The Seer

A woman goes into a fabric store and asks the shop assistant for some nice soft lacy material for her honeymoon nightie.

The assistant says “About two metres ought to do that!” and the woman says “Oh no, I’d better have about fifty metres.”

The assistant says “Fifty?! But surely that’s way too much?”

The woman says “I know, but the man I’m marrying is a guru devotee and he would rather seek than find.”

The assistant nodded knowingly and said: “Poor man, it sounds like he needs to read Nadeen’s book — From Seekers to Finders!”

PS. You might like check out the latest words of wisdumb from Puppetji — Puppetji vs Baggage

Government surveyors came to Doogan’s bush-block in the spring and asked if they could do some surveying. Doogan agreed and his wife even made them some pumpkin scones for their afternoon tea-break.

Six months later, the two surveyors stopped by and told Doogan, “Because you were so kind to us, we wanted to give you this bad news in person instead of by letter.”

Doogan replied, “What’s the bad news?”

The surveyors stated, “Well, after our work we discovered your block isn’t in Queensland, but is actually in New South Wales.”

Doogan looked at them and said, “That’s the best bloody news I’ve heard in ages. Why, I just told me wife ‘ere this mornin’, I don’t think I could take another cyclone season in Queensland!”

For two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a “mystic,” and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives.

It sounds like fiction, but today that man, Eckhart Tolle, is known worldwide for his teachings on spiritual enlightenment through the power of the present moment. His first book, The Power of Now, is an international bestseller, and has been translated into 17 languages.

More than 20 years have passed since Eckhart Tolle answered his first question on that park bench. While his audience has grown, his message remains the same: that it is possible to stop struggling in your life, and find joy and fulfillment in this moment, and no other.

Sounds True: Can you describe to us your own experience of spiritual awakening (and of course, can you define spiritual awakening as well)? Was there a singular event that occurred or has it been a gradual process?

Eckhart Tolle: Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness. There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance of being awake, of not falling back to sleep.

The word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit word Budh, meaning, “to be awake.” So Buddha is not a name and ultimately not a person, but a state of consciousness.

All this implies that humans are potentially capable of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming. This is why some spiritual teachings use terms like “shared hallucination” or “universal hypnotism” to describe normal human existence. Pick up any history book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and you will find that a large part of the history of our species has all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or an insane hallucination.

~ From an Interview with Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now and the End of Suffering, by publisher: Sounds True. circa July/2008

~ Read More of Eckhart’s interview.

~ Watch a YouTube video clip of a talk on ‘Enlightenment’ given by Eckhart two years ago.

Beneath the assumption ‘that you are the body’ is an even deeper one. The idea ‘that you are the body’ is predicated on the assumption that you exist, that you are a ‘me’ — a separate, individual self. The most intimate sense of your self is often this sense of ‘me’, which is a limited and incomplete sensing of your self. It doesn’t include the far reaches of your greater Being. This sense of a separate ‘me’ is not bad or wrong; it’s just limited and incomplete.

In the midst of a very profound and large experience of truth, the sense of your self can become so large and inclusive that it no longer has much of a sense of being your Being. When you awaken to the oneness of all things, the sense of a ‘me’ can thin out quite dramatically. If you are the couch you are sitting on, the clouds in the sky, and everything else, then it simply doesn’t make sense to call it all ‘me’. If it is so much more than what you usually take yourself to be, then the term ‘me’ is just too small.

In a profound experience of truth, the sense of ‘me’ softens and expands to such a degree that there is only a slight sense of ‘me’ as a separate self remaining, perhaps just as the observer of the vastness of truth. Beyond these profound experiences of the truth, is the truth itself. When you are in touch with the ultimate truth and the most complete sense of Being, there is nothing separate remaining to sense itself — there is no experience and no experiencer, no Heart, and no sense of self. There is only Being.

The experience of bigger truths and even the biggest truth doesn’t obliterate your capacity to experience a small truth and therefore, a separate self. But with many experiences of shifting in and out of a small sense of self, this separate self feels more like a suit of clothes you can take on and off rather than something permanent.

As you move in and out of many dimensions of Being and even beyond experience itself, the boundaries between all of these dimensions become very permeable and inconsequential. It turns out that these boundaries are just thoughts anyway. They don’t actually separate anything.

The question isn’t how to get rid of a small sense of self, but what is the sense of your self like? Is it fixed or is it constantly shifting — opening and closing, expanding and contracting, tightening and loosening, and sometimes even disappearing altogether?

