The Seer

When you accept the form that this moment takes, that is the miracle: the form of this moment becomes an opening into the formless within you. And the worse, the more challenging that this moment is and you accept it, the deeper it takes you into the unconditioned space consciousness or into peace.

So if you were faced with a dreadful disaster in your life, it arises at this moment, everything is collapsed. And you face it and see the isness of this moment just is as it is, you look death in the face. You accept the form that this moment takes completely and suddenly, you sense something that really cannot be described; it’s a spaciousness or peace around that dreadful event. It happens within a field of peace or space.

And I wouldn’t use here the word happy; you are not happy when that happens, nor are you unhappy. It is beyond happiness and unhappiness. There is a serenity and a peace that come. You make room for it to happen, you allow it to happen. You make space for it to happen,

Humans don’t make space for things to happen; they want to remove space from things. So if something is happening and you make space for it, you become the space. And this is the grace that is hidden underneath so-called bad events.

~ From: Journey Into Yourself by Eckhart Tolle

Experiences of truth have been given different names by different spiritual cultures. Heaven, nirvana, resurrection, enlightenment, satori, samadhi — all are names pointing to this supreme, un-nameable, divine beauty, empty of suffering and filled with grace.

In any moment, in a split second, there is the possibility of recognizing the boundless, limitless, eternal truth of yourself. Opening to the truth of our own essential being is simply a matter of receiving; but, because of our conditioning, this doesn’t seem like a simple matter. We are conditioned to fear the unknown depths of ourselves, suspecting the worst.

Yet, when we are finally willing to face head-on the suspected worst in ourselves, we discover an amazing, unbelievable truth: Opening the mind to what has previously been feared and avoided reveals the capacity to bear and truly embrace discomfort, even pain. And eventually, we discover that whatever we fully embrace reveals the peace that we were seeking through all of our attempts to avoid discomfort.

To open your mind to the silence that is the source of your mind is to open to your true self. Conscious silence is already open. You are already open. Allow your mind to stop gathering information, to stop imagining the future, to stop strategizing for survival. Let your mind simply be held by its source. Recognize that the capacity to open to the truth of your being is always here ….

You are truth already. You are consciousness. Consciousness is spirit. Recognize yourself, and you will see yourself everywhere — in every other human being, in every animal, in every plant, in every rock. Until you recognize yourself, you are still figuring out how to find yourself, how to get more of yourself, how to know what is and is not yourself.

Truth is already here, regardless of the state of your body, your emotions, your mind, or your circumstances. Stop and see.

~ From The Diamond in Your Pocket by Gangaji.

To see/hear Gangaji on Conscious TV with Iain McNay, >>>Click Here.

For many years now I’ve been in the habit of silently repeating to myself, from time to time, my own secret mantra “To be saved is to be Him”, while breathing out very deeply indeed.

My whole body down to my toenails seems to be expiring, breathing me out and You in.

The strong sensation of leaning back and collapsing into Your Immensity, of merging with You utterly, brings with it the profoundest physical relaxation I know.

As I say, it’s as if, breathing out thus deeply, I breathe You in; and, breathing in again, You breathe me in.

It’s very much as if, having just saved me from drowning in the Sea of Death, You were giving me the Kiss of Life.

~ From To Be And Not To Be (page 190) by Douglas Harding.

When we think about peace, everyone seems to have their own ideas about what that should look like. We certainly know what peace is not — war, violence, cruelty, lack, pain, suffering, noise, inner turmoil and so on.

The idea is that if we eliminate those bad things out of our personal (and also planetary) experience then we would be at peace. But all of this is only ideas.

Peace is something bigger than just having an outwardly gentle and quiet demeanor. We all know this, but is there something that we are calling peace that is behind all of our ideas about it?

Consider the poem below, written in a noisy airport. What sort of peace is being referred to in the poem that could include the noise of a busy airport? Is this peace achieved through lack of noise?

This peace does include harmony and justice and gentleness but doesn’t exclude the hubbub of everyday life at all. It is something that includes all of the tumult of the human condition with generosity and inclusiveness.

This is the peace that passes understanding referred to in the Bible. It can’t be understood by the limited and polarized mental processes that we have so long been habituated to use as filters in our perception.

Now, as we are able to open up our perception (noticing and relaxing the filters that are no longer helpful) we can begin to perceive directly this other kind of peace beyond all of our ideas about it.

At the Airport

Listening
To the hum of humanity
Above the silvery silence
Complete and at rest
Behind the sound.

