The Seer

There are two of us at all times. Even now, in this very moment, there are two of you living your life. Or it could be said, that Life is living you as two dimensions …

There is the You which is pure formless awareness, and, there is the you that you think you are and all of its stories and history and hopes and dreams. Another way of saying this is that you are consciousness itself AND you are an ego personality that exists in and because of your thoughts.

If we look at these two side-by-side, we get an even clearer picture:

Pure Consciousness ~ Ego Personality
Formless awareness ~ Thought forms
Known through presence ~ Known through thoughts
Present-moment being ~ Past and future idealization
Lives here and now ~ Lives elswhere, in the past and future
Body-centered ~ Thought-centered
Identity-less; free from all attachments and identifications ~ Identified with personal story, status, roles, nationality, jobs, things, etc

Transcendent ~ Temporal
Inner sense of aliveness ~ Mental thought processes
Infinite depth ~ Outer surface
The Observer ~ The supposed doer
Peaceful serenity, quiet equanimity ~ Drama, reactivity, suffering
At one with all that is, harmoniously ~ Separate from others; often in conflict

By dis-identifying with the ego, we naturally gain access to the experience of our true nature, the present-moment awareness that we know by being here, now.

~ by Eckhart Tolle. See >>>video clip

I had quite a huge pain-body. When I first came to know Eckhart Tolle closely, I thought that this is going to be absolutely wonderful, because when my pain-body comes up, I have someone who can be totally present and with me through it all. What I found was that if I remained a little bit present, he could stay with me, but if I went totally unconscious and totally identified with my pain-body, I would see him walk out the door.

This would infuriate me further. When this happened, it was the best thing for me because I learned that only “I” could dissolve my pain-body.

If you’re conscious enough to stay present with your pain-body, then you will watch it dissolve. Don’t let the ego come in because the ego will say “I am more awake now so I can stay here.” When you’re fully present, you won’t have those thoughts. You will just find yourself there holding the space. Just being still. Some words may come out, maybe not.

Staying present in your relationship with your parents can be both a great challenge and the ultimate practice. Ram Dass used to say, “If you think you’re enlightened, then go visit your parents for a week or two.”

If you can stay present (in the company of a critical or complaining parent), then you’re holding their pain-body in spacious awareness. Your being in awareness will help dissolve their pain-body … but only if you can stay present while you’e with them.

Now, if you find that your pain-body gets activated when their pain-body is active, and you can still be present and hold the space for your pain-body and their pain body, then great! You are dissolving both your pain-bodies. However; if you find yourself slipping into unconsciousness, or, in other words, identifying with the pain-body, and if you still have that little bit of conscious presence, then remove yourself from the situation.

Once you feel your own pain-body being activated, and we can all know this from experience, once the pain-body is active, you want a fight! And this is what we do when we are totally unconscious. It is the feeding of the pain body, it is not only fed by your thoughts, but also by the other person’s thoughts. We make it grow and grow.

I remember sitting in a cafe having tea. There was a young girl at the table next to me, who looked like she was with her father. She appeared to be in a lot of pain. I could feel the energy of her pain-body around her. I thought about moving, but it didn’t. Instead, I stayed present with the energy.

There is no division with energy, so you can feel other peoples energy around you. I don’t know how long it took, maybe 15 minutes. I wasn’t judging or naming, just feeling the energy. Suddenly, the energy felt as if it was about to burst and as I felt that, it did and she broke out in laughter. Then she and her father were laughing together. So it is possible to just stay present, not in a conceptual way, but be there as the witnessing presence.

~ by Kim Eng

You gotta’ smile over this one … Sometimes there is justice. A musician named Dave Carroll not long ago had difficulty with United Airlines. United apparently damaged his treasured Taylor guitar ($3500) during a flight. Dave spent over 9 months trying to get United to pay for damages caused by baggage handlers to his custom Taylor guitar.