The sense of a separate self can therefore be loosely held even though it continues to contract appropriately when a small truth is triggered. What is your sense of self like right now? What is true right now? Your Heart is the only guide you need for exploring even the biggest truths.

~ From: Living from the Heart (part 2). by Nirmala . (Sent in by Elena — Thanks Elena)

It is easy to turn awareness into a static mental conclusion. Instead of abiding in and as actual awareness, there is a tendency of the mind to repeatedly play the conclusion, “I am awareness” or “there is only awareness” or some other conclusory non-dual label.

A conclusion cannot see. It just repeats itself. A false sense of mental certainty often comes with this repetition. If any conclusion is repeated enough, it turns into a rigidly held position. Conflict is right around the corner. The need to be right arises directly from egoic insecurity. Conflict arises from attachment to thought — from an attempt to take ownership of reality. No one owns reality.

Actual awareness is not a conclusion. It is a deeply and relentlessly compassionate and loving awakeness to everything that is arising now including to any particular conclusion that may be arising or being held onto as “truth.” The degree of conflict and self-righteousness in your life are good indicators of whether awareness is being treated as a static mental conclusion or whether there is true abiding as actual timeless awareness.

Awareness is naturally secure and confident. It has nothing to prove. This confidence is different than mental certainty. It is a confidence of the heart. It is a confidence with a deep resonance of love, compassion, and pure openness to what is arising now. Conclusions fragment life into pieces. Awareness reveals that the fragments are illusory. It reveals wholeness.

From: Reflections of the One Life, by Scott Kiloby

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“Jesus was the Christ, but the Christ is much more than what we see as Jesus. The body of Jesus had a beginning in the womb of Mary, but the Christ exists eternally — long before the body of Jesus came into being. The Christ is never born and, therefore, never dies. There is only one Christ in all eternity. Our confusion over the nature of Jesus stems from our inability to see the body as nothing more than a garment. Jesus knew he was the Christ and not the perishable body.”

~ by Ethan Walker III, from The Mystic Christ pp 103.

The good man may not be aware that somewhere on Earth, while he slept, other men were seeking the true Light and meditating upon it. And this Light that I speak of is the Light behind the light — the same that kindled the Sun and Moon and stars in the beginning. And this Light — the Light of the world — is what every man born is seeking all the days of his earthly life, whether he knows it or not.

I will mention the feeblest of all lights — the candle that burns all night in a cold cell of this monastery. The monks here are all frail creatures like the men of the ploughshare and the net and given to error, but now and then, here and there, in cell and sanctuary, all over the world, a great company of minds and hearts is set on a quest for the ultimate meaning of things — for that goodness and truth and beauty that are at the heart of life.

The world is wrapped in night and sleep: a solitary sits at his candle and his spirit is abroad on the ocean of God’s love. Presently, the night-watcher is aware that the flame of his candle is so thin as to be invisible. The Sun, new risen, is flooding through his window. It is not the Sun of all vanity, but the Sun of holy wisdom, and under it, wonderful things are done day after day to the end of time.

These truths are not given only to a solitary here and there in the long watches of the night, they aught to be part of every man, woman and child. If we are true to that Light, we shall know when our last day on Earth, if not before, that life is a thing of beauty beyond price. The peace of the Light that we tend and trim in our hearts will outlast the darkness and the dust of death. And so, dear children of the Light, go out in peace to your fields and your fishing boats.

~ From the novel: Vinland by George MacKay Brown, Ch. 5.
(the conclusion of a short sermon given many centuries ago by Abbot Peter in a monastery chapel in the Orkney Isles)

You’ll remember, from the previous humor item (see below), the circus that came to a small outback town and needed local acts.

Well, the old Ringmaster had just seen off the bloke that did bird imitations when two strapping young bushmen presented themselves.

“What’s your act?” asked the Ringmaster.

“It’s our Dad,” answered one of the youths, “He drinks molten lead.”

“You mean no trickery, dead set dinkum — he drinks molten lead?!”

“Yep”

“That’s amazing!” what’s the performance fee?”

“Well there’s $500 for Dad and another $500 each for me and my brother.”

The old Ringmaster exclaimed, “Why should I pay you blokes more than a booking fee, seeing as your Dad is the real talent?”

“Well we’re needed to hold him down,” was the answer, “He doesn’t like it …”

~ Sent in by Sam Blight — Thanks Sam