Movement and stillness
Joining together
The dispersed strands
Of life’s fullness.
Each enfolding the other
In holy embrace.

~ by Alice Gardner

The Plotniks were shown into the dentist’s office, where Aari made it clear he was in a big hurry.

“No fancy stuff, Doctor,” he ordered. “No gas or needles or any of that stuff. Just pull the tooth and get it over with.”

“I wish more of my patients were as stoic as you,” said the dentist admiringly. “Now, which tooth is it?”

Aari turned to his wife, Ruthie …

“Show him your tooth, Honey.”

The phrase “Here and Now” is known to all. It is strange to even mentions it, like saying, “Breathe!” Isn’t it clear that we breathe? Well, just as breathing is sometimes strenuous so the experience of Now can be hard work. It happens to us when our attention is bombarded by troublesome thoughts that are not from here and now. Valuable psychic energy is wasted and the result is nervousness and exhaustion. It’s like pressing the accelerator in low gear.

How and when did we lose our connection to ‘Here and Now’?

When we were young and vulnerable, we operated on an automatic and reactive mindset aimed at survival. This mindset is security centered. The mind will struggle for security by constantly trying to make sense of life. That means trying to predict the future based on past experience. The mind gradually develops a ’story’ about oneself. The story consists of explanations of what happened in the past, interpretations of the present and predictions about the future.

Within the story, a child perceives him or herself as the main cause of his or her pains. This often develops into the delusion of “I am not lovable as I am.” The heavy price is a loss of authenticity, of connection to the flow of life, to NOW.

What does it mean to ‘live in the Now’?

Living in the Now means our attention is entirely focused at the present moment, as if we ‘forgot ourselves’ in favor of what is happening right now. Self forgetfulness is to forget the story your mind has created through your life. The story is like a prison whose bars are past memories. Returning to Now is liberation from this prison.

When your attention is fully Now, you don’t sense the effort but the lightness of a playful state of mind. You allow yourself to be who you really are. Does it mean that one should not learn from the past and plan for the future? On the contrary! Being with the flow of life is to experience learning because life is a movement forward through learning and growing.

The Now attention is not engaged in blame, guilt or catastrophising the future but simply in what one can learn for a better future. In Now the attention is free from the ’stories.’ Creating a healthy distance from your stories is what you want to achieve through a process of self-awareness. As you learn to disidentify with the relentless thoughts you free your attention to respond more effectively to the Now.

How can we return to Now?

Returning to Now is, to my view, the most transformative experience a person can have in his or her life. This is a transition in the center of gravity of one’s identity. From controlling-analytical mind — EGO — to the spirit, this loving-abundant capacity within each of us.

While our Ego-attention is operating on the survival pain/pleasure principle, our spirit operates on the abundance principle of unlimited possibilities for flourishing. The one who learns how to shift attention from survival mode to flourishing mode has freed him or herself from the conditioned ego. This will result in a more authentic life, a life that reflects one’s true potential, one’s true nature.

The spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, wrote in The Power of Now that a connection to life occurs when we disidentify with this mindset that psychologically lives the past and future. The liberation is not by taking control of it but by connecting with and observing it. The brain involuntarily generates electro-chemical events that we experience as thoughts and emotions. This is the nature of the mind. Resistance will only feed the same mindset.

We must understand that thoughts are neither right nor wrong. It is our relationship with them that give them the power. It’s like watching a movie: the impact on us is as strong as the belief that what we see is true. Our challenge is to see mental events — thoughts, images, memories etc., as what they really are — a content from the past running on the screen of our mind.

The method we use in order to train the mind to do so is known as mindfulness. Put simply, you learn to notice whatever is happening in the Now. As you develop the skill to just notice, you develop gradually the observer within you. In a state of self-awareness you are not carried away by your thoughts and feelings. The idea is simple, but not the implementation. One has to properly study and practice this ability.

According to Tolle, one of the main gateways to Now is our body. A short exercise of noticing your body experiences will anchor your attention instantly in the Now. Your body is always here, always alive and always changing. By noticing the subtle sensations you increasingly center your core identity as the spiritual self. Observing means unconditional acceptance, without analyzing or judging.

This is an emphatic observation, without ego’s contaminated filter. Such an observation is a skill we left in childhood. While playing in puddles we marveled at the jumping green thing before it became a ‘frog’. Such observation often leads to moments of wonder and awe. Once you experience it, you realize that coming back to Now is like coming back to life.

