The Seer

In essence the entire spiritual endeavor is a very simple thing: Spirituality is essentially about awakening as the intuitive awareness of unity and dissolving our attachment to egoic consciousness. By saying that spirituality is a very simple thing, I do not mean to imply that it is either an easy or difficult endeavor. For some it may be very easy, while for others it may be more difficult. There are many factors and influences that play a role in one’s awakening to the greater reality, but the greatest factors by far are one’s sincerity, one-pointedness, and courage.

Sincerity is a word that I often use in teaching to convey the importance of being rooted in the qualities of honesty, authenticity, and genuineness. There can be nothing phony or contrived in our motivations if we are to fully awaken to our natural and integral state of unified awareness. While teachings and teachers can point us inward to “the peace beyond all understanding,” it is always along the thread of our inner sincerity, or lack thereof, that we will travel.

For the ego is clever and artful in the ways of deception, and only the honesty and genuineness of our ineffable being are beyond its influence. At each step and with each breath we are given the option of acting and responding, both inwardly and outwardly, from the conditioning of egoic consciousness which values control and separation above all else, or from the intuitive awareness of unity which resides in the inner silence of our being.

Without sincerity it is so very easy for even the greatest spiritual teachings to become little more than playthings of the mind. In our fast-moving world of quick fixes, big promises, and short attention spans, it is easy to remain on a very surface level of consciousness without even knowing it. While the awakened state is ever present and closer than your feet, hands, or eyes, it cannot be approached in a casual or insincere fashion.

There’s a reason that seekers the world over are instructed to remove their shoes and quiet their voices before entering into sacred spaces. The message being conveyed is that one’s ego must be “taken off and quieted” before access to the divine is granted. All of our ego’s attempts to control, demand, and plead with reality have no influence on it other than to make life more conflicted and difficult. But an open mind and sincere heart have the power to grant us access to realizing what has always been present all along.

When people asked the great Indian sage Nisargadatta what he thought was the most important quality to have in order to awaken, he would say “earnestness.” When you are earnest, you are both sincere and one-pointed; to be one-pointed means to keep your attention on one thing. I have found that the most challenging thing for most spiritual seekers to do is to stay focused on one thing for very long.

The mind jumps around with its concerns and questions from moment to moment. Rarely does it stay with one question long enough to penetrate it deeply. In spirituality it is very important not to let the egoic mind keep jumping from one concern to the next like an untrained dog. Remember, awakening is about realizing your true nature and dissolving all attachment to egoic consciousness.

My grandmother who passed away a few years ago used to say to me jokingly, “Getting old is not for wimps.” She was well aware of the challenges of an aging body, and while she never complained or felt any pity for herself, she knew firsthand that aging had its challenges as well as its benefits. There was a courage within my grandmother that served her well as she approached the end of her life, and I am happy to say that when she passed, it was willingly and without fear.

In a similar way the process of coming into a full and mature awakening requires courage, as not only our view of life but life itself transforms to align itself with the inner mystic vision. A sincere heart is a robust and courageous heart willing to let go in the face of the great unknown expanse of Being—an expanse which the egoic mind has no way of knowing or understanding.

When one’s awareness opens beyond the dream state of egoic consciousness to the infinite no-thing-ness of intuitive awareness, it is common for the ego to feel much fear and terror as this transition begins. While there is nothing to fear about our natural state of infinite Being, such a state is beyond the ego’s ability to understand, and as always, egos fear whatever they do not understand and cannot control.

As soon as our identity leaves the ego realm and assumes its rightful place as the infinite no-thing-ness/every-thing-ness of awareness, all fear vanishes in the same manner as when we awaken from a bad dream. In the same manner in which my grandmother said, “Getting old is not for wimps,” it can also be said that making the transition from the dream state to the mature, awakened state requires courage.

Sincerity, one-pointedness, and courage are indispensable qualities in awakening from the dream state of ego to the peace and ease of awakened Being. All there is left to do is to live it.

~ Adyashanti 2008 www.adyashanti.org/

I regard not the outside and the words,
I regard the inside and the state of the heart.
I look at the heart if it be humble,
Though the words may be the reverse of humble.
Because the heart is substance, and words accidents,
Accidents are only a means, substance is the final cause.
How long will thou dwell on words and superficialities?
A burning heart is what I want; consort with burning!
Kindle in the heart the flame of love,
And burn up utterly thoughts and fine expressions.

~ Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (1207 – 1273), From: The Mathnawi: Rumi, Trans. E H Whinfield.

When a wealthy American visiting a small English town lost a valuable dog, he asked to have a notice printed in the local evening newspaper offering a thousand pounds reward for its return.

