The Seer

Many people who choose to seek the spiritual path do so because they are, quite frankly, miserable. They have lived a life that lacks meaning, feels empty, is filled with reactivity, or perhaps is emotionally excruciating. Whether mild or severe, pain itself is the great motivator when it comes to choosing to grow psychologically and spiritually. And it can be said that this is one benefit that pain and suffering offer to human beings.

Emotional pain and psychological suffering often are felt as depression or unhappiness. It is human nature to desire happiness and a life that feels full, satisfying and alive. When there is a gap between that desire and the reality of our life, we may feel keenly interested in finding out what will bring us happiness.

There are two steps to becoming more happy.

First, we must understand why we are unhappy. In a nutshell, we are unhappy because we are trapped in the small, limited confines of our ego personality – identified with a false self that is not who we really are. The ego is endlessly preoccupied with past and future, which are also false realities in the sense that neither are ever happening NOW.

The less we are experiencing ourselves and life in the present moment, which is where reality exists, the more unreal and false our life is and the less happy we will be. Understanding this will begin to help liberate you from ego and its trappings and live increasingly in the aliveness of present moment.

The second approach to becoming more happy is contained in a little secret that is very simple and very potent. The great Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti expressed this secret in a lecture he gave near the end of his life. He said to his audience, “Do you want to know my secret?… My secret is that I don’t mind what happens.”

Another way of saying this is …

* “I accept the present moment as it is.”
* “The present moment is my friend, not my enemy.”
* “I am in alignment with what is, as it is, in this moment.”
* “Whatever is happening in this moment is OK, neither good nor bad. It just is.”

The secret to happiness is letting go of judgment and resistance to the way things are. When we accept and align with what is, we are not resigning ourselves to a fate we may or may not like. We are empowering ourselves with peace, tranquility and a sense of clarity that will allow us to make wise, non-reactive choices about our conditions.

When we befriend the present moment with acceptance and non-resistance, we will feel more peaceful and be less torn by what we like and don’t like. To be more happy, make friends with what is.

Here’s a question to ask yourself regularly through your day:

“Am I making the present moment my friend or my enemy?”

~ by Eckhart Tolle

We think that freedom consists in having what we want. In reality, freedom is a kind of loss. As Jesus said, you have to lose your life to save it.

When there’s no longer any ownership of life, no longer anyone there who is trying to possess any aspect of experience, life is no longer something to be feared and rejected, but something to be loved and celebrated.

Imagine this:

A balloon, filled with air, floats in an infinite sea of air.

And the balloon says to itself, “I’m an individual. I live in a world full of individuals. A world of me and mine: my thoughts, my memories, my beliefs, my achievements, my successes, my failures, my past, my future, my relationships. I own a little piece of the whole, a little piece of life. This is my little part of everything.”

What the balloon fears most is its own popping — in other words, its own death — because it sees this as the ultimate loss of ‘me and mine’. In other words, death is the loss of ‘my little part of everything’. The end of ‘my life’.

What the balloon cannot see is that death is liberation. Upon death, ‘my little part of everything’ simply explodes back into everything. ‘My life’ dissolves back into life itself. And what is seen is that ‘my life’ was always an illusion, because there was never anyone there separate from everything! There was only ever everything! The balloon never ‘had’ anything to begin with, and so could never ‘lose’ anything. Upon death, nothing is lost.

And this seeing can happen upon what we call physical death, or it can happen now. Die before you die, and there is no death.

The mind will never be able to comprehend what I am talking about. But somewhere beyond the mind, somewhere beyond thought, somewhere beyond the stories we tell about life, there can be a recognition, a resonance, a knowing. And that’s what this message is really about: a recognition that’s totally beyond mind.

You are perfect as you are — even in your imperfection. Life is perfect as it is, even if you cannot see that yet. This is a journey into your own absence, an absence which finally reveals itself as the perfect presence of everything, as the Home you’ve always been seeking, and what will be found is this: You wrote these words yourself, to remind yourself of what, deep down, you have always known.

~ by Jeff Foster

“You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? And most important, what do they have me becoming? Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay?”