During his final exchange with the United Customer Relations Manager, he stated that he was left with no choice other than to create a music video for youtube exposing their lack of cooperation. The Manager responded : “Good luck with that one, pal”. So he posted a retaliatory video on youtube. The video has since received over 7.5 million hits!

United Airlines contacted the musician and attempted settlement in exchange for pulling the video. Naturally his response was: “Good luck with that one, pal”. And BTW, Taylor Guitars sent the musician two new custom guitars in appreciation for the product recognition from the video that has lead to a sharp increase in orders. Here’s >>>the video.

Sent in by Lumari Mcguinness. Thanks Lumari.

“In worshipping Jesus, men lost the Christ. In devotion to Jesus, men failed to apprehend the Christ. In seeking good through Jesus, men failed to find the omnipresent Christ in their own consciousness.”

~ From: The Infinite Way, pp 36, by Joel Goldsmith

The breath, the wind and the spirit
obey their own mysterious moods
and their own harmonious laws.
When you hear their voices
and feel their touch,
you know they exist without a doubt.
But you do not understand
how they came together,
how they rise and fall as they
pass over and through the earth.

Just as mysterious seems
the movement and the purpose
of every human being
who has returned to the Source
and been reborn from the Great Dark
through the power of breath and of spirit.

~ from the original Aramaic of Jesus’ words (as reported in John 3:8) translated by Neil Douglas-Klotz in The Hidden Gospel

At the end of the religious revival meetings held in a public hall, three church leaders were discussing the results with one another.

The Methodist minister said, “The revival worked out great for us! We gained four new members.”

The Baptist preacher said, “We did better than that! We gained six new members.”

The Presbyterian pastor said, “Well, we did even better than that! We got rid of our ten biggest trouble makers!”

Truth is only discovered in the moment. There is no truth that can be carried over to the next moment, the next day, the next year. Memory never contains truth, only what is past, dead, gone.

Truth comes into the non-seeking mind fresh and alive. It is not something you can carry with you, accumulate, or hold onto.

Truth leaps into view when the mind is quiet, not asserting itself. You cannot contain or domesticate truth, for if you do, it dies instantly.

Truth prowls the unknown waiting for a gap in the mind’s activity. When that gap is there, the truth leaps out of the unknown into the known.

Instantly you comprehend it and sense its sacredness. The timeless has broken through like a flash of lightning and illuminated the moment with its presence.

Truth comes to an innocent mind as a blessing and a sacrament. Truth is a holy thing because it liberates thought from itself and illumines the human heart from the inside out.

~ by Adyashanti, 2009

Question: What is our relationship with our personality after awakening and does it change?

Eckhart Tolle: Strictly speaking, before awakening, to a large extent, you don’t have a relationship with your personality; you ARE your personality. If you can have a relationship with your personality – which is the ego, with its way of reacting and thinking, and emotions – who is having a relationship with the personality?

What that means is you are witnessing it. There is a witnessing consciousness there, and if there is a witnessing consciousness, then you can have a relationship with your personality. What that really means is, you can be there as a witnessing presence when your ego is doing something silly. And you can laugh at yourself, maybe in the moment, maybe afterwards. If you are totally in the grip of your personality, or your ego, then of course there is no relationship because you have become it.

You’re so one with all your reactive patterns and all your conditioned thinking, that you don’t even know that there’s anything else in you. You ARE it. As you awaken spiritually, the awareness that is nothing to do with your personality increases, and the power of the personality, with its conditioned patterns, decreases.

Gradually, the personality is no longer opaque; it is transparent to the light of awareness, or consciousness. It loses its solidity. This is why you find that in people who are awake, or people who are awakening, there is more of a lightness to them. If there’s only personality, then there’s heaviness, a psychic heaviness in you. Everything is dreadfully serious, and [you are] defensive, always wanting something, or defending yourself against something.

