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.

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

Western civilizations revere brain intelligence to the point that we’ve all but forgotten there are other forms of intelligence available to us. As a result, it comes as no surprise that we often think of spiritual awakening as an intellectual pursuit. We devise steps, methods and formulas that titillate the brain and spend years refining every nuance.

The brain loves everything that keeps it engaged and it will happily lead us around and around in circles as long as it’s able to remain at the center of that circle. Methods can be helpful, but there’s a more direct path: the way of the intelligent heart.

We all associate the heart with love, but in our world, love is often about levels and conditions. The heart is seen as the seat of sentimental emotion, something that can easily lead us astray and cause us pain. But when spiritual masters speak of love, it is not an emotion, but a state of being that originates in the intelligent heart.

The heart actually contains at least forty thousand neurons, which rivals the subcortical centers in the brain. We’ve been taught that the brain is the command center for the heart, but it often works the other way around. When the brain sends a signal, the heart may choose to disregard it, but when the heart sends a message to the brain, the brain obeys.

Spiritual masters like Rumi have long recognized that it’s the heart that serves as a bridge to the Divine, and that bridge is crossed with unconditional love. When Shams-iTabrizi, Rumi’s teacher, said “The door of the heart must be opened,” he was encouraging us to see past the emotional love to the fullness of intelligent love that embraces all without distinction.

The ancient writer of the Mundaka Upanishad recognized the difference between brain and heart intelligence when s/he said, “The Lord of Love may be known through love but not through thought.” The brain dislikes the path of love because it’s exquisitely simple. There are no secrets, methods or formulas involved, we just love. We can still benefit from Rumi’s sage advice, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

As our love expands, the veils that have caused us to see a world of separate forms fall away, and we recognize the interconnected oneness of everything in existence. When we can say, “I love you like everybody” to everybody and everything, then we are love.

The brain is afraid of all-encompassing love. Its logic tells us that we must get something in return for everything we give. It is wrong. The path of the intelligent heart will lead you to a level of love, joy and peace beyond anything this world recognizes. Although most people believe “you can’t take it with you,” we’re betting you can always take love.

Love is the only reality, and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation. — Tagore

~ Lee & Stephen Hager www.thebeginningoffearlessness.com/blog

~ Hung-chih Cheng-chueh (1091 – 1157)

She is a breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; hence nothing impure can find a way into her.

She is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God’s active power, image of his goodness.

Although alone, she can do all; herself unchanging, she makes all things new.

In each generation she passes into holy souls, she makes them friends of God and prophets; for God loves the man who lives with Wisdom.

She is indeed more splendid than the sun, she outshines all the constellations; compared with light, she takes first place, for light must yield to night, but over Wisdom, darkness can never triumph.

She deploys her strength from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things for good.

Her I loved and sought after from my youth; I sought to take her for my bride and was enamoured of her beauty.

She glorifies her noble birth by living with God; and the Lord of all loves her.

For she is instructress in the understanding of God; and an associate in his works.

And if riches be a desirable possession in life, what is more rich than Wisdom, who produces all things?

Therefore I determined to take her to live with me.

~ From: The Book of Wisdom (7:22 – 8:5). Thought to be written in the 1st or 2nd cent. BCE, by an author unknown.

There are many indicators of this misalignment. One is when your experience of unhappiness is disproportionate to your situation or circumstances. It is an overreaction to the situation or circumstance. This is one of the easiest ways to recognize your lack of presence, even though everyone around you will have seen it before you did.

You don’t know you’re not being present because you’ve become identified with the reactivity, which blinds you to your lack of Presence, your misalignment with the Now. Your friends and family can easily see your identification when insignificant things or events cause you intense unhappiness.

Psychology tells us that these overreactions are, of course, the stimulation of old wounded feelings that are brought back to life, amplifying the structures of the ego. Remember that the pain body and ego are closely related. Because of the triggering, you hugely distort the importance of the particular event that is bringing on the intense unhappiness.

