Nothing To Be Gained From Enlightenment

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words?
He is the one I would like to talk to.

~ Chuang Tzu

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Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.

~ Ramana Maharshi

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"Popularity among the soundly asleep may not be the best criterion by which to judge a method for waking up."

~ Jed McKenna

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"Speaking of Self-realization is a delusion. It is only because people have been under the delusion that the non-Self is the Self and the unreal the Real that they have to be weaned out of it by the other delusion called Self-realization; because actually the Self always is the Self and there is no such thing as realizing it."

~ Ramana Maharshi

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Nothing is Gained with Enlightenment

I once lived in an apartment so small I had to step outside into the adjacent hallway to open my oven door. There was room only for a bed, a radio, and a cardboard carton of books. I kept my clothes in a closet down the hall. Even in this confined space, there was housework to be done. Indeed, the demands of maintenance follow us wherever we find ourselves, from palaces to prison cells.

The Italian poet Cesare Pavese wrote in his journal that we never remember days, we remember only moments. And Zen teachers tell us that this moment is the only one we’ll ever have. Perhaps this is a better way of looking at enlightenment. It’s not achieving or gathering something. Nor is it losing or overcoming something else. It’s simply stepping outside of the room you’re in and allowing the oven door to open. It’s checking the ceiling overhead and cleaning up the spills beneath your feet.

~ Gary Thorp, "The Dust Beyond the Cushion"

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"In Kisagata,
The flowering cherry trees
Vanish under waves ---
Until an old fisherman
Rows out across blossoms.

Whatever it is,
I cannot understand it,
Although gratitude
Stubbornly overcomes me
Until I'm reduced to tears.

My final desire ---
That I be allowed to die
Under flowering cherries,
On the fifteenth evening
Of the second month."

~ Saigyo, "The Poetry of Zen"

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So really what it comes down to, it's God. Wherever you look, it's God appearing as this, that, and what you really love and appreciate in each form is the divine formless out of which each form comes. But to be able to sense that you have to sense it in yourself first. And that is seeing the beauty in everything, that's really what it means.

~ Eckhart Tolle

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A Message from Space

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."

~ William Stafford

2011: Year Of Illumination

Earth Stands on the Threshold...

The excitement is becoming palpable. You are probably sensing it already.

Do you feel it?

We are about to enter a brave new world. A world that will never be the same again and there is no turning back. As it stands now, there is nothing that will be able to stop an array of dramatic events from occurring over and over again.

We as a human species have reached the point in our history where the most monumental transformations ever seen upon planet Earth are about to unfold.

Literally and figuratively, we are standing at the doorstop to a great new future that is opening up before us in the year 2011.

World events are accelerating at such a warp speed now that the pressure coming to bear upon the old paradigm of negativity, deceit and oppression is about to collapse in upon itself. Behind it will unfold the most wonderful and the most profound times ever in the entire history of the human race.

From major world-wide economic reform, to the fall of tyrannical leaders, to a return to constitutional government in the US, to the release of suppressed technologies, to extra-terrestrial disclosure, to the massive awakening of human consciousness, the internet is aflame with various reports of impending revolutionary changes. We are indeed living in the most exciting times ever in our history!

We know with absolute certainty that we are in a period of great change due to the consciousness evolutionary timeline we have been on for some 16.4 billion years. And now we are about to move into the fast lane heading straight for the finish line this year.

CLICK HERE to read more...

The Nature of Silence

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

~Wendell Berry

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There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes.

~Rumi

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The beauty of the heart
is the lasting beauty:
its lips give to drink
of the water of life.
Truly it is the water,
that which pours,
and the one who drinks.
All three become one when
your talisman is shattered.
That oneness you can't know
by reasoning.

~Rumi

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"Deep in my looking, the last words vanished.
Joyous and silent, the waking that met me there."

~Lalla (India, 14th Century)

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Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens light.

~St. Francis of Assisi

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If I spent enough time with the tiniest of creatures, even a caterpillar, I would never have to prepare a sermon, so full of God is every creature.

