The Seer

“Jesus … was what he was because he knew of himself that: “I and the Father are one,” and not — obviously — because he had accepted Jesus as his Saviour. But, from the beginning, institutional Christianity has hardly contemplated the possibitity that the consciousness of Jesus might be the consciousness of the Christian, that the whole point of the Gospel is that everyone may experience union with God in the same way and to the same degree as Jesus himself. On the contrary, one who says, with Eckhart, that “the eye with which I see God is.the same eye with which God sees me” is condemned as a heretic. … To see the light, it is only necessary to stop dreaming and open the eyes.”

~ From: Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, by Alan Watts

I’ve only just encountered the ‘Headless Way’ — a way of seeing Who or What you really are, pioneered by D E Harding and currently taught by Richard Lang … it’s an amazing thing to have discovered, especially given my past experiences of encountering the boundless space, and the changes in view I’m just going through.

I’ve had a very slow internet connection over the last few days; so slow that web pages sometimes take a couple of minutes to load. The www.headless.org site has been no exception. Interestingly, as the page loads, instead of the top tabs reading “Home”, “Douglas Harding”, Experiments” etc., in the brief moments before loading properly, they all read “home”. And that’s how I feel just right now. I have found “home”. All my remembered life, I have had glimpses of the eternal boundless space, but, paraphrasing Eliot, “I had the experience but missed the meaning”

Climbing in the Welsh mountains, poised on a rock face, my boundaries dissolve and I am one with the universe. Every small plant, the sky, the rocks, are glorious and detailed, glowing with light and I am not separate from the sky, from the mountain goat who springs through the mist, from the misty valley below Walking up a valley in the Wiltshire downs one spring morning, suddenly it’s as if someone has switched on a glorious light I have never seen before. I am nowhere but everywhere. The spring flowers glow, the sky is a heavenly azure blue, bird song is the most delightful sound I have ever heard. I am not separate. I am the world, the universe.

In church on Easter morning at dawn, under flickering candles. Instead of reading a sermon, Robert decides to fling open the doors and we sit in silence listening to the sound of a solitary blackbird. I am no longer “me”, the identified me which is within this parcel of flesh and bone and skin. I am everywhere. I am unbounded space. The sounds of the bird arise from within the space and fade and rise again in a glorious ripple of notes and silences. In a retreat centre in Bleddfa, doing the washing of the feet meditation. I am transported. I am not me, I am Mary washing the feet of Jesus and knowing I am going to lose him. I am in that eternal boundless space but full of the grief of the world.

In literature, certain things have moved me and stayed with me for reasons I have never been sure of. At school, I particularly loved Edward Thomas’ poem :”Adlestrop”, with its simple and elegant description of those timeless moments. Similarly, Eliot’s Four Quartets (for reasons which seem obvious now) and that glorious line in Kahlil Gibran’s “the Prophet” which reduced me to tears when first encountered: “For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.”

At one stage in my life I even longed for death. When confronted with cancer, I spent quite some time contemplating what death would be like, and far from finding it terrifying, eventually came to the point where death to me would be a reunion with the glorious boundless space. In my meditation as I “died” I felt myself distributed in particles of golden light back to join with the infinite, deep and tranquil unbounded space. Like a cosmic orgasm. On “return”, back to my body, I felt immensely sad and full of longing. Why did I have to spend more time away from this space? Why spend more years in my earthly body, when I could be part of the unbounded eternal space?

All these experiences which came unbidden have been transitory. I have revelled in the feeling of boundlessness, but know it will fade and I will be left lumpen in my solid and all too fleshy body, sad and full of longing for these glorious experiences. And as I think about them now, they have also all been experiences of losing myself completely in the boundless space… I no longer am “me”, but the boundless space (but if so, who is recognizing the experiences?).

I have, for the most part, conceptualized it as an either/or. Either I am “me” in my body, or I am the boundless space. The only real experience of anything other than this has been in Tantra practice, when I have had the experience of being both the boundless and infinite glorious universe surrounding me, and also at the same time, me. Shakti and Shiva, the giver and receiver, both at the same time… being in my body, and being the infinite space surrounding my body. Quite a glorious, but again relatively transitory experience.

Last week, by complete accident (or is anything ever a complete accident?) I found a link to the Headless Way website. It sounded quite whacky… but being a fairly experiential person, when I read the word “experiments”, and knowing I had some idle moments I decided to give them a go.