When you’re not present, you’re continuously looking at the current situation with the eyes of your emotional past. What you’re currently experiencing is not part of the situation that upsets you. Unfortunately, reactions, overreactions and all negative emotions are what the pain body receives its nourishment from.

When this is going on, you’re not perceiving reality accurately. Instead, you’re seeing the world through a heavily distorted story that traps your access to objective reality and makes you miserable.

So the next time you believe your life is “going in the wrong direction”, do a little inquiry to find out if your unhappiness is a movie or dream conspiracy of your pain body and ego to trap you in your own private hell.

The Present Moment is always waiting to bring you back to the truth.

~ by Eckhart Tolle. www.tolleteachings.com/

Isn’t it ironic that beliefs, which seem so true and valuable, are actually what can be most limiting? This is because most beliefs aren’t actually very true (or not the whole truth anyway) because beliefs are just conditioning. Conditioning is useful, but it doesn’t hold the key to how to live your life or fulfill your destiny.

Conditioning is meant to help us function, and some of it does that, but much of it just gets in the way of living life as the beautiful Being that we are. Many of our beliefs get in the way of being happy, which hopefully we can all agree is a worthwhile goal.

We all have a lot of false and useless conditioning. Our conditioning makes us think of ourselves in certain ways that can be limiting: “I’m not smart enough to succeed at that,” “My mother would have a fit if I became an artist,” “Girls cant do science,” “Making money is more important than doing what you want to do,” “You should carry on the family business.”

We have so many ideas about what we should do and what our life should look like, but are they true, and where did they come from? Is the source of these ideas trustworthy? What are we trusting when we trust our ideas? What happens when your ideas are in conflict with another sense of what seems true — with your Heart, with what you’d love to do? Then, what do you trust? What is more trustworthy?

People suffer when their ideas — their conditioning — are at odds with their Heart. This conflict can feel almost life threatening because often these ideas are ones we received from people we care about and are or were dependent on, from parents and others close to us. To not agree with these ideas feels like disagreeing with the truth, with the voice of God, with what’s right, with your parents!

Such ideas are not necessarily the truth even though others believe they are and questioning them feels dangerous. They are just what ot others believe and taught us and what we picked up along the way. They aren’t tailor-made for us. They are one-size-fits-all: They are supposed to fit everyone, but they don’t. And they certainly don’t fit all occasions.

When ideas that others close to us believe feel like they don’t fit for us, we often feel guilty, afraid, and even ashamed, like there’s something wrong with us or bad about us.

So what do you trust? Do you trust other people’s ideas and beliefs and your conditioning, or do you trust that little voice inside you that tells you something else? There seem to be two selves here: the conditioned self (the ego) that believes in following ideas and conditioning and another Self that feels differently.

Isn’t it funny how everyone knows what the ‘little voice inside’ is? We’re born with an awareness of something other than our thoughts that is at times in conflict with our thoughts or other people’s ideas. Even though this voice may go against our conditioning, we’re often encouraged when we’re young to pay attention to this voice. And if we didn’t learn to do this as a child or we don’t pay attention to this voice, we rather quickly learn that this voice does have something valuable to say! It can even save our life.

What is this voice? Well, it’s not actually a voice but a knowing, a nudging, sometimes an uncomfortable feeling when we go against it. It is our intuition, our Heart, the ’still, small voice within.’ We all know it, but we don’t always listen to it because there’s often a lot of pressure from others and even from ourselves in the form of fear and guilt to follow our conditioning and other people’s ideas instead. However, people usually end up quite unhappy when they let their conditioning and other people’s ideas determine their choices.

Unhappiness is not a good sign, although it’s a common state. Unhappiness is usually a sign that we’re not aligned with our personal truth — with what’s true for us. We’re not listening to our Heart. Understanding why we’re unhappy is complicated by the fact that the ego is often unhappy and discontent even in the best of circumstances and possibly even when we are aligned with our plan.