~Meister Eckhart

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Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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"If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark."

~St. John of the Cross

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The Sowing of Meanings

See the high birds! Is their’s the song
That dies among the wood-light
Wounding the listener with such bright arrows?
Or do they play in wheeling silences
Defining in the perfect sky
The bounds of (here below) our solitude,

Where spring has generated lights of green
To glow in clouds upon the somber branches?
Ponds full of sky and stillnesses
What heavy summer songs still sleep
Under the tawny rushes at your brim?

More than a season will be born here, nature,
In your world of gravid mirrors!
The quiet air awaits one note,
One light, one ray and it will be the angels’ spring:
One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then
Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!

For, like a grain of fire
Smoldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants His undivided power –
Buries His thought too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower,

Until, in the amazing light of April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret
Too terrible to bear.

Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees
Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament
And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,
While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,
Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.

And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,
The deep united threeness printed in our being,
Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition, turns within,
And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and
oblivion,
Dives after, and discovers flame.

~ Thomas Merton

And The People Stand Firm, Unafraid, and Listen

This is the essence of what is happening and unfolding, moment by moment. The only thing we can do is allow, breathe, accept, say "Yes." Life is in motion, coming into balance on its own, and we are moved by this naturally into awakening. And so it is.

********* ******* ********* ******* *********

In the face of rising warmth and light, a flower opens to the new day's Sun.

In the face of rising light and love, a planet's population wakes from sleep emerges from control, and reclaims its freedom.

It wakes from fear, throws off paralysis, and reclaims its power.

It wakes from hate, throws off suspicion, and reclaims its love.

It wakes from violence, throws off control, and reclaims its peacefulness.

And the people stand firm, unafraid, and listen.

And all around, the forces that controlled them lash out with every weapon they possess – police, provocateurs, military, water cannons, tear gas, guns. They issue threats; warn of reprisals; unleash storms and earthquakes; rain chemicals from the air; disrupt their travel, business, education, families.

But the people join together not as citizens of Iran, Tunisia, Myanmar, or France; not as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, or Jews; but as citizens of the world. They recognize how they've been carved up into nations, classes, religions; had language differences and class divides imposed on them; and in every other way been divided and conquered. They reject all division and join together as one - men, women, and children.

They raise the banner of light and love, peace and harmony. They tell the truth and seek more of it. They declare the freedom of all people and the right to health and choice and learning. They reject the use of force and control, censorship and manipulation, indebtedness and impoverishment.

They set their faces against fear and hate. They refuse to harm or kill or cooperate with those who do. They lay down their weapons everywhere. They walk away from bombs and poisons, warships and warplanes.

They depart from organizations that produce pandemic viruses and tainted vaccines, plot to overthrow democratic regimes, issue threats and carry out assassinations, suppress new technologies, and pollute the Earth.

They liberate the halls of power, courts of justice, places of confinement, and mediums of communication.

And the people stand firm, unafraid, and listen.

They learn of their part in bringing on their own subservience and in throwing off their chains.

They wonder how this could have happened and what is next.

They hear how this new age has been expected and anticipated, fostered and nurtured. They learn how this awakening, emergence, and rebirth are supported by a cast of millions, who until now have worked in the shadows and behind the scenes.

They learn how these people are our families from other places, dimensions, and even ages. They learn how these people have come here to end our impoverishment, debilitation, and subjugation.

They learn how these people have seen to it that the light of freedom was never quenched or servitude imposed on us as a planet.

They learn how these people have in hand the means of abundance, freedom, and fulfillment and give it freely.

And the people stand firm, unafraid, and listen.

They hear how our controllers intended to depopulate the globe and retain a fraction of us to serve them. They hear how fear has been used to control and exploit us. They drop their anxiousness of terrorism, Armageddon, starvation, catastrophe, and annihilation.

They rejoice at what awaits us - freedom from suppression and control. They realize the future is ours to decide with no new master looming; They see that no one seeks to place us under heel but to liberate us.

