Today, while I was walking that way, something happened.
And I see that, while I was walking my way to myself—
it turned into a Way to the Self.

I don’t know if it is a rare mystery,
or ancient alchemy,
or something inevitable and ordinary,
but I stand here still,
going further without making moves,
thankful and peaceful –
needing no more words.

~ From: On the WAY, by Eloratea

A. I don’t emphasise the story of ‘my awakening’ these days simply because I have less and less interest in holding up any image of myself, including any image of myself as ‘the awakened one’ or ‘the enlightened teacher”. What I am doesn’t seem to need any image. It is full and complete in this moment, fully engaged with the realities of present experience, without any reference to what did or didn’t happen in the past.

I can’t deny the past of course. I can’t deny that something has profoundly changed here, but at the same time, there’s no need to cling to that story, and use it to separate myself from others. There’s no need to constantly remind you of my story. There’s no interest in separating myself from you in that way. There’s no interest in proving to you how awakened I am. The story seems so irrelevant in the face of the wonder of this moment.

So, on a relative level, of course there is change and transformation, but there’s no need to cling to the story of that in order to give myself a conceptual identity. And on an ultimate level, what I am, as consciousness, has never changed and cannot change. It’s the ocean, deeply at rest, deeply at peace no matter how the waves chop and change. It has no interest in awakening. It doesn’t know enlightenment or non-enlightenment. It has no interest in holding up any story about itself.

This is the gorgeous paradox of awakening. Change and no change at all. (And of course, ultimately there aren’t two levels, ultimate and relative, but it’s a helpful way of pointing, as long as words are required.)

I spent years holding up an image of myself as ‘the awakened one’ without even realising it. Endlessly telling the story of ‘my awakening’ to myself and to others, both explicitly and implicitly, and not realising that it was yet another attachment, another dream.

I’ve met many people over the years who see themselves as awakened, and tell story after story about their past glories, about their life-changing transformation, about how perfect their lives are now, about how wonderful everything is for them — but in secret, of course, in their private and unseen moments, they are still suffering in their lives, still feeling stuck or unfulfilled in their relationships, still at war with others, not deeply at peace.

This goes for students as well as teachers. Nobody is immune from this spiritual bypassing. The truth is, who cares if you awakened yesterday? Who cares if yesterday you recognised your true nature? Who cares if yesterday you had a profound realisation of the ocean? What about NOW? THAT’s where all the juice is.

You saw the ocean yesterday? Wonderful. But can that ocean be seen in these waves? Can you recognise who you really are in this moment? Can you be at peace now? Why cling to a memory of yesterday’s awakening?

Yes, if we are truly interested in the end of suffering, we must go beyond all personal stories of our own awakening, all images of ourselves, all our boasts and claims about our own evolution, to a deep and radical acceptance of this moment. Awakening is the easy part. Holding onto a story of yesterday’s awakening is the easy part. Telling stories about your past is the easy part. Being ‘nobody and nothing’ is the easy part.

The real adventure begins when you’re willing to lose all stories, including these stories of your own spiritual transformation, your own specialness, your own purity, and be totally naked in front of life. The real adventure begins where all personal specialness ends.

Life’s real invitation is this: Find that which is always deeply at peace, even when things fall apart, even in the midst of pain, or fear, or sadness. Discover that which is always at rest, even when your partner comes home and says something that hurts you. Even when someone you love dies. Even when someone disagrees with you. Can the deepest acceptance be found in the pain? In the sadness? In the hurt? In the grief? In the anger? This is life’s constant invitation, however ‘awakened’ you think you are.

Yes, all your ideas of yourself as ‘the awakened one’, or ‘the special one’, or ‘the one who never suffers’, or ‘the enlightened teacher’, or ‘the nobody’, or ‘the fully evolved one’, or even ‘the one who knows’, will crumble in the face of life, in the face of this moment exactly as it is. Life will wake you up from the dream of your own awakening, for what you are is beyond all such dreams.

Yes, life is so fiercely loving and compassionate that it will destroy every image and leave you naked as a newborn baby, naked as the day you were born. Naked, and radically open to all experience. Naked, and present to this moment. The image is humiliated. And what is left is total humility in the face of life.

