Tuesday, July 28, 2009
There is Only This
When the great Chinese Zen master Ta-mei was dying, his students asked him for a final helpful word. "When it comes, don't try to avoid it; when it goes, don't run after it," he said. Just then, a squirrel chattered on the roof. "There is only this, there is nothing else," said Ta-mei, and then he died.
Can we conceive of what this is? Can this be enough for us? Is there another reality more real or more wonderful than this? To know that there is only this is to, as Hui-neng put it, "see the original nature and not become confused."
~ Francis Dojun Cook, How to Raise an Ox
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Silently and serenely one forgets all words;
Clearly and vividly That appears
When one realizes it, it is vast and without edges;
In its Essence, one is clearly aware.
Singularly reflecting is this bright awareness,
Full of wonder is this pure reflection.
Dew and moon,
Stars and streams,
Snow on pine trees,
And clouds hovering on the mountain peaks.
In this reflection all intentional efforts vanish.
Serenity is the final word of all the teachings;
Reflection is the response to all manifestations.
~ Hung Chih of the Tsao Tung School
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Rest in Natural Great Peace
Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace.
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
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"In the mind of natural perfection, certainly, moral discrimination and moral causality do not exist, yet what remains in nondual 'bodhichitta' , both the ground and the emanation of pure mind, which can only ever be pure vision and perfect conduct. .... there is no fall from grace, and there never has been a fall, and in the realization of that reality where the golden age lies just beneath an insubstantial, fragile surface of dualistic belief, any moral dualism becomes a problem rather than the solution.
So stay here, you lucky people,
Let go and be happy in the natural state.
Let your complicated life and everyday confusion alone
And out of quietude, doing nothing, watch the nature of mind.
This piece of advice is from the bottom of my heart:
Fully engage in contemplation and understanding is born;
Cherish non-attachment and delusion dissolves;
And forming no agenda at all reality dawns.
Whatever occurs, whatever it may be, that itself is the key,
And without stopping it or nourishing it, in an even flow,
Freely resting, surrendering to ultimate contemplation,
In naked pristine purity we reach consummation. "
~Longchepa, translated by Keith Downman
--from "Old Man Basking in the Sun."
"You'll laugh on the day of awakening, so you might as well laugh now!"
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A Fisherman
By Ikkyu (Ikkyu Sojun)
(1394 - 1481)
Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night.
-- from Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, Translated by John Stevens
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Contemplations
The joy which is
in Revelation
is nowhere else.
No amount of
perception
thinking
projecting
planning
doing
efforts
achieving
every will give you
that joy
that radiance
which Revelation does.
- Swami Amar Jyoti
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Close to Home
Jane Dobisc, who later became a Zen teacher under Korean Master Seung Sahn, went on a pilgrimage to the East as a young woman, searching for a Buddhist teacher. At one point she spent weeks trekking through the Himalayas to get to a particularly remote monastery. Reaching it at last she knocked upon the door and asked if she could see the lama.
"Oh, no," replied the nun who'd opened the door. "He's in New York."
When Dobisc returned home she discovered that Master Seung Sahn had been operating a practice center in Rhode Island all along, no more than a ten-minute drive from her family's home.
- from Sean Murphy's One Bird, One Stone (Renaissance Books)
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
The Path
All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher
that the religious institutions originally worked
with: reality. Reality-insight says ... master
the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-
pity. It is as hard to get the children herded
into the car pool and down the road to the bus
as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on
a cold morning. One move is not better than the
other, each can be quite boring, and they both
have the virtuous quality of repetition.
Repetition and ritual and their good results
come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping
noses, going to meetings, picking up around the
house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick-don' t
let yourself think these are distracting you from
your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores
is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape
from so that we may do our "practice" which will
put us on a "path"-it is our path.
- GARY SNYDER, 'The Practice of the Wild'
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
What Is The Point?
So what is the point of waiting? What exactly are you waiting for? Is somebody going to give you what you always wanted? Will a train come from Heaven bringing you goodies? But nothing that could ever happen could be as good, as precious, as who you are. What stops you from being, from being present, is nothing but your hope for the future. Hoping for something to be different keeps you looking for some future fantasy. But it is a mirage; you'll never get there. The mirage stops you from seeing the obvious, the preciousness of Being. It is a great distortion, a great misunderstanding of what will fulfill you. When you follow the mirage, you are rejecting yourself.
-- A.H. Almaas, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
All wisdom and holiness are but streaks of lightening - Huang Po
I love the mystery of it all. I love the ancient Chinese Zen Master Huang Po's declaration that all our spiritual insights are at best momentary lightening flashes in the vast mystery beyond all understanding. I am delighted that thought can never grasp its source and there is no way to explain it.
There are times of identification, of emptiness and fullness, of expansion and contraction. The awakening is reborn and refreshed each day as quiet releases, small epiphanies, gratitude and wonder. At each time it is the same awakening - the realization of being the silent presence, the enduring ground of wholeness and peace that is always here beneath the surface activity. All the variations in experience - including identification and sense of separation - are seen to be the expressions of this ever present reality underlying and sourcing it all.
Dasarath
Freedom Dreams
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
That we know this awareness exists means only that we have an idea of awareness. We do not see that awareness as itself an object, nor can we ever do so. If we are to know the awareness by itself, first we would have to drop knowing its objects, its reflections in thought, including the ego-thought, and then be it, not see it.
- Notebooks of Paul Brunton
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
"All disciplines are fixations: discipline excludes everything, except
the one thing that one wishes to concentrate upon. Thus one
establishes a dictatorship over oneself and all understanding is
jeopardized. What is absolutely necessary is attention without
strain. When I observe myself, I am really forced to admit that
every day I am the prisoner of a thousand unsatisfied desires, or
desires whose satisfaction brings me no permanent bliss. So it
seems to me that instead of endless running from one desire to
another, it would be better to stop and examine the true nature of
desire. If this investigation is successful you will penetrate the
nature of the true aim of all desire. What any desire really aims at, is
a state of non desire. This non desire is a state in which we demand
absolutely nothing. Thus it is a state of extreme abundance, of fullness.
This fullness is revealed as being bliss and peace. You now
know that you are really seeking nothing else but fullness and
absolute peace.
Now that you have understood the inner nature of your ultimate
goal, you perceive that the ultimate goal is, in fact, not a goal, that is
to say an end towards which you strive, but that the ultimate state
can only be the consequence of relaxing and letting go. Liberation is
not to be obtained by collecting and accumulating, but by being
rooted in a state of being which is truly ours and in which we live
constantly without knowing it. Even if we wished to, we could not
live for a single moment outside of this state."
- Jean Klein
Monday, June 8, 2009
Why Wait?
Scott Morrison
To be sure, we all have a great deal to learn from each other. However, the process of subtle arrogance and self deception in the spiritual arena is perhaps the most damaging of all illusions. I am a Buddhist, or a Yogi, or a Pagan, or a student of the Fourth Way or the Kaballah or some other mystical or ecclectic school, and I imagine that Christians are at least somewhat deluded. Or I am a Christian, perhaps a Catholic or an Evangelical, or a Course in Miracles student, or a Muslim, or a Jew, and maintain some pretense that my version of "God" or "Love" is somehow more accurate than "theirs." But in fact, when we think "Jesus said so-and-so," or "The Buddha taught thus-and-such, " we might ask ourselves, "How would I know, and why am I repeating this?" If we face it sincerely, it is hard to avoid the discovery that all we are doing is trying to justify our own opinions and their connected feelings, perhaps seeking to be tied in with some powerful authority figure(s) which is fortified by our own conditioning. So we each have our private and group stories about things, and continue to surreptitiously elevate ourselves and put each other down.
But in fact, there is no private liberation or salvation. (Where is the "one separate" from the rest, to be saved, except in some mental fiction?) Of utmost importance, finally, is putting an end to this devious and hurtful process of "spiritual ego," of imagining there's some kind of competition, and that there's someone who has to defend his or her particular spiritual turf against others. If you stop using your transient body or your thoughts or feelings as points of reference, it will be obvious that there is no "someone" and there are no "others." That whole thing is a paranoid fantasy, a pathological delusion, in this case in the name of whatever religion to which we happen to subscribe. So let's call a spade a spade: God, the Absolute, does not belong to anyone, nor to any particular group.
(So why pay homage to a limited god?)
Furthermore, Enlightenment, Self Realization, does not belong to anyone either. (In fact, everything belongs to Enlightenment. So why pay homage to a limited enlightenment? ) Although it may occur in virtually any context - Buddhist, Christian, Yogic, Sufi, Hindu, Fourth Way, Muslim, Taoist, Jewish, Wiccan, 12-Step work, shamanistic, agnostic, scientific and so on, Spiritual Awakening, the Realization of Emptiness, the Tao, cannot be owned. How could That which is infinite be possessed by any religion, tradition, path, lineage, teacher, or hierarchy, all of which are limited? Is God a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim? Is Enlightenment controlled by Buddhists or Yogis or Hindus? How could That which is formless be made to conform to any set of assumptions about liberation, past or future? (If you still find yourself resisting that possibility, you might ask yourself how you would know, one way or the other, and what motives are tied up in thinking about it in any specified way, for or against. Why maintain beliefs or disbeliefs at all?) Is truth really a matter of subjective opinion? Is not truth, if that word means anything at all, an ongoing process of careful observation and uncompromised, undefended honesty?
It's time we stop pretending, subtly or overtly, that our particular group is superior in some way. That's a hidden way of saying, "I'm superior," (and therefore not inferior). Let's bring our woundedness, our childhood fears and hurts of inferiority, covered over by the pretense of individual or collective superiority, to a total and absolute halt. Completely. Now. If we need to weep, then let's weep together. And let those tears of shame be tears of relief, tears of joy, in finally putting down this burden of trying to defend and justify what we have imagined ourselves to be. What doesn't exist doesn't need to be defended. It never did.
Particularly in recent years, many of us have had very powerful awakenings, but these experiences, in and of themselves, do not mean that much unless we allow ourselves to be transformed, completely, by what we have discovered. If we try to use them to validate our religious and peer identities and opinions, with our various secret and subtle motives and perceptions so shaped, we corrupt our awakening, and are already entangled in delusion. (And when we make ourselves or our group or our path or the teacher we've identified ourselves with special, we make ourselves separate.) The most any spiritual institution can do is to support and celebrate what is already real and true without reservation.