They breathe in new energy, share new abundance, look upon new technologies, and see the Earth being newly cleansed. They realize the sleep of millennia is over and a new day has dawned, a day without barriers, fear, or control.

And the people stand firm, unafraid, and listen.

And the people laugh and shout for joy, in loving anticipation.

~ Steve Beckow - The 2012 Scenario

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

Awaken from your slumber, friends...
Open your eyes!

Of Black Hats, White Hats, and Mad Hatters

Excuse me while I slip outta this old paradigm and into something more comfortable.

The first law of wingwalking is: Never leave hold of one branch before taking hold of another. I now declare the first law of wingwalking null and void.

Again, the first law of paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn suggests in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (or did he not suggest it and I just made it up?), is to allow cognitive dissonance to build until the old paradigm breaks under the weight of it, revealing the new.

I now declare the first law of paradigm shift as having itself been superseded. No new paradigm is visible; none has emerged; I look for none to emerge. We are the new paradigm.

Here I am, left without a dime, a paradigm or even a plugged nickel. Just as we cannot take anything with us into the afterlife, so we also cannot take anything of the old into the new world we face today, brave or otherwise. But I can laugh!

As a sovereign citizen of Planet Earth and a conscious co-creator, I let go of the branch called the old paradigm without having a hold on anything else. I know not truth or space. I am truth and space.

The new paradigm is to have no new paradigm – not if it’s conceptual, explanatory, a belief or a framework. It’s none of these.

Conceptual framework is superseded. Belief system is abandoned. Explanations have become outmoded..”

The new paradigm can only be lived and I can only describe it, dropping all pretense to “knowledge” and “explanation

Nothing I knew before can explain anything I will meet hereafter.

Wittgenstein said, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But he then stepped away from the mystery and entered an everyday world of which he doubtless felt he could speak. I face an everyday world that is rapidly becoming the mystery itself, whereof I cannot speak.

Ah, but my suffering is illusory! Goodbye to all that. I gladly take up the challenge.

Mad hatter, indeed!

Let novelty reign! The old strangeness is dead! Long live the new strangeness!

~ Steve Beckow - The 2012 Scenario

Be Still and Know Thy Self

"A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live."

~ Thomas Merton

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“The dawning of Self-recognition is the end of isolation, the end of separation, the end of feeling cut off from life, from others. It’s to know the heart of all beings.”

~ Adyashanti

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Buddha In Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!"

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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When it's cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.
And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.
The inner secret, that which was never born,
you are that freshness, and I am with you now.
I can't explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,
and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.

— Rumi

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The Confirmation

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveler finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world seem bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

~ Edwin Muir

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The raft across the ocean of samsara
is the strong decision to be free.
This intense desire is absolutely necessary.
The intensity of this desire is itself the Satguru,
the pain in the heart is the Self calling.

~ Papaji

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A Dream Unfolding

Time is very precious. Do not wait until you are dying to understand your spiritual nature. If you do it now, you will discover resources of kindness and compassion you didn’t know you had. It is from this mind of intrinsic wisdom and compassion that you can truly benefit others.... Moment by moment, we should look at life as if it were a dream unfolding... .In this relaxed, more open state of being, we have the opportunity to gain the infallible means of dying well, which is recognition of our absolute nature.

~ Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

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So Cheap

I am all hollowed out now
Like a reed.
I gave everything for this.
And still I laughingly wonder:
How could it have been so cheap?

~ Adyashanti

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"Without concepts, leave your awareness, just as it is, in the steady vision of appearances. If you can do so, that is the best of meditations. In terms of recognizing the nature of awareness, the spiritual mentors of the
past stated that it could be ascertained in the interval following the cessation of one thought and prior to the arising of the next thought. In that interval there is an emptiness. How long is this interval? It's a mistake to think it is short in duration. Rather, it is the very nature of both samsara and nirvana. In the very steady vision of appearances, right in the instant, in the instantaneous vision of the instantaneous moment of appearances, you can recognize the essential nature of the mind."