Evening came, but no paper appeared, the American waited for some time, then he went to the newspaper office.

There, he found no-one but the night-watchman.

“Isn’t the newspaper coming out tonight?” he asked.

“I doubt it, sir,” the night-watchman said, “the whole staff is out looking for a lost dog.”

Many children when they are first introduced to Christianity wonder why the body of Jesus, impaled upon a cross and bleeding from his wounds, is the symbol for Christianity.

Millions of people for thousands of years would not have related to it if there wasn’t something inside themselves that deeply resonated. In other words, perhaps they were not yet awake enough to see it directly inside of their own psyche, but the inner reality that Jesus on the Cross symbolizes is that of the collective pain body of humanity.

It seems right now that there is a lot of pain out there from sex scandals to oppressive Middle Eastern regimes. And all of it is brought to you live on cable news and the Internet. This is a further representation of how the pain body renews itself both on a global social and cultural scale as well as personally inside of each of us.

Reduced to its essence, the pain body is an independent energy-form that dwells within most humans. It has its own intelligence similar perhaps to a clever and cunning animal. And that intelligence is concentrated on maintaining its survival.

Like all living things, the pain body needs to replenish itself. The food it requires is energy that vibrates at the same frequency and has a character similar to its own. For the pain body, any emotionally painful thought, experience, deed, or fear can serve as food for it. That’s why it thrives on conflict, drama, and negativity.

You may be surprised the first time you discover that there is actually an entity inside yourself that feeds and thrives on conflict, negativity, and unhappiness. When one is identified with the pain body, there is a tendency not to turn towards goodness and charity, but actually make others as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative reactions.

As disturbing as this realization may seem, it does explain why humans on this planet treat each other so poorly and why one recent news commentator compared the media to high school where bullying, hatred, bias, and close-mindedness seem to rule the day.

Realizing that we are all at the effect of the global pain body will begin to give us the understanding and compassion to see it at work; stop feeding it, and finally dis-identify from what is a primitive and unneeded part of our brain and cultural past.

~ Eckhart Tolle. www.tolleteachings.com

As Jesus was walking with his disciples, “he saw a man who was blind from birth”. His disciples, having learned that this sort of affliction can be the result of ‘sin’, and noting that the blindness in this case had been from birth, asked Christ whether it was the man himself or his parents who had sinned.

This is an extraordinary question. If the blindness is due to the parents’ sin, then the statement from Leviticus, “He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children”, taken coarsely and literally, would apply. But if the affliction is due to the man’s own sin, then the sin must have occurred before birth since he was born blind. Thus, the disciples’ question presupposes a belief in reincarnation.

Christ’s response is even more extraordinary. He says that neither the man nor his parents had sinned. In this particular case, he says, the man had been made blind so that “the works of God may be manifested in him”.

Superficially, we could take this to mean that this poor fellow had endured a lifetime of blindness so that one day Jesus could come along and perform a miracle.

Alternatively, we can recognize that all of these stories are taking place internally, all of these people represent qualities within our own souls. A place within our soul has been ‘blind’ since birth, it has lived in a state of continuous psychological darkness and has never known anything else. Christ, the ‘light’ of the soul, who is ‘walking by’ in his task of transforming the soul, now sees this blind, hidden corner of the psyche. He tells the disciples that this part of the soul is exactly what it should be. It is necessary for the soul to experience the Creation all the way down to this, the lowest depths of Hell. It is all part of God’s plan.

In the ‘Parable of the Prodigal Son’, the Son cannot return to the Father until he has fallen all the way to the bottom of the scale, and has experienced all the pain, all the joy, and all the nothingness. So here in John, Christ is glad to have found the ‘man born blind’ – for until he finds him the transformation of the soul cannot be completed.

Christ now sets to work. He knows his ‘hour’ is coming, the destructive forces that oppose him are at his heels. In other words, if the initiate does not complete his work soon, if the forces of death reach the ‘Christ within’ before his work is done, then, like Solomon, he will ‘fall’, and the story will have to begin all over again.

Christ takes some of his saliva (‘water’ imbued with his Spirit), combines it with dirt, and spreads this mixture over the man’s eyes, saying, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” Siloam, John tells us right in his text, “means Sent”. The pool of Siloam was fed by waters from a spring called Gihon that was beneath the city of Jerusalem. ‘Gihon’ means valley of Grace. So the waters of Siloam were ‘sent from Grace’. The man “went and washed and came back able to see.” The deepest place of the initiate’s soul has been reached, permeated with God’s Grace, and awakened from its blindness.

This of course elicits the obligatory internal reaction.