Full awareness, peace, freedom, clarity and joy can, and do, only exist now. If any of us still find ourselves suffering from the symptoms of ignorance, divisiveness or competition, that is to say, fear, envy, anger, sorrow, frustration, disappointment, jealosy, self-loathing, guilt, depression, loneliness, despair, or confusion, it is because we are still negotiating with God, still negotiating with Truth, still negotiating with Love, still negotiating with Freedom, still negotiating with Serenity. The pain is none other than the agony of lying to ourselves about what we want more than anything else. It is like finally finding the lover we have always longed for, but holding back in terror of losing that love.
Why put this moment off? That which you seek is That which you already are, and always have been - you are not separate, you cannot be separate from the Absolute, from Infinite Consciousness Itself. If you dare to stop pretending that you and your life are based on some mental version of things that arises out of memory, you will find out beyond any doubt! This is not some kind of wishful thinking or grandiose mental trick. Rather, with total and unflinching sincerity, with no psychological defense or self deception whatsoever, search your heart and find out what you permanently are, what you've been all along. Find out if there has ever been a separate "Other." If you discover there never has been an other, is there one now? Could there ever be? Why pretend anymore?
If you dare to give your heart, your soul, your mind, your body, and your life, unconditionally, to what you discover to be true, you will know an infinitely deep and abiding peace that has never been even a breath away. This bliss, this tranquility depends on nothing, and It is not capable of ending. Furthermore, it doesn't make a bit of difference what you've ever done. or not done. You can put an end to the battle. Yes, that's correct, just walk right out of the war, right now. All you have to do is surrender, absolutely and completely, not to me, not to some authority figure, or some organization or institution, but surrender only to your own deepest Purity.
God and your own Unbounded Love are not different. If you truly give yourself up completely, it will shock your whole system. It will suddenly dawn on you,
"Oh my God, what a fool I've been! What was I thinking?"
Then the absolute insanity of giving yourself to anything else will become apparent. Why wait? Why put off your own complete and total liberation? In your innermost and outermost places, in every single moment, Love waits for you everywhere. Is there really something else you would rather do? Is it possible that the thing that you fear the most, the thing that you avoid the most, is what you truly desire the most? It cannot abandon you. Even if you choose to ignore It, betray It and walk away, It is always closer than your next breath. Suspend all opinion and debate, and find out for yourself.
http://sentient.org/past/scott-morrison.html
To be sure, we all have a great deal to learn from each other. However, the process of subtle arrogance and self deception in the spiritual arena is perhaps the most damaging of all illusions. I am a Buddhist, or a Yogi, or a Pagan, or a student of the Fourth Way or the Kaballah or some other mystical or ecclectic school, and I imagine that Christians are at least somewhat deluded. Or I am a Christian, perhaps a Catholic or an Evangelical, or a Course in Miracles student, or a Muslim, or a Jew, and maintain some pretense that my version of "God" or "Love" is somehow more accurate than "theirs." But in fact, when we think "Jesus said so-and-so," or "The Buddha taught thus-and-such, " we might ask ourselves, "How would I know, and why am I repeating this?" If we face it sincerely, it is hard to avoid the discovery that all we are doing is trying to justify our own opinions and their connected feelings, perhaps seeking to be tied in with some powerful authority figure(s) which is fortified by our own conditioning. So we each have our private and group stories about things, and continue to surreptitiously elevate ourselves and put each other down.
But in fact, there is no private liberation or salvation. (Where is the "one separate" from the rest, to be saved, except in some mental fiction?) Of utmost importance, finally, is putting an end to this devious and hurtful process of "spiritual ego," of imagining there's some kind of competition, and that there's someone who has to defend his or her particular spiritual turf against others. If you stop using your transient body or your thoughts or feelings as points of reference, it will be obvious that there is no "someone" and there are no "others." That whole thing is a paranoid fantasy, a pathological delusion, in this case in the name of whatever religion to which we happen to subscribe. So let's call a spade a spade: God, the Absolute, does not belong to anyone, nor to any particular group.
(So why pay homage to a limited god?)
Furthermore, Enlightenment, Self Realization, does not belong to anyone either. (In fact, everything belongs to Enlightenment. So why pay homage to a limited enlightenment? ) Although it may occur in virtually any context - Buddhist, Christian, Yogic, Sufi, Hindu, Fourth Way, Muslim, Taoist, Jewish, Wiccan, 12-Step work, shamanistic, agnostic, scientific and so on, Spiritual Awakening, the Realization of Emptiness, the Tao, cannot be owned. How could That which is infinite be possessed by any religion, tradition, path, lineage, teacher, or hierarchy, all of which are limited? Is God a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim? Is Enlightenment controlled by Buddhists or Yogis or Hindus? How could That which is formless be made to conform to any set of assumptions about liberation, past or future? (If you still find yourself resisting that possibility, you might ask yourself how you would know, one way or the other, and what motives are tied up in thinking about it in any specified way, for or against. Why maintain beliefs or disbeliefs at all?) Is truth really a matter of subjective opinion? Is not truth, if that word means anything at all, an ongoing process of careful observation and uncompromised, undefended honesty?
It's time we stop pretending, subtly or overtly, that our particular group is superior in some way. That's a hidden way of saying, "I'm superior," (and therefore not inferior). Let's bring our woundedness, our childhood fears and hurts of inferiority, covered over by the pretense of individual or collective superiority, to a total and absolute halt. Completely. Now. If we need to weep, then let's weep together. And let those tears of shame be tears of relief, tears of joy, in finally putting down this burden of trying to defend and justify what we have imagined ourselves to be. What doesn't exist doesn't need to be defended. It never did.
Particularly in recent years, many of us have had very powerful awakenings, but these experiences, in and of themselves, do not mean that much unless we allow ourselves to be transformed, completely, by what we have discovered. If we try to use them to validate our religious and peer identities and opinions, with our various secret and subtle motives and perceptions so shaped, we corrupt our awakening, and are already entangled in delusion. (And when we make ourselves or our group or our path or the teacher we've identified ourselves with special, we make ourselves separate.) The most any spiritual institution can do is to support and celebrate what is already real and true without reservation.
Full awareness, peace, freedom, clarity and joy can, and do, only exist now. If any of us still find ourselves suffering from the symptoms of ignorance, divisiveness or competition, that is to say, fear, envy, anger, sorrow, frustration, disappointment, jealosy, self-loathing, guilt, depression, loneliness, despair, or confusion, it is because we are still negotiating with God, still negotiating with Truth, still negotiating with Love, still negotiating with Freedom, still negotiating with Serenity. The pain is none other than the agony of lying to ourselves about what we want more than anything else. It is like finally finding the lover we have always longed for, but holding back in terror of losing that love.
Why put this moment off? That which you seek is That which you already are, and always have been - you are not separate, you cannot be separate from the Absolute, from Infinite Consciousness Itself. If you dare to stop pretending that you and your life are based on some mental version of things that arises out of memory, you will find out beyond any doubt! This is not some kind of wishful thinking or grandiose mental trick. Rather, with total and unflinching sincerity, with no psychological defense or self deception whatsoever, search your heart and find out what you permanently are, what you've been all along. Find out if there has ever been a separate "Other." If you discover there never has been an other, is there one now? Could there ever be? Why pretend anymore?
If you dare to give your heart, your soul, your mind, your body, and your life, unconditionally, to what you discover to be true, you will know an infinitely deep and abiding peace that has never been even a breath away. This bliss, this tranquility depends on nothing, and It is not capable of ending. Furthermore, it doesn't make a bit of difference what you've ever done. or not done. You can put an end to the battle. Yes, that's correct, just walk right out of the war, right now. All you have to do is surrender, absolutely and completely, not to me, not to some authority figure, or some organization or institution, but surrender only to your own deepest Purity.
God and your own Unbounded Love are not different. If you truly give yourself up completely, it will shock your whole system. It will suddenly dawn on you,
"Oh my God, what a fool I've been! What was I thinking?"
Then the absolute insanity of giving yourself to anything else will become apparent. Why wait? Why put off your own complete and total liberation? In your innermost and outermost places, in every single moment, Love waits for you everywhere. Is there really something else you would rather do? Is it possible that the thing that you fear the most, the thing that you avoid the most, is what you truly desire the most? It cannot abandon you. Even if you choose to ignore It, betray It and walk away, It is always closer than your next breath. Suspend all opinion and debate, and find out for yourself.
http://sentient.org/past/scott-morrison.html
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Dzogchen Practice in Everyday Life
by HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
The everyday practice of dzogchen is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit.
We should realise openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy.
We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life.
Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns.
When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection.
We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realise that the purpose of meditation is not to go "deeply into ourselves" or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.
Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordial state has no bias toward enlightenment or non-enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity.
All aspects of phenomena are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed - everything is mutually interpenetrating.
Seeing all things as naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realise.
The nature of phenomena appears naturally and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness. Everything is naturally perfect just as it is. All phenomena appear in their uniqueness as part of the continually changing pattern. These patterns are vibrant with meaning and significance at every moment; yet there is no significance to attach to such meanings beyond the moment in which they present themselves.
This is the dance of the five elements in which matter is a symbol of energy and energy a symbol of emptiness. We are a symbol of our own enlightenment. With no effort or practice whatsoever, liberation or enlightenment is already here.
The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself. Since the undeveloped state does not exist, there is no need to behave in any special way or attempt to attain anything above and beyond what you actually are. There should be no feeling of striving to reach some "amazing goal" or "advanced state."
To strive for such a state is a neurosis which only conditions us and serves to obstruct the free flow of Mind. We should also avoid thinking of ourselves as worthless persons - we are naturally free and unconditioned. We are intrinsically enlightened and lack nothing.
When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialised or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realise that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.
Therefore we should simply sit. Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is. Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think "I am meditating." Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become "peaceful."
If we find that we are disturbing ourselves in any of these ways, we stop meditating and simply rest or relax for a while. Then we resume our meditation. If we have "interesting experiences" either during or after meditation, we should avoid making anything special of them. To spend time thinking about experiences is simply a distraction and an attempt to become unnatural. These experiences are simply signs of practice and should be regarded as transient events. We should not attempt to re-experience them because to do so only serves to distort the natural spontaneity of mind.