~ E James Rohn

We were born into Life; we die into Life.
One day Life tapped me on the shoulder and said,
“Why are you running away from me?”
And I said, “You’re just too boring, too ordinary”,
So I ran to my family and there was Life,
I ran to my business and I met Life,
I ran to my garden and I found Life,
I ran to Shiva (Buddha, Jesus, whoever.) and there stood Life.

Then one day Life tapped me on the shoulder again,
And I turned round and looked into life’s face,
And saw my own,
And then life laughed and said,
“You were me all along”.

~ by Vic Forte

Douglas Harding writes: “Three words cover it — seeing our No-thing-ness. It’s that simple. Or, to drive the point home, turning our attention round 180° and looking into What we are looking out of, into our Absence, our Void Nature or Emptiness or Speckless Clarity, into our lack of characteristics, distinguishing marks, attainments, you-name-it.

It’s not — emphatically not — knowing all about Natureless Nature, or understanding it profoundly, or believing in it sincerely, or even feeling it acutely, but seeing it with such finality and such intimacy that we see this Absence which we are and are this Absence which we see. But alas, how liable even the most apt words are to complicate what is, after all, simplicity itself!

The awkward fact is that this Experience, which is none other than the substratum of all experience, is impossible to describe. It’s as ineffable and incommunicable as the redness of red or the sweetness of honey or the smell of wild violets. Try telling a man colour-blind from birth what purple is. Well, telling him about his Empty Core is even more futile.

Somehow you must get him to look in for himself at himself by himself instead of just out at you. Then and only then nothing could be easier or plainer, more blazingly self-evident to him, than his Nothingness, his disappearance in your favour.”

Intrigued? You can read more by Douglas on The Experience and the Meaning, HERE

BTW, you might like to see or page on Who is the Experiencer? by Tolle.

AND, Hagai Avisor recommends Daniel Kahneman on: The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self.

It’s wonderful how, all ovr the world, the English language is now bridging the gap between people of widely differing cultures. The following exchange by phone between a hotel guest and room-service illustrates what I mean …

Room Service : “Morrin. Roon sirbees.”

Guest : “Sorry, I thought I dialed room-service.”

RS: ” Rye . Roon sirbees…morrin! Joowish to oddor sunteen???”

Guest: “Uh….. Yes, I’d like to order bacon and eggs.”

RS: “Ow ulai den?”

Guest: “…..What??”

RS: “Ow ulai den?!?… Pryed, boyud , pochd?”

Guest: “Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry..Scrambled, please.”

RS: “Ow ulai dee bayken? Creepse?”

Guest: “Crisp will be fine.”

RS: “Hokay. Ansahn toes?”

Guest: “What?”

RS: “An toes. ulaisahn toes?”

Guest: “I…. Don’t think so..”

RS: “No? Udo wan sahn toes???”

Guest: “I feel really bad about this, but I don’t know what ‘udo wan sahn toes’ means.”

RS: “Toes! Toes!…Why Uoo donwan toes? Ow bow Anglish moppin we botter?”

Guest: “Oh, English muffin! !! I’ve got it! You were saying ‘toast’… Fine…Yes, an English muffin will be fine.”

RS: “We botter?”

Guest: “No, just put the botter on the side.”

RS: “Wad?!?”

Guest: “I mean butter… Just put the butter on the side.”

RS: “Copy?”

Guest: “Excuse me?”

RS: “Copy…tea.. meel?”

Guest: “Yes. Coffee, please… And that’s everything.”

RS: “One Minnie. Scramah egg, creepse bayken, Anglish moppin, we botter on sigh and copy … Rye ??”

Guest: “Whatever you say.”

RS: “Tanjooberrymutts.”

Guest: “You’re welcome”

~ Sent in by Marg & Phil of Broome, WA. Thanks guys.

Since resistance is inseparable from the mind, relinquishment of resistance — surrender — is the end of the mind as your master, the impostor pretending to be *you,* the false god. All judgment and all negativity dissolve. The realm of Being, which had been obscured by the mind, then opens up.