Exercise 1 — the pointing exercise. I point at the walls of my boat, at the table, at my knee, at my hand. I take in the shape and form, the edges and boundaries and the space between. I really look. And then I turn my pointing finger towards myself, towards my eyes. I feel my eyes going cross-eyed, trying to turn my eyeballs backwards to look at myself.

Then.. WHAM.. I’m looking into unbounded space. I am unbounded space (and apparently, everythng arising in it) — at this moment … and always!

~ by Carol Dent

If we have learned
Our lessons from life’s
Losses and failures, and
All that makes it worthwhile…

If we have learned
From our journey
And found the new fullness
Of our human-hood,
We begin to see
The patterns beneath
The surface of things.

Everywhere there is
Something that is lasting…
That doesn’t change
In the center of all
The changes made…
All along the journey
To what we are,
Where we are
In this moment.

Deep and untouchable
Divine patterning
Like arrows
Pointing always to
Something undefined by mind,
Something still
but in motion,
Not old or new.

Gathering both together
Seamlessly being
What has always been
In the unabashed
Nakedness of reality,
Just here, just this,
Unadorned.

~ by Alice Gardner

“Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” ~ Paul

In essence the entire spiritual endeavor is a very simple thing: Spirituality is essentially about awakening as the intuitive awareness of unity (oneness with God) 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 Jesus called, the kingdom of God, 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 (Christ nature) 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 with God, or Christ-consciousness, 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 is 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. Paul said, “This one thing I do …” 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 — the unborn, deathless Light of Christ — 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 — the ‘God’ dimension. 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 (Christ-consciousness), 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

If I could say it, I would, but how can I begin,
when there is no beginning.
How can I speak of what words can but hint
at the shadow of,
without losing the perfection of it.

I know not whether to laugh or cry.
I know not how to begin to see it as totally
as I know it was,
as it IS.

Let go, for it is still here,
absolute grace, purity of motive,
the opening of a flower that in a moment feared
the coming of Dawn.

Never could the rightness of it be judged
or spoken of, for who can know the blessing
but those graced by the touch of its tender hand,
soothed in the light of its warming smile,
forgiven in the shine of its gracious eye,
bathed in the Peace of its gentle Presence.

As a lily will rise out of the mire,
so out of the darkness of doubt opened the perfection
of the Flower of Light.

I feel the need somehow to say “Thank You!”
but how and to whom?
I gave myself to “You,” knowing the safety of Your “Arms,”
not realizing at first who the “You” was.
When You raised me up I knew who You were,
appearing as my experience in this way,
Thy Love flowing into and as
the moment of
Oneness.

Speechless am I in the face of that moment,
which still IS.
How beautiful the glow; how radiant the Light;
how soothing the smile; how loving the touch of that
Silent Heart.

~ From: The Day of Awakening, by Tony Titshall

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 is 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

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“When you step out of the story you are free from suffering in separateness. But when you see that you are one with all, you find yourself in love with all. So you feel compelled to rescue others who are suffering in separateness…. When you know you are the Author, you want to creatively engage with the story, because you love the story. And you want to share your love of the story with the other characters, so that they can also come to love the story and all the characters in it…. Initially you have to step out of the story to recognize you are the Author. But when you recognize your true identity as Spirit, you must step back into the story and play your role in the great adventure of creating Heaven on Earth.”

~ From, The Gospel of the Second Coming by Timothy Freke p.172

Your spiritual awakening is not only for yourself, it is a gift you give to humanity. For the first time ever in our history, humanity needs desperately to awaken. If this does not happen, we are at risk of losing the life we know, of becoming a race extinct.

The Earth is faced with a radical crisis of yet unknown proportions. Never before have we had the capacity to pollute our air, food and water. Never before have we been so heavily armed and angry that a single incident (of ego reactivity) can spawn an all-out decimation of our population, the human race and the great animal kingdom we share this planet with.

As with any radical crisis, we are faced with a monumental choice: we continue to live and behave along the old patterns — the very patterns that brought us to this point of crisis – or we recognize that we have outgrown the old ways and we must rise above the familiar and evolve. In the crisis we face in the world today, both individually and collectively, the bottom line truth is this: we must evolve or die. It is that simple.