All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique and entirely free from all concepts of past, present and future. They are experienced in timelessness.
The continual stream of new discovery, revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of our clarity. We should learn to see everyday life as mandala - the luminous fringes of experience which radiate spontaneously from the empty nature of our being. The aspects of our mandala are the day-to-day objects of our life experience moving in the dance or play of the universe. By this symbolism the inner teacher reveals the profound and ultimate significance of being. Therefore we should be natural and spontaneous, accepting and learning from everything. This enables us to see the ironic and amusing side of events that usually irritate us.
In meditation we can see through the illusion of past, present and future - our experience becomes the continuity of nowness. The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?
We should free ourselves from our past memories and preconceptions of meditation. Each moment of meditation is completely unique and full of potentiality. In such moments, we will be incapable of judging our meditation in terms of past experience, dry theory or hollow rhetoric.
Simply plunging directly into meditation in the moment now, with our whole being, free from hesitation, boredom or excitement, is enlightenment.
The everyday practice of dzogchen is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit.
We should realise openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy.
We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life.
Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns.
When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection.
We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realise that the purpose of meditation is not to go "deeply into ourselves" or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.
Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordial state has no bias toward enlightenment or non-enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity.
All aspects of phenomena are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed - everything is mutually interpenetrating.
Seeing all things as naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realise.
The nature of phenomena appears naturally and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness. Everything is naturally perfect just as it is. All phenomena appear in their uniqueness as part of the continually changing pattern. These patterns are vibrant with meaning and significance at every moment; yet there is no significance to attach to such meanings beyond the moment in which they present themselves.
This is the dance of the five elements in which matter is a symbol of energy and energy a symbol of emptiness. We are a symbol of our own enlightenment. With no effort or practice whatsoever, liberation or enlightenment is already here.
The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself. Since the undeveloped state does not exist, there is no need to behave in any special way or attempt to attain anything above and beyond what you actually are. There should be no feeling of striving to reach some "amazing goal" or "advanced state."
To strive for such a state is a neurosis which only conditions us and serves to obstruct the free flow of Mind. We should also avoid thinking of ourselves as worthless persons - we are naturally free and unconditioned. We are intrinsically enlightened and lack nothing.
When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialised or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realise that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.
Therefore we should simply sit. Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is. Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think "I am meditating." Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become "peaceful."
If we find that we are disturbing ourselves in any of these ways, we stop meditating and simply rest or relax for a while. Then we resume our meditation. If we have "interesting experiences" either during or after meditation, we should avoid making anything special of them. To spend time thinking about experiences is simply a distraction and an attempt to become unnatural. These experiences are simply signs of practice and should be regarded as transient events. We should not attempt to re-experience them because to do so only serves to distort the natural spontaneity of mind.
All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique and entirely free from all concepts of past, present and future. They are experienced in timelessness.
The continual stream of new discovery, revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of our clarity. We should learn to see everyday life as mandala - the luminous fringes of experience which radiate spontaneously from the empty nature of our being. The aspects of our mandala are the day-to-day objects of our life experience moving in the dance or play of the universe. By this symbolism the inner teacher reveals the profound and ultimate significance of being. Therefore we should be natural and spontaneous, accepting and learning from everything. This enables us to see the ironic and amusing side of events that usually irritate us.
In meditation we can see through the illusion of past, present and future - our experience becomes the continuity of nowness. The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?
We should free ourselves from our past memories and preconceptions of meditation. Each moment of meditation is completely unique and full of potentiality. In such moments, we will be incapable of judging our meditation in terms of past experience, dry theory or hollow rhetoric.
Simply plunging directly into meditation in the moment now, with our whole being, free from hesitation, boredom or excitement, is enlightenment.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Is It Time to Jump?
When I peruse the various news articles that abound concerning the state of our physical world, I would have to say that the information is all in all rather grim. We are watching the collapse of an old paradigm that has been based on the mass hypnosis of the majority in order to benefit a small minority. Now the masks are increasingly falling away, yet the folly gets more and more outrageous. Bankers and CEO's are getting huge bailouts while average folks are losing their homes and jobs. Those who trusted their governments to work on their behalf for a better world are now realizing it was a vast Ponzi scheme that merely transferred their hard-earned assets into the hands of those who create debt out of nothing and make us pay for it. It is amazing that we have been duped for so long.
But people are now starting to wake up to the truth about it all, not just that we've been trained all our lives to be the slaves to this usurious economic system, but also that we are not just bit players in someone else's story. We are waking up outside of the mental matrix that has kept us on the merry-go-round of fear and confusion. We are discovering that we are not the content of our thoughts, any more than a computer is its programs. Many of us are looking for a new way to function that is outside the known, where we can finally align with our inner authenticity and creativity and give it room to breathe and grow.
When I look at the system as it is, I recognize its dysfunction. It is not designed for individual freedom at all, even though we have been taught since kindergarten that we are the free-est nation on earth. It is designed to implant in our thoughts and psyches the beliefs and reasoning that will turn us into good little consumers and taxpayers, so that the system, which benefits only those who developed the system, continues, reaping vast profits for those in control at the expense of everyone else. And the United States is the best example of how well they've succeeded in getting us to buy what they're selling.
What's really weird is when you realize that the psychological and social experiment has been an incredible success. Government and the corporate sector have received immense political and economic power because we volunteered to give it to them. In exchange, we get the burden of humongous debt. What a great ruse, eh?
So how to get out of this trap? Many believe we must go head to head with these bozos, protesting, blogging, reporting every last bit of insanity, blocking legislation or coming up with new legislation to punish the bad guys. But while we go around making a lot of noise and shaking our fists, they are quietly in the background continuing to play out their game. We think we have accomplished something by marching in the rain with our placards and signs, listening to those great inspirational speeches, and buddying up with our disgruntled neighbors for a bit, but ultimately it ends up being another distraction and nothing really changes. The number one thing we must each realize is that there is NO WHITE KNIGHT! There is no savior coming to rescue you! YOU are the only one who can create the change you seek. Why do you think you are so fed up with your cookie cutter life, based on what someone else told you it should be? The truth is, we are meant to be FREE, truly free, to live a uniquely, authentic life from your deepest dreams, not to be shuttled onto a conveyor belt where it's all decided for you.
So, if you've realized there's no rescue, what are you waiting for? Do you dare to say no to whatever is draining your energy, your attention, and your pocketbook? Whatever objects you've surrounded yourself with are your prison. Let them go. Whoever keeps you in check, afraid to say, do and be the truth, slave to a clock or a schedule or a diet or a doctrine or anything outside yourself, let them go. Not with anger and hate, but with the realization that it was just an honest case of mistaken identity. And then do what you've dared to dream. You already know what that is. You've been afraid to think it, let alone say it. But NOW is the time, and HERE is the place, and there's no getting around it this time. There's no escape.
To step outside the known is the greatest adventure imaginable. It allows for great revolutionary, evolutionary acts. It is moment to moment creation, incredibly alive and creative. It is knowing that whatever you thought you needed faith in is so real, that faith become superfluous. What is needed becomes very simple and clear. Food, water, shelter, clothing, these things are the bottom line. Life in all simplicity is absolutely abundant. It isn't about accumulating stuff or money, anymore. It's about LIVING, being FULLY ALIVE EVERY MOMENT!
But people are now starting to wake up to the truth about it all, not just that we've been trained all our lives to be the slaves to this usurious economic system, but also that we are not just bit players in someone else's story. We are waking up outside of the mental matrix that has kept us on the merry-go-round of fear and confusion. We are discovering that we are not the content of our thoughts, any more than a computer is its programs. Many of us are looking for a new way to function that is outside the known, where we can finally align with our inner authenticity and creativity and give it room to breathe and grow.
When I look at the system as it is, I recognize its dysfunction. It is not designed for individual freedom at all, even though we have been taught since kindergarten that we are the free-est nation on earth. It is designed to implant in our thoughts and psyches the beliefs and reasoning that will turn us into good little consumers and taxpayers, so that the system, which benefits only those who developed the system, continues, reaping vast profits for those in control at the expense of everyone else. And the United States is the best example of how well they've succeeded in getting us to buy what they're selling.
What's really weird is when you realize that the psychological and social experiment has been an incredible success. Government and the corporate sector have received immense political and economic power because we volunteered to give it to them. In exchange, we get the burden of humongous debt. What a great ruse, eh?
So how to get out of this trap? Many believe we must go head to head with these bozos, protesting, blogging, reporting every last bit of insanity, blocking legislation or coming up with new legislation to punish the bad guys. But while we go around making a lot of noise and shaking our fists, they are quietly in the background continuing to play out their game. We think we have accomplished something by marching in the rain with our placards and signs, listening to those great inspirational speeches, and buddying up with our disgruntled neighbors for a bit, but ultimately it ends up being another distraction and nothing really changes. The number one thing we must each realize is that there is NO WHITE KNIGHT! There is no savior coming to rescue you! YOU are the only one who can create the change you seek. Why do you think you are so fed up with your cookie cutter life, based on what someone else told you it should be? The truth is, we are meant to be FREE, truly free, to live a uniquely, authentic life from your deepest dreams, not to be shuttled onto a conveyor belt where it's all decided for you.
So, if you've realized there's no rescue, what are you waiting for? Do you dare to say no to whatever is draining your energy, your attention, and your pocketbook? Whatever objects you've surrounded yourself with are your prison. Let them go. Whoever keeps you in check, afraid to say, do and be the truth, slave to a clock or a schedule or a diet or a doctrine or anything outside yourself, let them go. Not with anger and hate, but with the realization that it was just an honest case of mistaken identity. And then do what you've dared to dream. You already know what that is. You've been afraid to think it, let alone say it. But NOW is the time, and HERE is the place, and there's no getting around it this time. There's no escape.
To step outside the known is the greatest adventure imaginable. It allows for great revolutionary, evolutionary acts. It is moment to moment creation, incredibly alive and creative. It is knowing that whatever you thought you needed faith in is so real, that faith become superfluous. What is needed becomes very simple and clear. Food, water, shelter, clothing, these things are the bottom line. Life in all simplicity is absolutely abundant. It isn't about accumulating stuff or money, anymore. It's about LIVING, being FULLY ALIVE EVERY MOMENT!