Suddenly, a great stillness arises within you, an unfathomable sense of peace. And within that peace, there is great joy. And within that joy, there is love. And at the innermost core, there is the sacred, the immeasurable, That which cannot be named.

I don’t call it finding God, because how can you find that which was never lost, the very life that you are? The word God is limiting not only because of thousands of years of misperception and misuse, but also because it implies an entity other than you.

God is Being itself, not *a* being. There can be no subject-object relationship here, no duality, no you and God. God-realization is the most natural thing there is. The amazing and incomprehensible fact is not that you can become conscious of God but that you aren’t conscious of God.

~ From: The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle

Beyond all labels and ideas what you are is awareness itself. Aware of whatever is happening. Presence itself. Only ever present, with no future or past. Timeless. Without reason or meaning. Meaninglessness beyond any idea of that being a depressing thought.

Freedom beyond any idea or imagination. Freedom which is right now, which never needs to ‘break free’ from any bonds. Absolute fulfilment which has always been fulfilled even when you were searching for fulfilment. Absolute wholeness even when you believe that there is something missing.

Simply what is happening right now. The sensation of breathing, the sounds of the cars going past, the visual image of this page… just as it is without any improvement needed.

So the question is then, how do you actually realise this without just believing these words? Well, the answer is ‘you’ don’t. You that you have taken yourself to be is simply a dream, an imagined figure who lives in a story in time. The idea that you could achieve something is based in the idea that you are a separate individual living a life. It is a case of mistaken identity.

You are not just limited to a separate person living in a body. You have believed that you can fit yourself into a tiny box with a label, a name or role, when really you are life itself. Limitless, boundless, already free right now.

You do not need to understand this or have any particular experience. Recognising this is beyond understanding or experience. This is a realisation or recognition of what you are beyond who you think you are. Otherwise these words are just words and mean nothing more than dead and boring concepts. Throw out all concepts, just for one moment, and see what is left.

You could say that this recognition is like a ‘bridge’ between time and timelessness. Just for a moment in time it is seen that there is no time. In that moment there is no one recognising anything. Blank. A moment of no thought and no labelling, understanding or owning the experience. A timeless moment where all the boundaries fall away and there is no separation. This is death.

In recognising your true nature, life goes on but something is different. Something has been affected in a way that you can not put your finger on. Nothing is different but at the same time everything has changed. No one owns this change. You can not say ‘I’ve got it now’ because who do you believe could get anything?

There is no one here who could ever go anywhere or achieve anything. Whether the experience changes or never changes you never own anything. In fact, you have lost everything. You have lost all definition. But you can not even own this. Thought may keep trying to own and define it all but these thoughts never actually refer to a separate identity. You never arrive at any final goal. In fact this recognition is a continual losing, a timeless free-falling of no-one into nothing.

~ by Unmani.

“You will come in due course to realize that your true glory lies where you (the illusory mind-made-self ) cease to exist.”

~ Ramana Maharshi. (Sent in by Walt Motley – Thanks Walt)

The mystic-poet, William Blake, once noted the contrast between himself and a certain religionist, in the lines: “Both read the Bible day and night. But thou read’st black where I read white.”

The point is well illustrated by a fundamentlalist minister who once confronted an enlightened shoe-maker over the issue of eternal damnation.

The preacher taunted, “If I were like you and feared not the fires of hell, I could strike you down, steal your horse and saddle and ride away without a care!”

The shoe-maker quietly answered, “If you were truly awakened, that idea would never occur to you!”

All those who fully understood the life and teachings of Jesus came to realize that ‘Christ’ is not a person, but another name for the infinite presence latent in each of us — the divine Light, that scripture says, shines in everyone that comes into the world.

This means that essentially, you too are not a person, but the infinite, unborn, undying, field of awareness that witnesses every thought, feeling and eperience of your manifest self.

The challenge now, and in every ‘now’, is for you to turn from your confining egoic limitation and, like Jesus, become intentionally one with the limitless Christ-consciousness.

~ For more on The Inner ‘Christ’, >>>Click Here