And so ask yourself this:

Who would you be without your story of your own awakening?

Burn, baby, burn!

~ Jeff Foster The Ever Present Embrace of Life

This old religious package, which still survives today, no longer satisfies the current wave of practicing Christians and others seekers who are searching for clear answers to their pressing spiritual questions: What is the purpose of my life, and of all life? Where did I come from? What will happen to me after I die? Who am I? Why is there such suffering in the world, and why doesn’t “God” do something about it? And so on.

Only a small collection of mystics and saints over the ages since have touched this deeper wisdom through their individual devotional and intuitive efforts. It’s time now to release these original teachings of Jesus from their doctrinal, legendary and religious package.

Let it not be misunderstood: the Christian religion which emerged from the early Church has been a unique and unquestionably powerful, effective and worthy social factor in Western man’s evolutionary development over the last two thousand years. Just like other major world religions it has spawned valuable scholarship, unified social values and laws and generated a huge legacy of architecture, literature, music and art. It drew people together into cooperative and collective enterprises more than had ever occurred before in human history.

While its political policies varied from benevolence to treachery, it insisted that every human, even a heavy sinner, is worthy and loved. It provided hope in the form of an idyllic heaven, immortality and forgiveness for sins. It gave Western man a set of metaphors and positive symbols to sustain him through his miseries, even though they were embodied in a questionable legend. But this is what legends are for: to hold symbolically in the form of beliefs whatever of value cannot be maintained over time in the form of literal history, principles, customs and social laws.

Despite its shortcomings and terrible misuses the Christian religion has driven and nourished the spiritual lives of hundreds of millions of people. It has inspired the thought and work of countless contributors to society in many lands and callings. Highly successful in overall human terms, it is today the most salient religious influence in the lives of more than a billion people, and a strong underlying force in modern secular society throughout the planet.

Our position here is not to tear down Christianity but rather to encourage its enhancement and enrichment through a better understanding of what Jesus was actually teaching. In this way its adherents can choose to apply this deeper understanding in their individuaI lives, group endeavors and large-scale societal activities.

This is not unlike the process we follow when we raise a child. We do not continually criticize and judge it for being immature, or discard it for its frequent learning mistakes. Rather, we value it, nurture il and support it as it maliures. We take pleasure in participating in its creative growth so it may someday become responsible, self-fulfilled and a positive force in the world.

This is the same charge before each one of us as he tries to work out his personal relationship with the behemoth of Christianity, and find his peace with it whether he be Christian or not.

Many saints, prophets and devoted practitioners over the ages have experienced the Christian life very deeply. Their contemplative devotions generated insightful interpretations, novel insights and the resolution of some of the shortcomings in the Biblical account of Jesus.

A few of these practitioners found “hidden” truths within the Gospels and were able to write about them for later generations. The Christian contribution to the Perennial Philosophy arose in just this way…. Thanks in large part to this small minority of

Christian explorers we are better enabled today to experience for ourselves Jesus’ finer teachings and his grander vision. They have given us a head start, so to speak. We may dig even more deeply on our own now by building upon this background.

Perhaps most important, we may come to accept Jesus’ master-claim that God is not to be found external to man — which has been tacitly assumed by most Christians for one hundred generations — but lies rather within every one of us. While he said this very clearly, this central message has been largely disregarded, obscured or ritualized in Christianity.

To reclaim it one need only recognize this grand presence within himself, relate to it and then draw upon it. Could there be a simpler path to greater compassion, higher wisdom and a new awakening? ….

What is hardest to understand is why so little has been done in the long evolution of Christianity to correct the large divergence between it and the central principles Jesus taught. Apparently the same human needs have persisted for a symbolic, dogmatized and ritualized religious institution, a personified God-man as figurehead, a personalized savior from sin and a lingering hope for salvation in an indefinite future. Indeed, these needs are still widespread in the Christian world today. They are even built into the Christian creed.

Individuals who no longer find this Church offering supportive tend to step out of Christianity and seek their own way in another religion, or as agnostics or atheists entirely outside of the domain of organized religion. Many have followed a solitary spiritual path and discovered all by themselves their inner God-nature and all it has to reveal to them.