Reveries on Awakening
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
I had always had a sense of 'innerness', a sense of a 'center' within. Then at one point it struck me that my sense of center could be an "assumption", not a fact. I suddenly realized that that assumption created a sense of inner/outer, of a 'me' inside and of a 'world' outside. With that realization I was able to 'let go' of that assumption. With that letting go consciousness became as a point that was everywhere at once. There was no longer an 'outside'. Everything was included in that expanded sense of spaceless presence. It was as if the 'subjective geometry' of experience became radically simpler, indeed as if there were no geometry at all!
~Peter Dziuban in Consciousness is All
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
The gate was opened to me ... in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a University ... I saw it as in a great deep in the internal; for I had a thorough view of the Universe, as a complex moving fullness wherein all things are couched and wrapped up.
~Jacob Boehme
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
If I were to spend years and years imagining how to invent anything so beautiful, I could not do it, and I do not even know how I should try, for, even in its whiteness and radiance alone, it exceeds all that we can imagine.
~Saint Teresa of Avila
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Our true nature is not limited ... it is like the vast ocean. ... When we touch Supreme Consciousness through meditation, then we are boundless, we are everywhere, we are eternal.
~Amma Karunamayi
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy, then suddenly that quotation flashed into my consciousness: "I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars." And I repeated it. Then all at once I was struck as though by lightning, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared. Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly: "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! There's no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha, ha, ha!" the empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously ... Shakyamuni and the patriarchs haven't deceived me!"
~from "The Three Pillars of Zen" by Phillip Kapleau
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Behold what wonderful rest is in the Supreme Spirit
! and he enjoys it; who makes himself meet for it.
Held by the cords of love, the swing of the Ocean of Joy
sways to and fro; and a mighty sound breaks forth in song.
See what a lotus blooms there without water !
and Kabir says"My heart's bee drinks its nectar."
What a wonderful lotus it is,
that blooms at the heart of the spinning wheel of the universe!
Only a few pure souls know of its true delight.
Music is all around it,
and there the heart partakes of the joy of the Infinite Sea.
Kabir says: " Dive thou into that Ocean of sweetness:
thus let all errors of life and of death fiee away."
~Kabir
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, "How much is that?" "Oh, I'm just looking."
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish, project,
like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.
~Rumi, version by Coleman Barks, from "We Are Three"
I had always had a sense of 'innerness', a sense of a 'center' within. Then at one point it struck me that my sense of center could be an "assumption", not a fact. I suddenly realized that that assumption created a sense of inner/outer, of a 'me' inside and of a 'world' outside. With that realization I was able to 'let go' of that assumption. With that letting go consciousness became as a point that was everywhere at once. There was no longer an 'outside'. Everything was included in that expanded sense of spaceless presence. It was as if the 'subjective geometry' of experience became radically simpler, indeed as if there were no geometry at all!
~Peter Dziuban in Consciousness is All
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
The gate was opened to me ... in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a University ... I saw it as in a great deep in the internal; for I had a thorough view of the Universe, as a complex moving fullness wherein all things are couched and wrapped up.
~Jacob Boehme
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
If I were to spend years and years imagining how to invent anything so beautiful, I could not do it, and I do not even know how I should try, for, even in its whiteness and radiance alone, it exceeds all that we can imagine.
~Saint Teresa of Avila
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Our true nature is not limited ... it is like the vast ocean. ... When we touch Supreme Consciousness through meditation, then we are boundless, we are everywhere, we are eternal.
~Amma Karunamayi
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy, then suddenly that quotation flashed into my consciousness: "I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars." And I repeated it. Then all at once I was struck as though by lightning, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared. Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly: "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! There's no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha, ha, ha!" the empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously ... Shakyamuni and the patriarchs haven't deceived me!"
~from "The Three Pillars of Zen" by Phillip Kapleau
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Behold what wonderful rest is in the Supreme Spirit
! and he enjoys it; who makes himself meet for it.
Held by the cords of love, the swing of the Ocean of Joy
sways to and fro; and a mighty sound breaks forth in song.
See what a lotus blooms there without water !
and Kabir says"My heart's bee drinks its nectar."
What a wonderful lotus it is,
that blooms at the heart of the spinning wheel of the universe!
Only a few pure souls know of its true delight.
Music is all around it,
and there the heart partakes of the joy of the Infinite Sea.
Kabir says: " Dive thou into that Ocean of sweetness:
thus let all errors of life and of death fiee away."
~Kabir
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, "How much is that?" "Oh, I'm just looking."
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish, project,
like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.
~Rumi, version by Coleman Barks, from "We Are Three"
Various Pointers to Non-Duality
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
There is no attainment and no cultivation
of original nature. You are Consciousness,
not a farmer! Why work for that which you
already are? Do not mentate, do not stir a
thought. Trying to get out of superimposed
bondage, which is the notion that you are
separate from Existence, you will land in
superimposed freedom.
- From "The Truth Is" by Sri H.W.L. Poonja
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
"When you become more sensitive to the body you have the impression that the inhalation-exhalation is no longer localized. It is all around you. It is important to see how we live mainly in our heads. Think with your whole body, feel with your whole body.
In the whole feeling, the global sensation, you go into your room and touch your whole room. You go outside and touch the clouds, the trees, the water. You do not live in isolation.
In your radiation you are in communion with all things. In this expansion there is no place for the ego because the ego is a contraction. Love is expansion, a feeling of spaciousness. "
- Jean Klein
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
This is from New Seeds of Contemplation, pg 226, in the chapter called "The Gift of Understanding"
"A door swings open in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. Where already, supernatural instinct teaches us that the function of this abyss of freedom, which has been open within our midst, is to draw us utterly out of our own selfhood and into its own immensity of liberation."
- Thomas Merton
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
The Trap of Meaninglessness
There are other traps that are inherent within this process of going from the initial glimpse of awakening to real abiding awakening. There are several of them that come up and again these traps or these cul-de-sacs, these delusions aren't inherent to awakening itself but they arise with the mind's relationship with the awakened view because the awakened view is so far beyond the mind that the mind truly can't contain it but the mind's inherent nature is to try to contain everything that it sees. And so one of these very common traps that people can get into is a sense of meaninglessness.
Now this can arise because from the stand point of reality we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego's desire to find meaning in its life is actually a surrogate, a substitute for having a direct connection with life, for having the perception of 'you are life itself.' But if we don't feel that, if we don't know that, we don't experience that, then we need surrogates, we need something to stand in to fill the gap as it were. And as egos, what the ego uses is meaning, 'I'm trying to find the meaning in my life, what's the meaning to my life.' Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning. Only someone that's disconnected from life will look for purpose. I'm not saying that people shouldn't look for meaning or shouldn't look for purpose. Actually they are probably wise strategies that are used to help people cope with life. But remember that these egoic yearnings for 'what's the meaning of my life?, what's the meaning of my existence?, what's the purpose of my existence?' are ultimately derived from a state where we have no real knowledge of what we are, where we're disconnected from our true nature. I don't mean actually disconnected, I mean unconscious of.
So when there's a true realization, when we wake up from the dream state, when we wake up from the ego, what is realized, part of the realization is the search for meaning is now no longer appropriate. When one has a direct connection with life, all of a sudden to find one's meaning, to find one's purpose seems to be a rather paltry thing, to be a small thing, to be insignificant. It's no longer really a drive in our life. The drive for meaning and purpose falls out of our life because we are literally in a different perspective. In a perspective where such things don't really exist or certainly they don't exist in the old way, they don't exist from the egoic standpoint.
Now the mind will perceive this, this truth, this truth that when we wake up from the dream state we see that the dream state is a dream state. How could a dream state have meaning? How could a dream state have purpose. It's a dream. And that's very true but as I say over and over, there's still a human being and there's still a human mind. And the mind is trying to make sense of all this. The mind is even trying to make sense of awakening itself. It's trying to make sense of the view of awakening. And as I have also said, for most people there's not a total disappearance of the ego, of that which is the experience of division. And so the mind is in relationship with the insights of reality, at times. And the mind will start to say, 'Oh God, there's no meaning!' And what's left of the ego will say, "There's no meaning! I now have no purpose or meaning! It's like you've seen too much of Reality to believe in purpose or meaning.
From "The End of Your World" - Adyashanti
There is no attainment and no cultivation
of original nature. You are Consciousness,
not a farmer! Why work for that which you
already are? Do not mentate, do not stir a
thought. Trying to get out of superimposed
bondage, which is the notion that you are
separate from Existence, you will land in
superimposed freedom.
- From "The Truth Is" by Sri H.W.L. Poonja
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
"When you become more sensitive to the body you have the impression that the inhalation-exhalation is no longer localized. It is all around you. It is important to see how we live mainly in our heads. Think with your whole body, feel with your whole body.
In the whole feeling, the global sensation, you go into your room and touch your whole room. You go outside and touch the clouds, the trees, the water. You do not live in isolation.
In your radiation you are in communion with all things. In this expansion there is no place for the ego because the ego is a contraction. Love is expansion, a feeling of spaciousness. "
- Jean Klein
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
This is from New Seeds of Contemplation, pg 226, in the chapter called "The Gift of Understanding"
"A door swings open in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. Where already, supernatural instinct teaches us that the function of this abyss of freedom, which has been open within our midst, is to draw us utterly out of our own selfhood and into its own immensity of liberation."
- Thomas Merton
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
The Trap of Meaninglessness
There are other traps that are inherent within this process of going from the initial glimpse of awakening to real abiding awakening. There are several of them that come up and again these traps or these cul-de-sacs, these delusions aren't inherent to awakening itself but they arise with the mind's relationship with the awakened view because the awakened view is so far beyond the mind that the mind truly can't contain it but the mind's inherent nature is to try to contain everything that it sees. And so one of these very common traps that people can get into is a sense of meaninglessness.