First, his ‘neighbors’ who had known him as a blind beggar began to ask each other if this was really the same man they had known. “Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’ He kept saying, ‘I AM’. But they kept asking him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’” He told them the story, and they said, “Where is he?” But he told them he did not know.

Second, he was taken to the Pharisees, the constituents of the soul that are only concerned with superficial formalities. It was the Sabbath day when the man received his sight, so of course the only thing that mattered to them was that Jesus had broken a rule. “Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?’ And they were divided.” So they asked the man himself what he thought, and the man replied, “He is a prophet.”

Third, he was taken to “the Jews” – which for John, indicates those constituents of the soul that can only see things literally and require ‘proof’. “The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he see now?’” The frightened parents responded that yes, the man was their son, and yes, he had been born blind. But they had no idea how he had received his sight or who was responsible. So they said, “Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.”

So they called the man back a second time, and tried to persuade him to curse Christ. “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.”

It is interesting to note that until he spoke the words “I AM”, (which his neighbors did not understand); the man had said absolutely nothing. He did not ask to be healed (like Plato’s cave-dweller, he did not know there was anything to see). He did not say anything when Christ put the mixture of dirt and saliva on his eyes. He did not say anything when told to go to Siloam, and he did not say anything when he returned and was able to see. But now, his tongue is loosened.

He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (John.9.25)

Exasperated that he would not say what they wanted him to say, they asked him again. “What did he do to you?” This time, with the perfect ingenuousness and fearlessness of someone who has only just been born, he replied, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”

This, of course, infuriated them, and they indignantly said, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”

He found this utterly astonishing. “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.” How could they possibly not know? So he said, “We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

This was more than their self-importance could bear. “You were born entirely in sins, and you are trying to teach us?” And they cast him out.

But it is too late. This is an extraordinary moment in the Gospels. It is the first time that someone (other than Christ himself) has stood up to lower forces! Everyone has been afraid of them, no one has ever spoken back. The soul has grown up. It has come “of age”, as the parents said, and has taken responsibility for itself.

~ by Dr Andrew Cort Details

There’s an old story about a group of monks living with their master in an ancient monastery. Their lives were disciplined and dedicated, and the atmosphere in which they lived harmonious and peaceful. People from villages far and wide flocked to the monastery to bask in the warmth of such a loving spiritual environment.

Then one day the master departed his earthly form. At first the monks continued on as they had in the past, but after a time, the discipline and devotion that had been hallmarks of their daily routine slackened. The number of villagers coming through the doors each day began to drop, and little by little, the monastery fell into a state of disrepair.

Soon the monks were bickering among themselves, some pointing fingers of blame, others filled with guilt. The energy within the monastery walls crackled with animosity.

Finally, the senior monk could take it no longer. Hearing that a spiritual master lived as a hermit two days walk away, the monk wasted no time in seeking him out. Finding the master in his forest hermitage, the monk told him of the sad state the monastery had fallen into and asked his advice.

The master smiled. “There is one living among you who is the incarnation of God. Because he is being disrespected by those around him, he will not show himself, and the monastery will remain in disrepair.” With those words spoken, the master fell silent and would say no more.

All the way back to the monastery, the monk wondered which of his brothers might be the Incarnated One.

“Perhaps it is Brother Jaspar who does our cooking,” the monk said aloud. But then a second later thought, “No, it can’t be him. He is sloppy and ill tempered and the food he prepares is tasteless.”

“Perhaps our gardener, Brother Timor, is the one,” he then thought. This consideration, too, was quickly followed by denial. “Of course not” he said aloud. “God is not lazy and would never let weeds take over a lettuce patch the way Brother Timor has.”

Finally, after dismissing each and every one of his brothers for this fault or that, the senior monk realized there were none left. Knowing it had to be one of the monks because the master had said it was, he worried over it a bit before a new thought dawned. “Could it be that the Holy One has chosen to display a fault in order to disguise himself?” he wondered. “Of course it could! That must be it!”

Reaching the monastery, he immediately told his brothers what the master had said and all were just as astonished as he had been to learn the Divine was living among them.

Since each knew it was not himself who was God Incarnate, each began to study his brothers carefully, all trying to determine who among them was the Holy One. But all any of them could see were the faults and failings of the others. If God was in their midst, he was doing a fine job of hiding himself. Finding the Incarnated

One among such ordinariness would be difficult, indeed.

After much discussion, it was finally decided that they would all make an effort to be kind and loving toward each another, treating all with the respect and honor one would naturally give to the Incarnated One. If God insisted on remaining hidden, then they had no recourse but to treat each monk as if he were the Holy One.