The ego complains about anything and everything. It’s an ongoing voice of discontentment — the grass is always greener somewhere else. If we pay a lot of attention to the voice in our head, we’re bound to be unhappy much of the time. So there is the usual unhappiness that’s characteristic of the egoic state of consciousness, and there’s the unhappiness that is a sign we aren’t listening to our Heart or that we’re out of step with our higher plan.

The unhappiness that indicates we aren’t aligned with our plan is a deeper variety, a sense of our soul longing for something else, something more meaningful or more in tune with who we really are. This deeper unhappiness is often experienced as depression and often indicates that our life structures don’t fit our plan.

The cure generally calls for making different choices and possibly creating different life structures: changing our job or career, changing our relationship, moving, including something new in our life, developing an overlooked or a buried talent, or making some other important but possibly difficult change. This deeper unhappiness or depression is the ’stick’ that is attempting to get our attention and move us in another direction.

Joy is the ‘carrot’ that says, “Go this way!” What a beautiful setup it is that joy is the sign that something is part of our higher plan! Do you want to know what your plan is? What do you love? Where is your joy, your juice, your excitement right now? The things that give you joy right now are part of your plan right now, not something that gave you joy in the past or something you think will give you joy in the future, but what gives you joy right now? All we can ever really know of our plan is what is true right now.

The fact that following our joy and doing what we love brings happiness and fulfillment is evidence that love and goodness are behind life. When joy and love are motivating us, the result is happiness, love, and goodness, not just for us as individuals, but for the Whole. Joy and love align us with our higher plan and with the Whole, and that can only be good for everyone.

Think about it: Has following your joy ever led to evil or harming someone? It just doesn’t. Other people might not approve of what you love to do, but you aren’t harming them by doing that, even if that’s what they believe. On the other hand, negative emotions, especially fear, lead to all sorts of addictions and harm. But love is the opposite. Following love and joy leads to happiness and more love and joy, not just for you but ultimately for others too. If what you’re doing is in your highest good, then it must be in everyone’s highest good — in the highest good of the Whole.

What a great formula for life this is! Life is prodding us to follow our joy and love by rewarding us when we do that. This is very kind of Life. In providing us with this guidance system, Life is being very loving. You could conclude that Life loves love and joy.

You could conclude that love and joy are behind life. This Intelligence that has a plan loves and celebrates love! What’s not to trust about that?

~ by Gina Lake, From her book: Trusting Life: Overcoming the Fear and Beliefs that Block Peace and Happiness

Every object which we know has been christened by Time and Space. Every name means limitation, every word is an expression for something in distinction to something else. In the everlasting Now there is neither Space nor Time, neither limitation nor distinction. Even the language of the gods would be inadequate to describe it, and the ‘language of Heaven’ cannot be spoken or written; it is lived.

Tongue and pen can tell lies, the language of Heaven is the life of true reality in man and imparts itself directly from soul to soul, with those who are wholly and really living in truth. Words cannot describe the wordless, and I am no artist in handling words, even within the realm of words. But now I will try to express myself on the subject as plainly and simply as I can. I select a summer day’s meeting between Time and Eternity and describe it in as far as it can be described.

I had been sitting in the garden working and had just finished. That afternoon I was to go to Copenhagen, but it was still an hour and a half before the departure of the train. The weather was beautiful, the air clear and pure. I lighted a cigar and sat down in one of the easy-chairs in front of the house. It was still and peaceful — around me and within me. Too good, in fact, to allow one to think much about anything. I just sat there.

Then it began to come, that infinite tenderness, which is purer and deeper than that of lovers, or of a father toward his child. It was in me, but it also came to me, as the air came to my lungs. As usual, the breathing became sober and reverent, became, as it were, incorporeal; I inhaled the tenderness. Needless to say the cigar went out. I did not cast it away like a sin, I simply had no use for it.

This deep tenderness which I felt, first within myself and then even stronger around and above me, extended further and further — it became all-present. I saw it, and it developed into knowing, into knowing all, at the same time it became power, omnipotence, and drew me into the eternal Now.