When you’re relating to somebody in whom there is no awareness, then you always get a slightly uncomfortable feeling, because that person is completely ill-at-ease. Ultimately, all personalities are ill-at-ease. They may pretend that they are very confident, but underneath the role of ‘confidence’, there’s always a person who feels ill-at-ease. They need to prove something, or they want something from you.

That’s the personality. As you awaken, that part become a little less opaque and it becomes lighter. There’s more of an awareness that shines through the person. Ego is complete identification with your thinking and your emotions. When you are unconscious, personality and ego are one thing. As you awaken, you become more aware of your patterns, which may to some extent still operate.

I’m choosing to define personality as something that you can be aware of. It was the ego before, but you can be aware of it as patterns that still operate within you. If there is no awareness, and you are it, then it’s totally ego. As you become aware of your ego, the ego becomes the personality, and then you can have a relationship with your personality in the sense that you can be the witness.

If you have a difficult relationship with your personality, that’s a delusion. Then your personality has split itself into two, one part is having a relationship with another, and one part says “You should be better, why can’t you be more conscious?” That means there is no witnessing presence there. One part of the personality is arguing with another.

The witnessing consciousness doesn’t judge. You don’t judge yourself in any way, you just see behavior. There’s no good or bad, it just is. The need to be right, for example, is a very common thing with the ego. If it’s a deep-seated need, then you can’t be wrong in an argument. There’s a compulsion to defend yourself. Then suddenly you can see it in yourself. Ultimately, having a relationship with your personality implies that there is a witnessing presence.

~ by Eckhart Tolle — to see an excellent interview with Eckhart, >>>Click Here

“In the deepest within — the most infinite beyond — in ever present awareness, your soul expands to embrace the entire Kosmos, so that Spirit alone remains, as the simple world of what is. The rain no longer falls on you, but within you; the sun shines from inside your heart and radiates into the world, blessing it with grace; supernovas swirl in your consciousness, the thunder is the sound of your own exhilarated heart; the oceans and rivers are nothing but your blood pulsing to the rhythm of your soul.

Infinitely ascended worlds of light dance in the interior of your brain; infinitely descended worlds of night cascade around your feet; the clouds crawl across the sky of your own unfettered mind, while the wind blows through the empty space where your self once used to be.

The sound of the rain falling on the roof is the only self you can find, here in the obvious world of crystalline one taste, where inner and outer are silly fictions and self and other are obscene lies, and ever-present simplicity is the sound of one hand clapping madly for all eternity. In the greatest depth, the simplest what is, the journey ends, as it always does, exactly where it began.”

~ by Ken Wilber (sent in by Walt Motley, Thanks Walt.)

“Dig in thine own field for this Pearl of Eternity that lies hidden in it; it cannot cost thee too much, nor canst thou buy it too dear; for it is ALL; and when thou hast found it, thou wilt know, that all which thou hast sold or given away (or ‘lost’) for it, is as a mere nothing, as a bubble upon the water.” ~ William Law

Centuries ago in China, Master Tsung-i would instruct others by saying, “The whole universe is One Bright Pearl.” (cf. ‘Consciousness is all there is’)

“One Bright Pearl” thoroughly expresses it even though not itself revealed in its name, and we can recognize it in its name.

“One Bright Pearl” directly transcends the eons, and because in eternal past it never ceased to be, it reaches up to the eternal present.

Though there is one’s mind now and one’s body now, they are just the One Bright Pearl. This grass or that tree are not grass and tree, nor are the mountains and rivers of the world mountains and rivers; they are One Bright Pearl.

Thus, the Bright Pearl, existing just so and being beginningless, transcends changes in time and place. The whole universe is One Bright Pearl.

We do not speak of two or three pearls, and so the entirety is one True Dharma Eye, the Body of Reality, One Expression. The entirety is Brilliant Light, One Mind.

When [the Bright Pearl] is the entirety, nothing hinders it. Round [like a pearl], it rolls around and around.

~ by Zen Master Dogen Ki-gen

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