference is something I walk with in the moment. It's a constant state of presence. It isn't active or reactive; it's simply the membrane in my consciousness that lets the wind of experience flow through. Residing in no preference means it doesn't even occur to me to put labels on whatever happens in the world or inside me. All simply is. 
     I'm reminded of Emerson's transparent eyeball, something that doesn't reflect but absorbs. "...my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." 
     I like "absorb" instead of receive. To absorb is an action while to receive suggests passivity. I want to take everything in, to merge my consciousness with everything that is, to touch the universe free of my oh so very opinionated ego. In a sense, to have no preference is to have a mystical connection to experience, to exist in that vibrating state of intense clarity, to feel no separation between self and other. 
     Alas, I am rarely in that place of no preference. The dailiness of life is filled with choices and opinions. I couldn't get through if I didn't value or discount or judge experience as I go. But I often have a deep seated preference that gets me into trouble. I decide which way I want, even need things to go and if they don't I feel disappointed or rejected or inconsequential, some bad feeling that can be the start of a descent down a rabbit hole.  I've come far enough to know that the way out of those bad feelings is to find acceptance of what is, and when I fully connect with it, bad feeling goes.
     If I could live with no preference, so much of my pain in life would never exist in the first place. But I think the most I'll manage is a few moments of truly being a neutral filter. But I don't forget hose moments and they give me a goal, an ideal to aspire to. I know that it's the journey not the arrival that matters. It's the journey that makes me alive.