We may conclude that Christianity has only partially followed the track Jesus originally offered. Its base of knowledge and practice is only weakly related to Jesus’ teachings. As an organized religious institution it is rooted instead on a manufactured and persuasive legend, not on the reliable historic facts and the central teachings of the man for whom it is named.

Even though the Jesus movement grew obliquely out of Jesus’ exemplary life and sayings twenty centuries ago, Christianity is not the only, and not necessarily the preferred and universal gateway to a deeper understanding of the deeper message Jesus taught. It is this deeper understanding that we seek in this book (and E-pistle).

~ From: A New Jesus: Rediscovering His Deeper Teachings Through Intuitive Inquiry pp 14-16, by William Kautz, iUniverse 2011. ISBN: 978-1-4502-6344-3 (pbk)

Harding was born in 1909, in Lowestoft, on the east coast of England. His parents belonged to the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect notorious for its ultra-Puritanism and intolerance of other denominations and, of course, all other religions.

At 21, while studying architecture at University College, London, Harding apostatized from the Brethren much to his parent’s horror. To justify this step, he sent to the elders of the Brethren a thesis explaining that he saw the great religions as complementary rather competing, and as having, at their common core, the Beatific Vision.

From age 21, Harding was remarkably successful in leading a double life. Without knowing quite how he did it, he managed to earn a respectable living as an architect in private practice, while devoting most of his time and energy to “the discovery of What and Who he really is”, to piecing together an elaborate but credible cosmology-cum-epistemology, and increasing to work out its application to everyday life.

In fact, Harding’s crowning achievement has been to devise a toolkit of exercises or experiments for getting behind words and concepts to direct seeing into our True Nature. In all the great spiritual traditions, the true mystics — the Seers — have, hitherto, been limited to words or silence in their attempts to share their vision. No wonder they rarely succeeded.

But now at last, thanks to his toolkit, the essential vision is entirely shareable, indeed obvious and natural. It’s also revolutionary, and therefore resisted in traditional circles — decreasingly, it seems.

The first book that Harding wrote was his magnum opus, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in The Universe. He wrote this book, of 650 huge pages, over eight years to 1950. His main purpose in writing this book was to answer his two questions: ‘What am I?’ and ‘What do I amount to in the universe?’ A shorter edition and a number of other books followed from time to time throughout his long life.

It’s been widely acknowledged that the greatest aspect of Harding’s spiritual teaching work has been his devising of thirty or so sense-based workshop ‘experiments’. These ‘awareness exercises’ are designed to enable people to see or recognize Who they really are beyond outward appearances. In the 35 years prior to his death in 2007, Harding travelled to more than 20 countries across 5 continents, offering ‘Look for Yourself’, or ‘Seeing Who We Really Are’ workshops, based around these experiments.

One of the simplest and most effective of Harding’s exercises can be done just by sitting down opposite a friend. Point to your friend’s feet, then yours; to his torso, then yours; to his head, then back to where others see yours. What, on present evidence, is your finger pointing at? (Warning: it’s no good just reading about this, you have actually to carry out the experiment for yourself.)

What you see by carrying this exercise in basic attention, is what it is to be 1st-Person Singular — the noumenous No-thing that is nevertheless keenly aware of Itself as the Container or Ground of the whole display. This seeing is believing. Altogether unmystical (in the popular sense), it is a precise, total, and all-or-nothing experience admitting of no degrees — so long as it lasts.

Now your task is to go on seeing your Absence/Presence in all situations, till the seeing becomes quite natural and continuous. This is neither to lose yourself in your Emptiness nor in what fills it, but simultaneously to view the thing you are looking out at and the No-thing you are looking out of. There will be found to be no times when this two-way-attention is out of place or can safely be dispensed with.

The initial seeing into your Nature is simplicity itself: once noticed, Nothing is so obvious! But it is operative only in so far as it is practised. The results — freedom from greed and hate and fear and delusion — are assured only while the One they belong to isn’t overlooked.