The true culprit for the many difficult and life-threatening problems we face in the world and in our lives is the dysfunction of the egoic mind that is unique to human beings. We may be more evolved than the animals with whom we share this planet, but our use of our higher brain function is not keeping pace. We are growing technologically much more quickly than we are spiritually. This presents a dangerous situation. This situation has been cooking for about a hundred years and is now a pressure cooker that can blow at any time.

Don’t be fooled by the New Age and New Thought promises that we can visualize our way out of the crisis and create a new world with our thought and vision. Evolution is not this easy. The evolution that will save humanity is not about a new belief system, a new religion, a new mythology, nor in creative, ways of using the mind and its thought. The evolution that will save humanity will be the transcendence of thought altogether.

The transcendence of thought is nothing more than discovering and realizing a dimension within yourself that is beyond thought. It is the source of thought itself. It is the true higher mind. And we know this mind, we recognize and connect to it, by the simple act of Presence, Being, and settling into a heart-based consciousness.

Our evolution is a shift from identification with form and ideas (ego consciousness) to the increasing awareness of our own existential Being. This is the flowering of human consciousness, and it is happening now, for the first time in such large numbers of people. It is happening now because it is imperative.

Awakening is the most urgent need of humanity and it is the primary purpose in your life.

~ by Eckhart Tolle

Invariably, it takes a flash of light to reveal the true meaning of Life and of all things to us: nor can it be obtained in any other way.

As the veil lifts, one moment’s sudden revelation completely rearranges and shifts our viewpoint; and the scene abruptly changes. In fact, this was exactly what happened to me one day while in deep meditation.

I was considering ‘Spirituality’, its study and problems, when suddenly it dawned upon me that the student-position, which I had assumed, was certainly an unreliable and unsound one.

As this actuality burst upon me, breathlessly my heart cried out, “Oh to be the great subject itself instead of a mere stidemt of it!”

Instantly there followed a moment of shining light with its electrifying transfusion, sudden and swift. As though a curtain had been raised admitting some startling new sight, I saw the indisputable fact with vivid, clear distinctness — I saw that I was the Truth ItSelf … not a student at all!

Under this flood of blazing revelation, what else could I do but exclaim further, — “Why, this means that I am the TRUTH! I am not a student trying to solve problems of human existence, but I am the absolute and changeless Truth itself!” The simplicity of all this amazed and overwhelmed me. Here in this brief but thrilling moment, I saw what years of study and research had never given me.

Immediately, I then understood Jesus’ dynamic statement, “I am the Truth!” Yes, this was it. I was not a student of Truth, endeavoring to obtain and attain certain states of consciousness, always letting go one for another higher on the scale. No, I was the Truth ItSelf!

What more then could I ask? What more could be desired? Did Truth, or true Being, have any association with a problem? Certainly not. Neither, then, did I!

“I am the Truth!” exuberantly I told myself again and again, in my newly found changed relationship. I am not trying to do, to think or to know something; but I am doing, feeling and being Truth, the Life, and the Way! Oh, the blessed wonder of light!

I saw then that the problem of human existence could never be solved … but will dissolve when we take our rightful stand as the Truth, the Life and the Way.

Now once having seen and accepted this platform, all other speculations immediately vanished, while beautiful verifications in Jesus” life and teaching came flooding my rapturous thought. How plainly now to see that Jesus never said that he was a student of Life, but insisted, “I am the Life!” Neither did he intimate that he was a follower of some particular way or system, but again and again reiterated, “I am the Way!”

No wonder he was so absolute, so completingly certain and sure. Never did he speak nor act as though he were using Truth as a means to bring about certain healing results in a material existence! His attention was NOT towards conditions, states nor beliefs, but upon that Being which is unalterable; that Principle which is fixed and absolute; that Life which is wholeness always … ‘Against such there is no law.’

So, ‘Know thyself!’ Learn Who and What you really are; the meaning of life and the fullness of all things. Then for you, wars and problems will cease and be no more; sorrows and limitations fade away; for finding yourself as you really are, you shall be in touch with every good and perfect thing; and shall live here on earth a life of peace, joy and plenty.

~ From: The Christ Within by Lillian DeWaters

“Life is a mystery. The more you understand it, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you know, the less you feel that you know. The more you become aware of the depth — the infinite depth, the more it becomes almost impossible to say anything about it. Hence silence. The one who really knows remains in such awe, such infinite wonderment, that breathing almost stops. In presence with, and as, the mystery of life, one is lost … or found … completely.”

~ Pete Sumner