That was my first actual meeting with Reality; because such is the real life: a Now which is and a Now which happens. There is no beginning and no end. I cannot say any more about this Now. I sat in my garden, but there was no place in the world where I was not. During the whole time my consciousness was clear and sober. I sat in the garden and acknowledged it with a smile. There was something to smile over, for time and space, characteristics of the Now which happens were so to speak ‘outside’.

But what is the Now which happens? It is continuously active creation with all its birth throes. I saw time and space as instruments or functions of this creation. They come into existence with it and in the course of it, and with it they come to an end. The Newly Created stands in the Now and discards these tools. The freedom, the real Being begins.

~ Johannes Anker-Larsen (1874-1957), from: With the Door Open

ET: The natural way of being after death of a loved one is suffering at first, then there is a deepening. In that deepening, you go to a place where there is no death. And the fact that you felt that means you went deep enough, to the place where there is no death.

Conditioned as your mind is by society, the contemporary world that you live in, which knows nothing about that dimension — your mind then tells you that there is something wrong with this. Your mind says “I shouldn’t be feeling peace, that isn’t what one feels in a situation like this.”

But that’s just a thought conditioned by the culture that you live in. So instead we can recognize when this happens, when that thought comes — recognize it as a conditioned thought that isn’t true.

It doesn’t mean that the waves of sadness won’t come back from time to time. But in between the waves of sadness, you sense there is peace. As you sense that peace, you sense the essence of your children as well — the timeless essence. So death is a very sacred thing — not just a dreadful thing. When you react to the loss of form, that’s dreadful.

When you go deep enough to the formless, the dreadful is no longer dreadful, it’s sacred. Then you will experience the two levels, when somebody dies who is close to you. Yes it’s dreadful on the level of form. It’s sacred on the deeper level.

Death can enable you to find that dimension in yourself. You’re helping countless other humans if you find that dimension in yourself — the sacred dimension of life. Death can help you find the sacred dimension of life — where life is indestructible.

Surrender can open that door for you. Complete acceptance of it. So honor that sacred dimension and realize that what your mind is saying, that it isn’t right, is just a form of conditioning — it isn’t the truth. It is supremely right.

This is always the window into the formless. As you accept it, surrender. Because the form is gone, your mind becomes still when you surrender to death. It’s not through explanations that you accept death. You can have explanations, mental explanations that say, well, he or she will move on or reincarnate, or go to some place of rest.

That can be comforting, but you can go to a deeper place than that, where you don’t need explanations — a state of immediate realization of the sacredness of death, because what opens up when the form dissolves is life beyond form. That is the only thing that is sacred. That is the sacred dimension.

You can get tiny glimpses of that when you lose something, and you completely accept that it’s gone. This is a tiny glimpse of death and it can give you a tiny realization — maybe even more than tiny, if you’re ready.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

If there is unhappiness in you, the first step is to realize that is how you feel. The next step is to inquire into it and understand what the action step is. The action step might be changing a situation out in the physical world. Or the action step might be changing something in your inner psychological landscape. A good thing to remember is that the main cause of unhappiness is never a specific situation but the thoughts about and behind that situation.

As you inquire, stay with the facts. Opinions and identifications with the negative situation like “I am ruined” is an opinion that is more a story that a recounting of the facts. If you can face the facts of your situation, you will feel empowered.

If you’re running away from something — whether it is an addiction, not having enough money, an unhappy marriage or relationship, or a painful part of your past — you’re in denial and not operating in objective reality where solutions could appear at any time in the present moment.

Also remember that what you think creates the emotions that you feel. As you tease out the relationship between your thoughts and your emotions, you will find that the truth of your unhappiness is resolved by being the awareness behind your thoughts and emotions.

Seeking happiness will never make you happy, as seeking is really the opposite of the contentment of happiness. And though happiness is elusive, freedom from unhappiness is achievable by facing what is rather than believing the stories your ego has fabricated about it.

As you pierce this veil with your awareness, you will discover your natural state of well-being and inner peace.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com