I’ll let Harding himself conclude this all too brief overview. In his Religions of the World: A handbook for the open-minded. he writes:

“Arrived at his goal, the truly Awakened one is, in fact, not Christian in any ordinary sense. He has broken loose from his parent tradition and become universal, above all distinctions whatever. But on his way there he has had a hard time of it. It’s no easy task to reconcile his direct vision with his inherited faith.

His intuition of the One, his dawning identification with the One, his clear sight of that One as the Light or Emptiness within, his resulting freedom from all desire and emotion and even love for man or God, his inability to meditate in the prescribed fashion (visualising, for instance, the Passion of Christ), or to pray, or to think good thoughts, or even to think at all — these sure evidences of his Enlightenment must at first seem to him grave spiritual defects.

To his spiritual counsellors or former co-religionists they may seem downright sinful. All the same, it is his direct experience, his original contact with the Real — ignored by the majority, condemned by the orthodox — which is the heart of this religion, as of all other religions. It is what makes Christianity true.

Because she gets to the Root, becomes that nourishing Root, she becomes also the whole tree with all its leaves and fruits. Ultimately, the (Radical), Mystic or Realised Christian has no preferences, no personal opinions. She doesn’t pick and choose among the innumerable sects and doctrines of Christianity.

Because she rests in their common Source, she is free of it all, and it is all very good indeed.”

~ For more info on Douglas Harding and current activities of the Headless Way, check out: www.headless.org. You can also try out many of Harding’s ‘experiments’ from links on the home page. This is an extensive resource and highly recommended. Ed.

The book is entitled: The Silence of the Mind and is the first in a tetralogy (1 of 4) to be published by Obooks. The other titles out in 2012 will be: The Wondrous Journey into the Depth of Our Being, Life is Eternal Newness and I Am Boundlessness.

Like, I Am That, this rare work has been made available to readers throughout the English-speaking world through a perceptive and awakened translator — in this case, Petrica Verdes. For the past few years, Verdes has been practicing meditation and living in various meditation communes in Italy, Germany and the UK. Translating Ilie Cioara’s work has been for him a labour of love and a process of spiritual growth.

Verdes said: “In 2002, I came across one of Ilie Cioara’s books in a bookshop, and I wrote the publisher straight away, asking if they could pass me the address of the author. The book just mesmerized me, I felt an energy around the text and I used to meditate with it and carry it with me.

We just “see” something and understand it profoundly, intuitively, without needing to filter any knowledge through the mind. This practice has become part of my life. It is a great gift to understand that truth is very simple. Applying it is more difficult, but this apparent difficulty is easily overcome with a little persistence and thirst for the divine.”

Ilie (rhymes with lily) is unique in a way, in the sense that he lived in almost complete isolation in Romania. Early in his life, he was hunted by the secret police and finally gaoled for six years because he did not support the communist regime. He seemed to be just an ordinary man, with a deep longing for the divine, living in very adverse circumstances. He belonged to no tradition of enlightenment, he wasn’t part of a lineage, he had no master, he never travelled to India.

Originally a Christian mystic, he repeated a mantra-like prayer frequently each day for over 20 years. One day, he felt an intuitive impulse to drop the mantra, and just practice ’silence of the mind’, by listening to the noises on the street etc, in the now. After following this practice for a few years, one morning, as he was waking up from his sleep, ‘he’ suddenly experienced what some have called, ‘liberation’ or ‘enlightenment’.

Until the age of 55, when Ilie awakened spiritually, he hadn’t written a single page, and never tried to be a teacher. Because he lived in almost complete isolation, his words have a freshness and a direct simplicity, devoid of any spiritual jargon. Ilie felt the impulse to share his experience and insights using short verses which could give the reader a taste of no-mind. The verses were followed by prose explanations (see example below).

Most of these writings had to be hidden in the apartment of a friend, until 1990, when the iron curtain fell, so as not to be confiscated by the communist authorities. They describe the practice of ‘Self-knowing’ using all-encompassing Attention. Like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti etc, his is a simple message of discovering our inner divine nature through the silence of the mind.