Now this can arise because from the stand point of reality we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego's desire to find meaning in its life is actually a surrogate, a substitute for having a direct connection with life, for having the perception of 'you are life itself.' But if we don't feel that, if we don't know that, we don't experience that, then we need surrogates, we need something to stand in to fill the gap as it were. And as egos, what the ego uses is meaning, 'I'm trying to find the meaning in my life, what's the meaning to my life.' Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning. Only someone that's disconnected from life will look for purpose. I'm not saying that people shouldn't look for meaning or shouldn't look for purpose. Actually they are probably wise strategies that are used to help people cope with life. But remember that these egoic yearnings for 'what's the meaning of my life?, what's the meaning of my existence?, what's the purpose of my existence?' are ultimately derived from a state where we have no real knowledge of what we are, where we're disconnected from our true nature. I don't mean actually disconnected, I mean unconscious of.
So when there's a true realization, when we wake up from the dream state, when we wake up from the ego, what is realized, part of the realization is the search for meaning is now no longer appropriate. When one has a direct connection with life, all of a sudden to find one's meaning, to find one's purpose seems to be a rather paltry thing, to be a small thing, to be insignificant. It's no longer really a drive in our life. The drive for meaning and purpose falls out of our life because we are literally in a different perspective. In a perspective where such things don't really exist or certainly they don't exist in the old way, they don't exist from the egoic standpoint.
Now the mind will perceive this, this truth, this truth that when we wake up from the dream state we see that the dream state is a dream state. How could a dream state have meaning? How could a dream state have purpose. It's a dream. And that's very true but as I say over and over, there's still a human being and there's still a human mind. And the mind is trying to make sense of all this. The mind is even trying to make sense of awakening itself. It's trying to make sense of the view of awakening. And as I have also said, for most people there's not a total disappearance of the ego, of that which is the experience of division. And so the mind is in relationship with the insights of reality, at times. And the mind will start to say, 'Oh God, there's no meaning!' And what's left of the ego will say, "There's no meaning! I now have no purpose or meaning! It's like you've seen too much of Reality to believe in purpose or meaning.
From "The End of Your World" - Adyashanti
Friday, April 24, 2009
A Meditation on Our Monetary System: State of Permanent Siege
By Richard C. Cook
THE LEVEL OF PUBLIC IGNORANCE on the topic of the U.S. and world monetary system is astonishing. This is part of the plan, of course, because the monetary elite control not only the financial system but also the news media, the publishing industry, and the educational system. The blueprint for control was put together over a century ago by Cecil Rhodes and his friends, including British financier Nathan Rothschild, as documented by Professor Carroll Quigley.
THE LEVEL OF PUBLIC IGNORANCE on the topic of the U.S. and world monetary system is astonishing. This is part of the plan, of course, because the monetary elite control not only the financial system but also the news media, the publishing industry, and the educational system. The blueprint for control was put together over a century ago by Cecil Rhodes and his friends, including British financier Nathan Rothschild, as documented by Professor Carroll Quigley.
During the 20th Century the power shifted to the U.S., with the Rockefellers playing the dominant role as they continue to do today. It is no accident that J.P. Morgan Chase—the Rockefeller family bank—dominates the U.S. derivatives market; nor that Exxon-Mobil, the Rockefellers' oil company, is the most profitable corporation in history.
The basic plan was to place all of mankind in a state of permanent mental and emotional siege so that in the end we would trade all our liberties to the controllers in return for protection; even freedom of thought would be traded for physical safety. That plan is well advanced. The sheeple have been prepared for the final shearing.
Meanwhile, every attempt at real reform has been strangled in the cradle. Past voices for monetary sanity like those of Congressmen Louis McFadden and Jerry Voorhis were silenced. Starting in the 1970s, functionaries like Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Volcker carried out David Rockefeller's plan to outsource manufacturing to China and eliminate the U.S. as the world's greatest industrial democracy, replacing it with a financier oligarchy.
During the 2008 election campaign, Ron Paul called for the end of the Federal Reserve, the bastion of financier control, but no one effectively organized the millions of people who responded to his call or had a viable plan to put in place. Barack Obama obviously works mainly for the financiers, as did Bill Clinton before him. The job of the Democrats is to keep the sheeple quiet by now and then implementing some “reforms”; the Republicans were a more blatant gang of looters.
With the financial crash of 2008-2009, the noose is tightening everywhere in the world. The International Monetary Fund is announcing, “The current global recession is likely to be ‘unusually long and severe, and the recovery sluggish.'” (BBC News, “IMF Sees Long and Severe Slowdown,” April 16, 2009.) In reality, as the IMF knows, it would be possible to put every nation in the world on the road to recovery by allowing them to prime the economic pump through sovereign control of their own monetary systems, with freedom to utilize their own natural resources.
The IMF announcement is in fact the start of a worldwide program of genocide similar to what was done to Russia in the 1990s, with crushing poverty, slashing of incomes, reduction of benefits for the poor and elderly, rising levels of disease and malnutrition, and reduction of life expectancy. We in the West will view the carnage with alarm from our own stripped-down economies but remain docile out of fear the same will be done to us.
Awareness of the hideous evil of the financiers' plans to destroy the soul of humanity is growing. This is being accomplished through the internet and the work of a number of writers who understand what is at stake. I doubt this channel of expression will be available indefinitely. Already alternative websites are being isolated and marginalized. But the fight must be waged.
The one organization that has a program which is comprehensive and free from outside influence is the American Monetary Institute, which has drafted the American Monetary Act. If the Act is introduced in Congress, it will be imperative for it to be recognized and supported as the one chance to save our nation from the dark night that is threatening. But even progressive writers shrink from taking on the Monetary Power, with many of them putting forth the absurdity that all we need to do is reform the banking system.
The American Monetary Act has been in process since 2003. It may be found on the AMI website at: http://www.monetary.org/amacolorpamphlet.pdf. AMI will conduct a presentation on the Act on Capitol Hill, April 23, 2009, in Room 304 of the Cannon House Office Building. Presentations will take place at 10:00 AM and at 2:00 PM.
At the same time, groups of relatively conscious people can come together on their own to create refuges of sanity until the danger passes–over a period of years, decades, or even generations. And, to look at it from a spiritual perspective, we can hope that the Higher Powers who observe humanity's destiny refuse to allow our particular experiment in consciousness to be obliterated.
Destruction of human consciousness is the real goal of the financiers and their minions. It is lies above all that do this. The financiers' power is the biggest lie of all.
Richard C. Cook is a retired federal analyst who writes today on economic, political, and spiritual matters. His books and videos are available through his website at www.richardccook.com. He recently released his six-part video series: Credit as a Public Utility: the Solution to the Economic Crisis.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
I Don't Know
A Dialogue on Intuition
An Interview with Robert Rabbin by Lourdes Billingsley
(Published in the Spring 1995 issue of the Institute of Noetic Sciences Review.)
Editor's Note: Intuition, like consciousness itself, has puzzled both scholars and laypeople for centuries. When we try to pin it down in words, it seems to forever elude precise definition. Yet many of us believe we have some sense of what it is. Lourdes Billingsley decided to interview workshop leader and author Robert Rabbin because "he has a way of responding that circumvents the mind." Rather than answer questions, he enquires into the motivation of the questioner. In the following interview, Billingsley demonstrates how the meaning of intuition is experienced rather than explained.
Lourdes Billingsley: I used to think that intuition was something which would somehow make me a better person, that intuition would be IT. Many people want to develop their psychic or intuitive abilities. Why do you think there is this interest in intuition?
Robert Rabbin: I think people are initially interested in what you call intuition because they do indeed think it will bring benefit. But you know it's hard to answer a question before first asking questions about the question. So let's begin with, What is intuition? I was thinking that if we just start talking about intuition, we'll never become intuition, we'll only know something about it. If we only come to know something about intuition, instead of becoming it, that knowledge will imprison us and reinforce the barrier against it. However, if we can end up inside intuition without knowing something about it, that will have value.
Let's talk about what you were saying initially, which is to ask why we have an interest in intuition. Do we think that intuition will positively affect something in our lives? Let's first find out what it is we want to affect through knowledge of intuition or the experience of intuition. Because the question, What is intuition? may be the wrong question. It may be that our pursuit, if it's unexamined, is misguided, it may not really feed and satisfy our hunger. So let's talk about intuition only if it turns out it's necessary to talk about it. Let's first ask, What is it about our lives that we feel intuition is an answer or an antidote for? Is intuition a medicine that's going to cure a condition? Why do we want to know what intuition is? That's my question to you.
At this point I feel my role and agenda as interviewer slipping away. When I am asked a question I can no longer hide behind the role of interviewer. The question brings me out into the open.
LB: I wanted to satisfy an inner yearning for a certain something that I could not name. I just knew there was something beyond what I knew. I have felt it deeply for years and have always felt a compulsion to seek it out, discover it, bring it out of hiding.
RR: I want to be precise about the condition that was motivating you to seek out this something. If you have a sense that there is something more in life to experience or become aware of, we would have to assume there is an a priori condition that is motivating you. That condition might just be curiosity, but from what you have said it sounds more like dissatisfaction, or perhaps unhappiness, emptiness, sadness, loneliness, insecurity. So those might be among the conditions in our lives that we feel intuition will mitigate. Already we could significantly alter the inquiry of our conversation from "What is intuition?" to "What is the nature and source of isolation, sadness, confusion, doubt, alienation, longing?" We might do better to inquire into the nature of those states—what are they, how do they arise, and what can we do about them? Developing our capacity for intuition may be the correct path" it may also be a colossal waste of time. We should carefully examine and clarify what we are doing. Let's look at what motivates us to explore intuition, and then let's look at what we are calling intuition. We shouldn't rust forward blindly.
An inquiry into the place from which questions arise produces not an answer, but a resolution of the tension from which the question appears. This is something much more profound and useful than any answer. The mind will swoon and fall back into its source. That's what we've been doing. We haven't answered anything. We haven't thrown ourselves carelessly into the world of abstraction. We are inquiring into the question itself. This inquiry creates a new space from which we can ask the question, should that still be necessary. Lourdes, would you say that in the few minutes of our inquiry anything has shifted for you?
I feel very quiet inside. The question is startling, I can't find an answer to the question I think he's asking. As far as my mind can tell, nothing has changed. I feel the same about intuition as when I arrived here for the interview.
LB: No.
RR: Are you sure ?
LB: Yes. Shifted from what? I can't really answer the question.
RR: Your mind has become more still. Your body has become more relaxed. Your senses have become more open. You can, if you take a moment, feel a current of subtle energy moving through and around you.