Each so concentrated on seeing God in the other that soon their hearts filled with such love for one another the chains of negativity that held them bound fell away. As time passed, they began seeing God not just in each other, but in every one and everything. Days were spent in joyful reverence, rejoicing in His Holy Presence.

The monastery radiated this joy like a beacon and soon the villagers returned, streaming through the doors as they had before, seeking to be touched by the love and devotion present there.

It was some time later that the senior monk decided to pay the master another visit to thank him for the secret he had revealed.

“Did you discover the identity of the Incarnated One?” the master asked.

“We did,” the senior monk replied. “We found him residing in all of us.”

The master smiled.

We may ask, “How are we to attain the unitive state of awareness?” (‘I and the Father are one.’) Until we are ‘lifted’ into the experience of unity by the grace of God, duality for us must continue to exist.

When that experience is about to happen to a person, that person’s mind becomes irresistibly withdrawn from worldly concerns, and becomes centered instead upon one all-consuming love, a singular sort of love, for the very source of love within.

And in the process of consummating this love, solitude is procured, giving the mind the opportunity to become detached from the pull of distracting thoughts and sense-impressions; and the mind is then focused with great intensity upon its aim.

Consciousness, like an unflickering flame in a windless room, becomes pure and clear. And then suddenly it sees or knows who it has always been.

It is God’s grace which manifests in us as that divine love that draws us so compellingly toward the experience of unity. This love is not the ordinary kind of love between a subject and an object, however; for in this case the subject and the object, and the love itself are one.

Nor is this love the result of a conclusion based on a rational premise; it is an inner experience. It is something quite real — breathtakingly and intoxicatingly real. It stirs from within, and centers on itself within.

It is not a rationally thought-out construction based on philosophical principles, but a sweetness that is itself the object of devotion. It is this Love that bhaktis (devotees) love. It has no location but the human heart, yet its source is the universal Being.

It is His gracious gift, and only those who have experienced it know What it is. It is of this love that Ramakrishna sang:

“How are you trying, O my mind, to know the nature of God? You are groping like a madman locked in a dark room. He is grasped through ecstatic love; How can you fathom Him without it? When that love awakes, the Lord, like a magnet, draws to Him the soul.

Such longing for God or Truth always precedes the experience of enlightenment, because it is the natural expression, the unfailing indicator, of a shift in consciousness toward the transcendent Unity.

To read the complete article: >>>Click Here

~ by S. Abhayananda.

I have discovered my deep deathless being:
Masked by my front of mind, immense, serene
It meets the world with an Immortal’s seeing,
A god-spectator of the human scene.

No pain and sorrow of the heart and flesh
Can tread that pure and voiceless sanctuary.
Danger and fear, Fate’s hounds, slipping their leash
Rend body and nerve, — the timeless Spirit is free.

Awake, God’s ray and witness in my breast,
In the undying substance of my soul
Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest.
Death nearer comes and Destiny takes her toll;

He hears the blows that shatter Nature’s house:
Calm sits He, formidable, luminous.”

~ Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950)

Lady opening door to TV repair man:

“I’m glad you’ve both come. I keep getting double images on my TV screen.”

To discover our autonomy is the most challenging thing a human being can do. Because in order to discover our autonomy, we must be free from all external control or influence.

This means that we must free our mind from all that it has collected, all that it clings to, all that it depends on. This begins by realizing that we are in a psychological prison created by our minds.

Until we begin to realize how confined we are, we will not be able to find our way out. Neither will we find our way out by struggling against the confines we have inherited from our parents, society, and culture.

It’s only by beginning to examine and realize the falseness within our minds that we begin to awaken an intelligence that originates from beyond the realm of thinking.

If spirituality is to be meaningful, it must deliver us from all forms of dependence — including the dependence on spirituality — and help awaken within us that creative spark which all beings aspire to.

For the culmination of spirituality lies not only in discovering our inherent unity and freedom, but in opening the way for life to express itself through us in a unique and creative way.

Such uniqueness and creativity is not to be found in anything the human mind has ever created, nor is it to be found in our ideals of human perfection or utopian dreams.

True autonomy arises when we have broken free of all the old structures, all psychological dependencies, and all fear. Only then can that which is truly unique and fearless arise within us and begin to express itself. Such expression cannot be planned or even imagined because it belongs to a dimension uninhibited by anything that has come before it.

True autonomy is not trying to fit in or be understood, nor is it a revolt against anything. It is an uncaused phenomenon. Consciously or unconsciously all beings aspire to it, but very few find the courage to step into that infinity of aloneness.

~ Adyashanti, 2009. www.adyashanti.org