~ Resourced by Pete from: The Silence of the Mind blog, Non-Duality Magazine and Yogi Times

~ Book details: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara. Trans. Petrica Verdes. Softcover: 145 pp. Obooks, John Hunt (Oct, 2011) ISBN:10: 1846948290 & 13: 978-1846948299

~ You can get good used copies Here

Eternal youth is a natural phenomenon,
It is each person’s destiny — as a mature, realized individual;
It ensues spontaneously, as an authentic experience,
An energy without support, bound by nothing.

Physically, youth depends oh the number of our years,
On the body’s progress towards maturity.
There are no contradictions. People consider themselves
As old as their physical age, according to their life expectancy.

Whereas psychologically it is a-different matter,
Youth is directly connected with Life’s constant newness;
Life itself demands that we encounter it,
The same way She is, as absolute newness in each movement.

Without this eternal, ever-renewing youth,
We will not understand the newness of the Universal movement.
We need to have a fresh, lucid and clear mind,
Completely detached from time, from the wandering memory.

Such a state is attained naturally,
When we understand the “ego” and its powerless nature,
Unable to embrace and really comprehend
The innocence of the naked moment.

The moment makes us young, if we encounter it constantly,
Without the old “self” — based on old residues;
Youth is unrelated to time, years do not define it,
In eternal youth, everyone and everything becomes integrated.

The Prose

Eternal youth is a natural phenomenon; it is the destiny of every human being who has reached a stage of spiritual maturity. This spiritual attainment appears spontaneously — as a true experience — when man discovers the Reality of his being, as immortal Divinity. In this fortunate circumstance, he has a Pure Energy and Consciousness without dimensions or cause.

On a physical plane, youth is determined by the age of our body, by its progress towards maturity. From this point of view, there are no contradictions. People consider themselves as old as their years, according to the climate or the geographical location they live in.

On a psychological level, it is a different matter. In this circumstance, youth is closely connected to the way we integrate and welcome Life’s eternal freshness. >•

Practically, Life itself requests us to encounter it in the same way She is — as absolute newness, with each movement. Without this Eternal Youth, we will never be able to encounter or understand the newness of the Universal movement. Only by being detached from time and space — from the wandering memory — we are able to understand that which is new and real, brought “here and now” by the constant mobility of Life.

How can we reach this eternal Youth within us? Only in one manner, that is: when we understand the “ego” and its powerless nature, unable to embrace and comprehend the purity of the present moment. When understanding occurs — as a direct experience — this fiction becomes silent, in humbleness, because it has understood its fundamental incapacity. In the psychological void thus created, we expand to Infinity and we acquire a new mind, perfectly functional and without limits.

Encountering the moment correctly leads us to a state of eternal Youth — without the senility based on mental accumulations. Youth is not a prisoner of time and it is not influenced by how many years old our physical body is.

In a state of complete inner freedom, on the threshold of the incoming moment – we remain untouched and just as free after the moment has passed, without recording any memory residues. We die psychologically to what has been and, simultaneously, we are reborn just as alive, fresh and always young in each second of Life in Its perpetual movement.

~ From: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara pp 59.

The longest is entitled: The Silence of the Mind (11.39)

If the video doesn’t appear above, >>> Click Here

Others in the series are:

1. Perfectly Conscious (1.54)
2. How Can We Free Ourselves? (3.26)
3. Creation is Eternal Freshness (3.55)
4. The Power of Emptiness (1.39)
5. Listening and Watching (3.20)

If any reaction of the mind surfaced, it disappeared immediately in contact with the sparkle of impersonal Attention. A state of quiet and all-encompassing joy characterized me in all circumstances, whether pleasant or painful. My behavior was that of a simple witness, perfectly aware of what was happening around me, without affecting my all-encompassing state of peace.

The State of the Sublime is, of course, difficult to describe, but not impossible to experience by someone who authentically practices awareness. In order to communicate it, a simple and direct language is used, which is not filtered through reason, because the “ego”, with its subjective perception, is no longer there. To put it this way: the psychological emptiness is the one who lives the present moment, expresses this encounter into words and still remains present and available to the next moment.

As a result of this direct encounter with the moment, always new and renewing itself, I felt the need, initiated and fueled by intuitive impulses, to express “Self- knowing” using verse. It was a natural thing to do. In few words I could encompass and communicate the essence of the experience. In the first year I wrote 300 poems. Later on, their number reached 1000, of which 600 are accompanied by prose explanations, such as the ones in this book.