My mind has not yet got wind of the changes. I slowly begin to realize that he's right. I am more relaxed, my senses are more open. As I sense the changes that have occurred I begin to laugh and I feel bathed by light and lightness. Nothing is funny, yet I am laughing and I am in a state of joy. There is nothing: no thoughts, no me—just space. My body is laughing and there is joy. The person who thought of and was conducting the interview is no longer present. I am experiencing the quality of being that Robert describes continuously throughout the interview. His eyes and voice are bubbling with laughter as we laugh together. An understanding of what is happening is present without words or thinking. In the laughter, he continues:
RR: Now we're getting somewhere. Intuition is not something that can be understood. What we're going to do is end up being possessed by intuition without knowing anything about it. Rumi said, "You are the whole ocean. Why send out for a sip of dew?" If we want only to collect information or have an experience of intuition, aren't we sending out for a sip of dew when we are the whole ocean? Let's go into this a bit more.
We love that momentary excursion into the relaxed and unconstricted state of intuition. But we haven't yet questioned the structure of the reality from which we assert intuition, we just take it for granted. So we want to know about intuition to enhance who we think we are while we're living in that structured reality: how it can help us, how we can use it, how we can access it. The world of intuition exists only because it exists in relation to where we stand now, outside intuition. If we were standing over there, in intuition, wouldn't our situation be like a fish in the ocean trying to find its way to water? What could we say? "Hey, fish, wake up. You're already in the water! "
So we also need to question the place that we're standing in from which we think there is something called "intuition" that we want to know something about. Do we remain as we are in our structured reality and then take a momentary excursion into a relaxed and unconstricted mental realm, or do we remove ourselves totally as we journey into the water of intuition? Which happened to you a moment ago when you started laughing? Our absence becomes the presence we call intuition, and this absence of ourself takes over. What we call intuition takes over; it does not serve our hopes and aspirations but dissolves the one who hopes and aspires.
Intuition is really an ending of ourselves. Even though we think we want to add something, we really want to lose something. In this ending of ourself, there is silence. There is love. The lack of this love which exists only in the moment we end ourselves is the cause of our sadness. One's own self is the barrier to love. One's own self is the sadness. That's why you can't do anything about it, you can only see it. Then it ends, by itself.
I start to laugh again. This time I'm laughing because I can't imagine writing an article about intuition. It's true that when intuition takes over there is no desire for it. It stops existing in the way that it does when we want it. So from this place why write an article, why care? It's like wanting to make love when you're making love. You miss what is already there by wanting it, and you are drawn further and further away from the experience.
RR: The yearning for the serenity and exhilaration of intuitive insight is a fragment of the desire to become whole, the longing of the drop to become the ocean. Can we approach the subject of intuition objectively? Remember, we really want to know how to escape the heavy coat of sadness, loneliness. Can this be dealt with objectively? There is a clue in the unitive flash of total being glimpsed in the intuitive moment. This is the real candy. Not the information. Not the knowledge. The real allure is in the instant of total being. What we are describing occurs when our conventional dualistic reality is dissolved, when all of the conditions that propelled you to seek something more disappear. They are only symptoms of fragmentation, symptoms of duality. In the nondual instant, which can never be objectified or known, there is no separation of knower and known.
There is no object of experience. Not a sensation or a perception or even a thought. Pure awareness alone exists. This is a key. The attraction of intuition is in the momentary dissolution of the subject and object. In the instance in which there is the "aaha", there is no knower and known, there is only knowing. It passes so quickly that we are then left with the knower and the known again. This is why, even as you went deeper in your exploration of intuition, you ended up sad all over again. You returned too quickly to this habitual pattern of dualism. Of course, we all do. You are left with the memory of your absence, and this remnant will not feed your soul, it will not respond to the conditions that are symptoms of your fragmentation. The habit of living in the subject-object world kicks in. We're not ready, we're not ripe enough for full dissolution of ourselves, to live fully in knowing. So we become the knower and the remembered. Then we try to use what is remembered to enhance who we are in the subject-object world.
We are having this conversation about intuition because we all want to become real. We a want to be delivered from those conditions that you talked about before for which we may think intuition is an answer. But do you see how, without dismantling the structure of reality that puts intuition "over there", we will continue to be sad? That sadness will not be brightened for long by a mere remembrance of who we are. We want more than a periodic glimpse. We want to be taken by that.
As I'm listening, I see my many years of frustration and sadness. I had taken what was an awakening to the possibility of something deeper and richer in my life and turned it into a salve for my deflating ego. I kept reinventing the problem. This explains why my joy would always slip away.
RR: We need to understand that what we truly want is a dissolution of the barrier to the intuitive world, the world of nonduality. We want this world to possess us, so that the pain of isolation gives way to the joy of being. Then there is only that. The world of duality that creates intuition collapses. There's no more intuition.
LB: Everything disappears.
RR: Just you, you disappear. Our inquiry into intuition has led us here, to this curious place. Isn't one's interest in intuition really the desire to be free from suffering? Can't we see, through persistent and honest inquiry, that the end of suffering is in the disappearance of the separate self? "In this absence is our presence," says Jean Klein. That knowingness of life itself appears, magically and beautifully.
Once again I am reminded of how I became caught up in the phenomenon of intuition. I tried to hold on to it the best I could. My thinking made it about me, and my striving to maintain an experience that thinking fundamentally could not understand. It exists in daily living. I was so sheltered from the grace of life that I turned it into something special.
LB: You're just seeing things the way they are.
RR: Yes. In this seeing, there is just awareness itself there is no knower of the objects of awareness.
LB: So when you say that there's no knower, will this "I", the person that I am, disappear? Is there no one there anymore to really notice?
RR: Let's take your experience. When you were laughing a few minutes ago, what was your experience? What happened to you when you started to laugh, when laughter took you over?
LB: I disappeared.
RR: Yes, and it's the same with the experience of intuition, you disappear in order for intuitive knowingness to appear. The problem is that we want to use intuition to enhance what disappears in the moment of intuition, instead of seeing how what disappears in the moment of our fullness appears in the first place!
If we were to undertake a journey of inquiry into the knower and the known, we would become that vast frontier of pure knowledge that we call intuition. We wouldn't use it. We would be it. It would be us. We would have erased the ground from which we look out and say, Aaha! Intuition must be over there.
LB: So does that mean [laughter], so that would mean that I would disappear? There would be no one there to notice that intuition was happening?
Every time I disappear, I laugh and become blind to the world as I usually know it. The furniture is here, Robert is here, my body is here; but it's not here as it usually is. I see it, but I am not of it.
RR: Excellent question. Let me ask you to look as clearly as you can into the intuitive insight. It's like a lightning flash. When you look up at a dark sky and you see a flash of lightning it's as though it cracks open the darkness of the sky and reveals another dimension. Go in and find out where the knower, the "I", the experiencer goes in the lightning flash of intuitive awareness. You can look and see a person being struck by the lightning of intuition and it is as if the entire conditioned habitual mechanism of the I-thought, of the knower, the person, disappears. For the briefest instant, just like lightning shattering the sky, you can see what we're calling "intuitive insight" shatter the person that exists in duality.
Over the years I have had experiences where who I am and all that I know is instantaneously erased. It's a beautiful experience of deep simplicity and beauty. Then slowly it disappears, and I am back in the painful place of wishing I was still in the beauty.
RR: Can you ever know who you are, or can you only discover who you're not? If the intuitive flash, the absence of ourselves, is a resolution of duality, then there can't be a knower of one's own self. So how can one know who one is? We can't do that. Let's not be satisfied with this as an idea or a philosophy. Let's look directly into what happens, because there is always enough space in between thoughts to discover the truth of what happens. We can find our way into and between the otherwise relentless stampede of thinking to see, not to know and remember, but to see.
As I look directly at what happens as Robert suggests, I experience a release from thinking and, instantaneously, spaciousness occurs. I disappear, then reappear. I can only describe it as being poor one day and winning Lotto the next. Then losing it all and winning it again. In an instant your concerns disappear and all is well. Until you fall back into thinking again.
LB: Can this spaciousness happen for longer periods of time?
RR: If we ask the question in this way, we're again asserting the reality of the world of duality. You're asking, "How can we make that happen for long periods of time?" Isn't this an escape? What is it that we want to escape from? Do we want to become free from the pain of isolation, from duality? Let's look at this and see if we can directly see, without explaining, without creating abstractions. The lightning flash that fractures the dark sky, the intuitive insight that stops duality within a person, this merging of beauty and silence, if we see that, is that in itself not the answer to your question, "Does that occur? Can that occur more frequently?"
How can what is eternally present occur more frequently?
Why don't you first find out how you create the perception that what is in actual fact always present seems to be distant and remote? You are sitting on the treasure right now.
What we want is freedom from the self. We want to be free from knowing. We want to be free from remembering and becoming. We want to be pure being. Our own seeing will reveal this. If we learn how to see, we'll know this. See how quickly the dissolution of the self in the intuitive insight reappears as the knower and the remembered.
LB: How do you learn to see that?
RR: Just begin to look at it. It's there. You can see it right now. When I asked you, "Lourdes, what happens when intuition strikes you?", you said, "Well, there isn't me. There's just pure knowing." That's seeing. You don't have to do much more than be assisted in seeing what is, and in this seeing the false self drops away. Unfortunately, we have mostly been supported in believing that what isn't, is, which then leads us to ask, How can we develop intuition to solve our problems? figure out which way to go in life? decide which person to marry?
I feel a split within myself. I am very aware of the peacefulness within me. I am also aware of something being afraid of it. I simultaneously feel a sense of relief and a fear of myself disappearing. I feel joy, and also terror, because everything that I thought I was here for no longer matters. I tell Robert about this.
RR: This has never been a problem in the moment of your total absence. Then there is only the joy of pure being. When the joy of pure being dissolves back into the knower and the remembered, then you become afraid, not of that joy, but of the lack of that joy in duality. That fear, that anxiety, is the primary experience of the limited self. We can never truly do anything about that because we have so identified with all that limitation: body, mind, and patterns. We can only see that we are fundamentally not that.
Duality doesn't want to erase itself. So of course the thinking "I" will always suggest fear about its own death. So we say, I'm kind of happy, but I'm also terrified that I'm not going to exist. Of course, but when you don't exist there is no terror. There's nothing but ecstasy, joy, and complete lucid clarity that is more compelling than anything you as a person could ever create on your own.