~ by Hagai Avisar (Hagai will be giving an extended workshop at Gurukula in November. For more details, >>>Click Here)

Some people try to express non-duality by not using the ‘I’ word as they think it reinforces dualism and in a sense it does, but I found it a bit silly trying to talk without using it. All language is conceptual and so is not the ‘thing’. Words are just pointers. It does present quite a challenge using language although, of course, we have to. If you understand that words are part of the mind and both appear in awareness then there’s no problem. Awareness witnesses all.

The thing is you are aware of these writings right now. The eyes and nervous system processes them and a perception is formed. It’s awareness that notes them. Without awareness nothing could be known. So there’s nothing to become — awareness is already working perfectly well. Behind all the identifications is awareness and you are that. There really is nothing to become. Waiting for some big experience only delays the understanding of what is already and always has been functioning.

Mind loves bigger, better, stronger and faster. Everything that’s happened in your life happened in awareness. Yes the self inquiry is important. Ask the question ‘Who am I’ and watch the answers that the mind throws up — identifications. The mind is an object in awareness and it thinks in terms of objects — it can’t know the subject — you.

The original problem was when awareness became infatuated with objects, through the baby’s eyes, and became indentified with them, namely the ‘me/human’. At some point there was an intuition that something was wrong, but everyone we trusted convinced us all was well. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s what had to happen; just like you and I had to start asking questions. So don’t expect an event just understand that awareness is behind everything.

As you would have noticed self realization is also sometimes referred to as ‘the understanding’. The understanding is important and the inquiry shows the mind at work close up. For me, I did that while reading Ramesh Balsekar and I watched the mind trying to work it all out and come up with one identification after another. What was important for me was simply noticing that the real I (the I AM) was witnessing all this happening but even so it was still some time later and while reading John Wheeler that it hit me.

Yes you are awareness. And ultimately only awareness is. How would you know the words on this page without awareness? You just have to come to that understanding and conviction. You are not a human who is aware, you are awareness witnessing everything through the human — everything is an appearance in you. When this is seen it is the simplest and most elegant and uncomplicated understanding. Our ‘normal’ understanding of the world is way too complicated.

~ by Roy Townsend

So here we are — just a sliver past Equinox time. Some of us are noticing the leaves pushing out of their buds and the days lengthening and growing warmer. Others are feeling a slight nip in the air, the leaves are turning all their beautiful shades and the light is on the wane. No better time at all than this, says Tim Freke, to ponder polarities and to explore ways to be deep awake. Check out this Video where Tim talks about the theme of his new book, How Long is Now, available soon from Clearsight.

And hey, you might like this song by Jamus Dorey entitled:Be Real, Be Free.

“To become free, your attention must be drawn to the “I am”, the witness. Of course, the knower and the known are one, not two, but to break the spell of the known the knower must be brought to the forefront. Neither is primary, both are reflections in memory of the ineffable experience, ever new and ever now, unstranslatable, quicker than the mind.”

~ by Nisargadatta Maharaj

Professor Thomas Metzinger is based at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz in Germany, and has long collaborated with neuroscientists and artificial intelligence researchers and others. And in his new book, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, he makes the case that there is no such thing as a self.

In Sep. 2009, he was interviewed by Natasha Mitchell for the All in the Mind program on ABC Radio National. Natasha began by asking: “If I was to ask you who you are, the self that goes by the name of Thomas Metzinger from Germany, I wonder how you’d answer, because you make the provocative argument that there is no such thing as a self, that there never has been, that there never will be.”

Thomas Metzinger: Yes, it’s actually not so provocative, it’s not an original idea at all. Many philosophers, David Hume, in the Anglo Saxon universe have said that for a long time. Who am I? The physical body certainly exists, the organism exists, but organisms are not selves. I don’t deny that there is a self-y feeling. I certainly feel like someone, but there is no such thing. There is neither a non-physical thing in a realm beyond the brain or the physical world that we could call a self, but there’s also no thing in the brain that we must necessary call a self.

Of course Buddhist philosophy had that point 2,500 years ago. So the idea that, as philosophers say, the self is not a substance, that it is something that can stay and hold itself in existence, even if the body or the brain were to perish, that’s not a very breathtaking and new idea. What I am interested in is to understand why we just cannot believe that this is so. We have the feeling there is an essence in us, a deepest, inner core. We have this feeling that there must be something that is just not right about neuro-scientific theories about self consciousness, there’s something beyond it. And I want to understand what that deepest core is because that’s the origin of the subjectivity of consciousness.

You can see the complete transcript of this interview >>>Here.

To download or listen to the interview, >>>Click Here.