~ Han Shan

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"Most seekers exacerbate their itching, scratching esoteric maps and dimly pondering weighty conundrums until the light falls flat from warm eyes to cold ground, leaving themselves in a yet deeper dark, wondering how in hell they got there. Truly, what's so difficult about simply standing still and watching this luminous darkness rise and fall in perfect harmony? The more one fusses with doctrines and dogmas, the further one roams from their own cozy hearth. Conniving with alchemy's elixirs and potions, they end up fouling their own nest. All night long, again and again, they disturb the family peace with pointless droning debates, poisoning the air with stale breath and drowning out the nightingale' s melancholy sonority. Were they to quietly open their ears and listen, true to that soulful sound, they could finally close the book on heaven and hell, blissfully, and let the relatives relax.

~ Gyatrul Rinpoche

What is Beyond Consciousness?

The water of the mind, how clear it is!
Gazing at it, the boundaries are invisible.
But as soon as even a slight thought arises,
ten thousand images crowd it.
Attach to them, and they become real.
Be carried by them, and it will be difficult to return.
How painful to see a person trapped in the ten-fold delusions.

~Ryokan

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Watch yourself closely and you will see that whatever be the content of consciousness, the witnessing of it does not depend on the content. Awareness is itself and does not change with the event. The event may be pleasant or unpleasant, minor or important, awareness is the same. Take note of the peculiar nature of pure awareness, its natural self-identity, without the least trace of self-consciousness, and go to the root of it and you will soon realize that awareness is your true nature, and nothing you may be aware of, you can call your own.

When the content is viewed without likes and dislikes, the consciousness of it is awareness. But still there is a difference between awareness as reflected in consciousness and pure awareness beyond consciousness. Reflected awareness, the sense "I am aware" is the witness, while pure awareness is the essence of reality. Reflection of the sun in a drop of water is a reflection of the sun, no doubt, but not the sun itself. Between awareness reflected in consciousness as the witness and pure awareness there is a gap, which the mind cannot cross.

~Sri Nisargadatta

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The next time you feel extreme anger, anxiety, jealousy, or sadness, just notice each thought that is feeding that state. Let each thought fall away quickly, one after the other, like flashes of light. Then just rest with the full sensory and emotional experience in the body, without placing any agenda on it, without trying to think yourself out of it. In that moment, you stop mentally running from suffering.

~Scott Kiloby

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Our personal viewpoints (self, other, world, duality) and impersonal viewpoints (no self, no other, no world, nonduality), are equal in that they arise and fall, leaving no trace. They only leave a trace if we follow one, thinking it is closer to truth or closer to our present experience. But nothing can bring us closer to our present experience. It's already here, appearing as the present viewpoint.

~Scott Kiloby

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Breath is Truth

Some people practice throughout their entire lives just by paying attention to breathing. Everything that is true about anything is true about breath: it's impermanent; it arises and it passes away. Yet if you didn't breathe, you would become uncomfortable; so then you would take in a big inhalation and feel comfortable again. But if you hold onto the breath, it's no longer
comfortable, so you have to breathe out again. All the time shifting, shifting.

Sylvia Boorstein

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POEMS by Alan Larus

Suddenly

Woke up in a play,
on a crooked way

Comedy from start
Much too big, my part
And in awe I am too small
Got a little light, that's all

Life's impossible to swallow
Like a closed door,
what may follow?
A coming oh so handily,
transformation of the alchemy.

I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.

http://www.ferryfee .com/bluesky/ Suddenly. html


In life to realise

At the end of winding road,
such a gift you gave to me
Tumbling down the mighty load,
in a white house by the sea

But my maker saved this spark
It is shining in the dark

Lesson learnt
Getting burnt,
where no shelter is

To the rays of bliss.

http://www.ferryfee .com/bluesky/ The_gift. htm

I Salute You

I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!

Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there. The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Your joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it; that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country home.

And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and shadows flee away.

~ Fra Giovanni ~ Christmas Eve, 1513