When we see that we are the joy of being, we won't need any more strategies in life because the fundamental condition that we need strategies in life to deal with has disappeared. So much of our life is spent trying to feed the monster of our apparent separation from life. That comes to an end. You won't need intuition any more.
An Interview with Robert Rabbin by Lourdes Billingsley
(Published in the Spring 1995 issue of the Institute of Noetic Sciences Review.)
Editor's Note: Intuition, like consciousness itself, has puzzled both scholars and laypeople for centuries. When we try to pin it down in words, it seems to forever elude precise definition. Yet many of us believe we have some sense of what it is. Lourdes Billingsley decided to interview workshop leader and author Robert Rabbin because "he has a way of responding that circumvents the mind." Rather than answer questions, he enquires into the motivation of the questioner. In the following interview, Billingsley demonstrates how the meaning of intuition is experienced rather than explained.
Lourdes Billingsley: I used to think that intuition was something which would somehow make me a better person, that intuition would be IT. Many people want to develop their psychic or intuitive abilities. Why do you think there is this interest in intuition?
Robert Rabbin: I think people are initially interested in what you call intuition because they do indeed think it will bring benefit. But you know it's hard to answer a question before first asking questions about the question. So let's begin with, What is intuition? I was thinking that if we just start talking about intuition, we'll never become intuition, we'll only know something about it. If we only come to know something about intuition, instead of becoming it, that knowledge will imprison us and reinforce the barrier against it. However, if we can end up inside intuition without knowing something about it, that will have value.
Let's talk about what you were saying initially, which is to ask why we have an interest in intuition. Do we think that intuition will positively affect something in our lives? Let's first find out what it is we want to affect through knowledge of intuition or the experience of intuition. Because the question, What is intuition? may be the wrong question. It may be that our pursuit, if it's unexamined, is misguided, it may not really feed and satisfy our hunger. So let's talk about intuition only if it turns out it's necessary to talk about it. Let's first ask, What is it about our lives that we feel intuition is an answer or an antidote for? Is intuition a medicine that's going to cure a condition? Why do we want to know what intuition is? That's my question to you.
At this point I feel my role and agenda as interviewer slipping away. When I am asked a question I can no longer hide behind the role of interviewer. The question brings me out into the open.
LB: I wanted to satisfy an inner yearning for a certain something that I could not name. I just knew there was something beyond what I knew. I have felt it deeply for years and have always felt a compulsion to seek it out, discover it, bring it out of hiding.
RR: I want to be precise about the condition that was motivating you to seek out this something. If you have a sense that there is something more in life to experience or become aware of, we would have to assume there is an a priori condition that is motivating you. That condition might just be curiosity, but from what you have said it sounds more like dissatisfaction, or perhaps unhappiness, emptiness, sadness, loneliness, insecurity. So those might be among the conditions in our lives that we feel intuition will mitigate. Already we could significantly alter the inquiry of our conversation from "What is intuition?" to "What is the nature and source of isolation, sadness, confusion, doubt, alienation, longing?" We might do better to inquire into the nature of those states—what are they, how do they arise, and what can we do about them? Developing our capacity for intuition may be the correct path" it may also be a colossal waste of time. We should carefully examine and clarify what we are doing. Let's look at what motivates us to explore intuition, and then let's look at what we are calling intuition. We shouldn't rust forward blindly.
An inquiry into the place from which questions arise produces not an answer, but a resolution of the tension from which the question appears. This is something much more profound and useful than any answer. The mind will swoon and fall back into its source. That's what we've been doing. We haven't answered anything. We haven't thrown ourselves carelessly into the world of abstraction. We are inquiring into the question itself. This inquiry creates a new space from which we can ask the question, should that still be necessary. Lourdes, would you say that in the few minutes of our inquiry anything has shifted for you?
I feel very quiet inside. The question is startling, I can't find an answer to the question I think he's asking. As far as my mind can tell, nothing has changed. I feel the same about intuition as when I arrived here for the interview.
LB: No.
RR: Are you sure ?
LB: Yes. Shifted from what? I can't really answer the question.
RR: Your mind has become more still. Your body has become more relaxed. Your senses have become more open. You can, if you take a moment, feel a current of subtle energy moving through and around you.
My mind has not yet got wind of the changes. I slowly begin to realize that he's right. I am more relaxed, my senses are more open. As I sense the changes that have occurred I begin to laugh and I feel bathed by light and lightness. Nothing is funny, yet I am laughing and I am in a state of joy. There is nothing: no thoughts, no me—just space. My body is laughing and there is joy. The person who thought of and was conducting the interview is no longer present. I am experiencing the quality of being that Robert describes continuously throughout the interview. His eyes and voice are bubbling with laughter as we laugh together. An understanding of what is happening is present without words or thinking. In the laughter, he continues:
RR: Now we're getting somewhere. Intuition is not something that can be understood. What we're going to do is end up being possessed by intuition without knowing anything about it. Rumi said, "You are the whole ocean. Why send out for a sip of dew?" If we want only to collect information or have an experience of intuition, aren't we sending out for a sip of dew when we are the whole ocean? Let's go into this a bit more.
We love that momentary excursion into the relaxed and unconstricted state of intuition. But we haven't yet questioned the structure of the reality from which we assert intuition, we just take it for granted. So we want to know about intuition to enhance who we think we are while we're living in that structured reality: how it can help us, how we can use it, how we can access it. The world of intuition exists only because it exists in relation to where we stand now, outside intuition. If we were standing over there, in intuition, wouldn't our situation be like a fish in the ocean trying to find its way to water? What could we say? "Hey, fish, wake up. You're already in the water! "
So we also need to question the place that we're standing in from which we think there is something called "intuition" that we want to know something about. Do we remain as we are in our structured reality and then take a momentary excursion into a relaxed and unconstricted mental realm, or do we remove ourselves totally as we journey into the water of intuition? Which happened to you a moment ago when you started laughing? Our absence becomes the presence we call intuition, and this absence of ourself takes over. What we call intuition takes over; it does not serve our hopes and aspirations but dissolves the one who hopes and aspires.
Intuition is really an ending of ourselves. Even though we think we want to add something, we really want to lose something. In this ending of ourself, there is silence. There is love. The lack of this love which exists only in the moment we end ourselves is the cause of our sadness. One's own self is the barrier to love. One's own self is the sadness. That's why you can't do anything about it, you can only see it. Then it ends, by itself.
I start to laugh again. This time I'm laughing because I can't imagine writing an article about intuition. It's true that when intuition takes over there is no desire for it. It stops existing in the way that it does when we want it. So from this place why write an article, why care? It's like wanting to make love when you're making love. You miss what is already there by wanting it, and you are drawn further and further away from the experience.
RR: The yearning for the serenity and exhilaration of intuitive insight is a fragment of the desire to become whole, the longing of the drop to become the ocean. Can we approach the subject of intuition objectively? Remember, we really want to know how to escape the heavy coat of sadness, loneliness. Can this be dealt with objectively? There is a clue in the unitive flash of total being glimpsed in the intuitive moment. This is the real candy. Not the information. Not the knowledge. The real allure is in the instant of total being. What we are describing occurs when our conventional dualistic reality is dissolved, when all of the conditions that propelled you to seek something more disappear. They are only symptoms of fragmentation, symptoms of duality. In the nondual instant, which can never be objectified or known, there is no separation of knower and known.
There is no object of experience. Not a sensation or a perception or even a thought. Pure awareness alone exists. This is a key. The attraction of intuition is in the momentary dissolution of the subject and object. In the instance in which there is the "aaha", there is no knower and known, there is only knowing. It passes so quickly that we are then left with the knower and the known again. This is why, even as you went deeper in your exploration of intuition, you ended up sad all over again. You returned too quickly to this habitual pattern of dualism. Of course, we all do. You are left with the memory of your absence, and this remnant will not feed your soul, it will not respond to the conditions that are symptoms of your fragmentation. The habit of living in the subject-object world kicks in. We're not ready, we're not ripe enough for full dissolution of ourselves, to live fully in knowing. So we become the knower and the remembered. Then we try to use what is remembered to enhance who we are in the subject-object world.
We are having this conversation about intuition because we all want to become real. We a want to be delivered from those conditions that you talked about before for which we may think intuition is an answer. But do you see how, without dismantling the structure of reality that puts intuition "over there", we will continue to be sad? That sadness will not be brightened for long by a mere remembrance of who we are. We want more than a periodic glimpse. We want to be taken by that.
As I'm listening, I see my many years of frustration and sadness. I had taken what was an awakening to the possibility of something deeper and richer in my life and turned it into a salve for my deflating ego. I kept reinventing the problem. This explains why my joy would always slip away.
RR: We need to understand that what we truly want is a dissolution of the barrier to the intuitive world, the world of nonduality. We want this world to possess us, so that the pain of isolation gives way to the joy of being. Then there is only that. The world of duality that creates intuition collapses. There's no more intuition.
LB: Everything disappears.
RR: Just you, you disappear. Our inquiry into intuition has led us here, to this curious place. Isn't one's interest in intuition really the desire to be free from suffering? Can't we see, through persistent and honest inquiry, that the end of suffering is in the disappearance of the separate self? "In this absence is our presence," says Jean Klein. That knowingness of life itself appears, magically and beautifully.
Once again I am reminded of how I became caught up in the phenomenon of intuition. I tried to hold on to it the best I could. My thinking made it about me, and my striving to maintain an experience that thinking fundamentally could not understand. It exists in daily living. I was so sheltered from the grace of life that I turned it into something special.
LB: You're just seeing things the way they are.
RR: Yes. In this seeing, there is just awareness itself there is no knower of the objects of awareness.
LB: So when you say that there's no knower, will this "I", the person that I am, disappear? Is there no one there anymore to really notice?
RR: Let's take your experience. When you were laughing a few minutes ago, what was your experience? What happened to you when you started to laugh, when laughter took you over?
LB: I disappeared.
RR: Yes, and it's the same with the experience of intuition, you disappear in order for intuitive knowingness to appear. The problem is that we want to use intuition to enhance what disappears in the moment of intuition, instead of seeing how what disappears in the moment of our fullness appears in the first place!