I would also like to describe a few effects which, as a result of becoming aware of the reactions of my own thinking process, have completely disappeared, without any other intervention from my mind.

After experiencing this phenomenon, I felt like a broken vessel, from which the following started to disappear: my interest in astral journeying, my religious beliefs, my egoism, desires, fear, envy, pride etc. My awareness remained open all the time, offering me the possibility to pass from the finite dimension into Infinity.

After encountering this extraordinary phenomenon^ with the help of a global perspective I understood the whole human tragedy, caused by the misinterpretation of life in its constant mobility and newness from one moment to another.

Faced with the freshness and the aliveness of life, each individual — according to his own conditioning, as a result of wrong education — behaves completely inappropriately, because the structure of the mind cannot in any way comprehend arid embrace the beauty of life. The shadow of the past is actually a memory pattern, clouding and distorting the reality of the present moment.

Life cannot be encountered and understood objectively, unless we are in a state of complete freedom and serenity of the mind. Life is newness, moment by moment, and it demands, even forces us to encounter it with a new mind, with a new brain and with new brain cells, which have not been used previously.

It is a well-known fact: scientists claim that man, during the whole span of his life, uses no more than 10-15% of his brain cells and memory potential. As you can see, our psychological possibilities are almost unlimited.

After these explanations, it will be easier to understand the process of our own conditioning, as well as the phenomenon of breaking the shell of the “ego”.

As I had shown previously, life demands that we encounter it directly, without any memory baggage. How do we lose the memory baggage? It is all very simple! Here is how:

We encounter the movement of the mind with the flame of total Attention — requested by the aliveness of life in its continuous flow. Without the light and serenity provided by Attention, nothing can be understood in a real way. In the light of Attention, any reaction of the mind (thought, image, fear, desire) — which functions chaotically, obsessively and dominates us — is instantly dissolved.

In the psychological void that follows, a new mind appears, expanding into Infinity, as a state of Pure Consciousness, pure understanding as well as transformative action. This simple state of “being” is in itself an action in which the entity who performs the action doesn’t exist anymore. The old man, conditioned by his behavioral patterns, loses his authority as the chaotic, uncontrollable reactions dissolve — energies which sustain and fuel the “ego”.

Only in this way, by a simple encounter with the reactions of the mind and its subsequent demise, the barrier of the “ego” is broken. Through a momentary opening, our real being is revealed, transforming and healing us. This all-encompassing Attention, without any purpose, is the Sacred itself in action.

There is, in fact, another type of attention directed by will, which behaves subjectively by limiting itself to one object. By its very nature, this type of attention defines itself as lack of attention.

Beware, nevertheless, not to make a mere theory of this simple meeting with yourself! Simply becoming aware of “what is”, of what we encounter, brought about by the flow of life, without having any purpose or expectations, places us in a state of simply “being”, which transforms us by itself. That is all there is to it.

~ From: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara pp 131-134

Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher and the author of several books including, ‘Impact of Awakening’, ‘Emptiness Dancing’, ‘Falling Into Grace’ and ‘The End Of Your World’.

In this interview he talks in detail about his years as a Zen meditator; life as a top athlete; his two significant awakenings; the obstacles he discovered in the way, and the nature of illusion.

If you can’t see the video above, >>>Click Here

Also, don’t miss Adya’s Free live broadcast — available in both audio and video formats — on Thurs. Dec. 8th, 8am Perth Time, pre-program music, 9-10:30am Perth Time. See the time in your local area.

Available to anyone with an internet connection. Just go to: and click on “Audio Stream” or “Video Stream” according to your prefernce.

Mukti, a Californian spiritual teacher of Irish descent is married to Adyashanti. Their teaching in Australia in 2007 is still much appreciated.

Mukti had an early yearning to know God. She felt a fire in herself to find a direct experience of the Divine. This led to her discovering her true nature — an awareness that recognised itself as ‘emptiness’.

If the video does not appear above: Click Here

You can read more about Mukti and what she has to say on ’spiritual marriage’, >>>HERE