If we were to undertake a journey of inquiry into the knower and the known, we would become that vast frontier of pure knowledge that we call intuition. We wouldn't use it. We would be it. It would be us. We would have erased the ground from which we look out and say, Aaha! Intuition must be over there.
LB: So does that mean [laughter], so that would mean that I would disappear? There would be no one there to notice that intuition was happening?
Every time I disappear, I laugh and become blind to the world as I usually know it. The furniture is here, Robert is here, my body is here; but it's not here as it usually is. I see it, but I am not of it.
RR: Excellent question. Let me ask you to look as clearly as you can into the intuitive insight. It's like a lightning flash. When you look up at a dark sky and you see a flash of lightning it's as though it cracks open the darkness of the sky and reveals another dimension. Go in and find out where the knower, the "I", the experiencer goes in the lightning flash of intuitive awareness. You can look and see a person being struck by the lightning of intuition and it is as if the entire conditioned habitual mechanism of the I-thought, of the knower, the person, disappears. For the briefest instant, just like lightning shattering the sky, you can see what we're calling "intuitive insight" shatter the person that exists in duality.
Over the years I have had experiences where who I am and all that I know is instantaneously erased. It's a beautiful experience of deep simplicity and beauty. Then slowly it disappears, and I am back in the painful place of wishing I was still in the beauty.
RR: Can you ever know who you are, or can you only discover who you're not? If the intuitive flash, the absence of ourselves, is a resolution of duality, then there can't be a knower of one's own self. So how can one know who one is? We can't do that. Let's not be satisfied with this as an idea or a philosophy. Let's look directly into what happens, because there is always enough space in between thoughts to discover the truth of what happens. We can find our way into and between the otherwise relentless stampede of thinking to see, not to know and remember, but to see.
As I look directly at what happens as Robert suggests, I experience a release from thinking and, instantaneously, spaciousness occurs. I disappear, then reappear. I can only describe it as being poor one day and winning Lotto the next. Then losing it all and winning it again. In an instant your concerns disappear and all is well. Until you fall back into thinking again.
LB: Can this spaciousness happen for longer periods of time?
RR: If we ask the question in this way, we're again asserting the reality of the world of duality. You're asking, "How can we make that happen for long periods of time?" Isn't this an escape? What is it that we want to escape from? Do we want to become free from the pain of isolation, from duality? Let's look at this and see if we can directly see, without explaining, without creating abstractions. The lightning flash that fractures the dark sky, the intuitive insight that stops duality within a person, this merging of beauty and silence, if we see that, is that in itself not the answer to your question, "Does that occur? Can that occur more frequently?"
How can what is eternally present occur more frequently?
Why don't you first find out how you create the perception that what is in actual fact always present seems to be distant and remote? You are sitting on the treasure right now.
What we want is freedom from the self. We want to be free from knowing. We want to be free from remembering and becoming. We want to be pure being. Our own seeing will reveal this. If we learn how to see, we'll know this. See how quickly the dissolution of the self in the intuitive insight reappears as the knower and the remembered.
LB: How do you learn to see that?
RR: Just begin to look at it. It's there. You can see it right now. When I asked you, "Lourdes, what happens when intuition strikes you?", you said, "Well, there isn't me. There's just pure knowing." That's seeing. You don't have to do much more than be assisted in seeing what is, and in this seeing the false self drops away. Unfortunately, we have mostly been supported in believing that what isn't, is, which then leads us to ask, How can we develop intuition to solve our problems? figure out which way to go in life? decide which person to marry?
I feel a split within myself. I am very aware of the peacefulness within me. I am also aware of something being afraid of it. I simultaneously feel a sense of relief and a fear of myself disappearing. I feel joy, and also terror, because everything that I thought I was here for no longer matters. I tell Robert about this.
RR: This has never been a problem in the moment of your total absence. Then there is only the joy of pure being. When the joy of pure being dissolves back into the knower and the remembered, then you become afraid, not of that joy, but of the lack of that joy in duality. That fear, that anxiety, is the primary experience of the limited self. We can never truly do anything about that because we have so identified with all that limitation: body, mind, and patterns. We can only see that we are fundamentally not that.
Duality doesn't want to erase itself. So of course the thinking "I" will always suggest fear about its own death. So we say, I'm kind of happy, but I'm also terrified that I'm not going to exist. Of course, but when you don't exist there is no terror. There's nothing but ecstasy, joy, and complete lucid clarity that is more compelling than anything you as a person could ever create on your own.
When we see that we are the joy of being, we won't need any more strategies in life because the fundamental condition that we need strategies in life to deal with has disappeared. So much of our life is spent trying to feed the monster of our apparent separation from life. That comes to an end. You won't need intuition any more.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Freeing Yourself From The Past
by Leonard Jacobson
In truth, there is no life outside of the present moment. Sooner or later, we must all come to terms with this simple fact.
If you are to awaken fully into the present moment, and remain fundamentally grounded in Presence, then you will have to liberate yourself from entanglement in your own past. It is not the true past. It is the remembered past, which you access through the mind whenever you think. You will also have to free yourself from the imagined future, which is nothing more than the past projected forward. It is simply a fantasy.
The true future does not exist in the world of the mind. The true future unfolds through the doorway of the present moment, just as the true past is accessible through the doorway of the present moment.
To free yourself from the past, there are a number of steps you will have to take.
1. If there are feelings from the past, which have been repressed within you, will have to allow these feelings the opportunity to surface into conscious and responsible expression. You are not trying to get rid of these feelings. You are simply allowing them to express. Everything in existence has a right to exist, including the feelings of need, hurt and anger. If they were denied the right to exist when you were young, because they were too painful then or simply not allowed expression, they will have to be restored into the flow of conscious expression that was once denied them.
2. Forgiveness is a powerful force, which can release the past from you and you from the past. Forgive all those who have hurt you and seek the forgiveness of everyone you have hurt. The forgiveness must be authentic. Sometimes, the pain and the anger at those who have hurt you must be experienced fully, before forgiveness can occur.
3. With some people, healing of the past is necessary before forgiveness and release can truly arise. The good news is that, through the power of awakened Presence, which is a state of Oneness with God, emotional and soul healing is possible in a way that defies all reason and is beyond belief. In working with others, I have so often seen their lives transformed, as we successfully bring to consciousness some traumatic experience from the past, either in this lifetime or some earlier life time, which has been unconsciously projecting into and affecting their current experience of life.
4. To the extent that you maintain yourself in resentment, guilt or blame, you cannot be present, simply because these feelings keep you imprisoned within the past. You must bring these feelings to the surface. Bring them to consciousness in a loving and accepting way. Identify, own, confess and express these feelings, but do not project them onto anyone. Do not believe in them. You are allowing them into consciousness, simply so that they are no longer hidden and so they can no longer control you unconsciously. Feelings of resentment, blame and guilt are an indication that you are not taking responsibility for your life or for yourself. It is easier to blame someone, than to take responsibility for yourself.
5. This next point is the most difficult to understand and is the most easily resisted. If you continue to generate good feelings by remembering happy experiences from the past, you will remain in bondage to the mind and ego forever. Identification with happy memories holds you in the world of the mind and locks in place all those unhappy and painful memories you would rather avoid. This is because the mind is a world of duality, and there is no way to avoid duality, other than by becoming so fully present that Oneness is revealed as the fundamental ground of your existence. It is the same with deriving pleasure from the anticipation of a future event. Only the present moment can fulfill you. It is only when we awaken fully into the present moment that duality is transcended and Oneness is revealed.
In truth, there is no life outside of the present moment. Sooner or later, we must all come to terms with this simple fact.
If you are to awaken fully into the present moment, and remain fundamentally grounded in Presence, then you will have to liberate yourself from entanglement in your own past. It is not the true past. It is the remembered past, which you access through the mind whenever you think. You will also have to free yourself from the imagined future, which is nothing more than the past projected forward. It is simply a fantasy.
The true future does not exist in the world of the mind. The true future unfolds through the doorway of the present moment, just as the true past is accessible through the doorway of the present moment.
To free yourself from the past, there are a number of steps you will have to take.
1. If there are feelings from the past, which have been repressed within you, will have to allow these feelings the opportunity to surface into conscious and responsible expression. You are not trying to get rid of these feelings. You are simply allowing them to express. Everything in existence has a right to exist, including the feelings of need, hurt and anger. If they were denied the right to exist when you were young, because they were too painful then or simply not allowed expression, they will have to be restored into the flow of conscious expression that was once denied them.
2. Forgiveness is a powerful force, which can release the past from you and you from the past. Forgive all those who have hurt you and seek the forgiveness of everyone you have hurt. The forgiveness must be authentic. Sometimes, the pain and the anger at those who have hurt you must be experienced fully, before forgiveness can occur.
3. With some people, healing of the past is necessary before forgiveness and release can truly arise. The good news is that, through the power of awakened Presence, which is a state of Oneness with God, emotional and soul healing is possible in a way that defies all reason and is beyond belief. In working with others, I have so often seen their lives transformed, as we successfully bring to consciousness some traumatic experience from the past, either in this lifetime or some earlier life time, which has been unconsciously projecting into and affecting their current experience of life.
4. To the extent that you maintain yourself in resentment, guilt or blame, you cannot be present, simply because these feelings keep you imprisoned within the past. You must bring these feelings to the surface. Bring them to consciousness in a loving and accepting way. Identify, own, confess and express these feelings, but do not project them onto anyone. Do not believe in them. You are allowing them into consciousness, simply so that they are no longer hidden and so they can no longer control you unconsciously. Feelings of resentment, blame and guilt are an indication that you are not taking responsibility for your life or for yourself. It is easier to blame someone, than to take responsibility for yourself.
5. This next point is the most difficult to understand and is the most easily resisted. If you continue to generate good feelings by remembering happy experiences from the past, you will remain in bondage to the mind and ego forever. Identification with happy memories holds you in the world of the mind and locks in place all those unhappy and painful memories you would rather avoid. This is because the mind is a world of duality, and there is no way to avoid duality, other than by becoming so fully present that Oneness is revealed as the fundamental ground of your existence. It is the same with deriving pleasure from the anticipation of a future event. Only the present moment can fulfill you. It is only when we awaken fully into the present moment that duality is transcended and Oneness is revealed.
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