The Seer

An interview with Eckhart Tolle by Andrew Cohen

AC: What exactly do you mean when you say that the purpose of the world lies in the transcendence of it?

ET: The world promises fulfillment somewhere in time, and there is a continuous striving toward that fulfillment in time. Many times people feel, “Yes, now I have arrived,” and then they realize that, no, they haven’t arrived, and then the striving continues. It is expressed beautifully in A Course in Miracles, where it says that the dictum of the ego is “Seek but do not find.” People look to the future for salvation, but the future never arrives.

So ultimately, suffering arises through not finding. And that is the beginning of an awakening—when the realization dawns that “Perhaps this is not the way. Perhaps I will never get to where I am striving to reach; perhaps it’s not in the future at all.” After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future.

That’s an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis — when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless. That happened to me. I was just that close to suicide and then something else happened — a death of the sense of self that lived through identifications, identifications with my story, things around me, the world.

Something arose at that moment that was a sense of deep and intense stillness and aliveness, beingness. I later called it “presence.” I realized that beyond words, that is who I am. But this realization wasn’t a mental process. I realized that that vibrantly alive, deep stillness is who I am.

Years later, I called that stillness “pure consciousness,” whereas everything else is the conditioned consciousness. The human mind is the conditioned consciousness that has taken form as thought. The conditioned consciousness is the whole world that is created by the conditioned mind.

Everything is our conditioned consciousness; even objects are. Conditioned consciousness has taken birth as form and then that becomes the world. So to be lost in the conditioned seems to be necessary for humans. It seems to be part of their path to be lost in the world, to be lost in the mind, which is the conditioned consciousness.

Then, due to the suffering that arises out of being lost, one finds the unconditioned as oneself. And that is why we need the world to transcend the world. So I’m infinitely grateful for having been lost.

The purpose of the world is for you to be lost in it, ultimately. The purpose of the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that seems to be what is needed for the awakening to happen. And then once the awakening happens, with it comes the realization that suffering is unnecessary now. You have reached the end of suffering because you have transcended the world. It is the place that is free of suffering.

This seems to be everybody’s path. Perhaps it is not everybody’s path in this lifetime, but it seems to be a universal path. Even without a spiritual teaching or a spiritual teacher, I believe that everybody would get there eventually. But that could take time.

AC: A long time.

ET: Much longer. A spiritual teaching is there to save time. The basic message of the teaching is that you don’t need any more time, you don’t need any more suffering. I tell this to people who come to me: “You are ready to hear this because you are listening to it.

There are still millions of people out there who aren’t listening to it. They still need time. But I’m not talking to them. You are hearing that you don’t need time anymore and you don’t need to suffer anymore. You’ve been seeking in time and you’ve been seeking further suffering.” And to suddenly hear that “You don’t need that anymore — for some, that can be the moment of transformation.

So the beauty of the spiritual teaching is that it saves lifetimes of –

AC: Unnecessary suffering.

ET: Yes, so it’s good that people are lost in the world. I enjoy traveling to New York and Los Angeles, where it seems that people are totally involved. I was looking out of the window in New York. We were next to the Empire State Building, doing a group. And everybody was rushing around, almost running. Everybody seemed to be in a state of intense nervous tension, anxiety. It’s suffering, really, but it’s not recognized as suffering.

And I thought, where are they all running to? And of course, they are all running to the future. They are needing to get somewhere, which is not here. It is a point in time: not now — then. They are running to a then. They are suffering, but they don’t even know it. But to me, even watching that was joyful. I didn’t feel, “Oh, they should know better.” They are on their spiritual path. At the moment, that is their spiritual path, and it works beautifully.

AC: Often the word enlightenment is interpreted to mean the end of division within the self and the simultaneous discovery of a perspective or way of seeing that is whole, complete, or free from duality. Some who have experienced this perspective claim that the ultimate realization is that there is no difference between the world and God or the Absolute, between samsara and nirvana, between the manifest and the unmanifest.

But there are others who claim that, in fact, the ultimate realization is that the world doesn’t actually exist at all — that the world is only an illusion, completely empty of meaning, significance, or reality. So in your own experience, is the world real? Is the world unreal? Both?

ET: Even when I’m interacting with people or walking in a city, doing ordinary things, the way I perceive the world is like ripples on the surface of being. Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there’s the vastness of being. There’s a vast spaciousness. There’s a vast stillness and there’s a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn’t separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.

So there’s no separation in the way I perceive it. There’s no separation between being and the manifested world, between the manifested and the unmanifested. But the unmanifested is so much vaster, deeper, and greater than what happens in the manifested.

Every phenomenon in the manifested is so short-lived and so fleeting that, yes, one could almost say that from the perspective of the unmanifested, which is the timeless beingness or presence, all that happens in the manifested realm really seems like a play of shadows.

It seems like vapor or mist with continuously new forms arising and disappearing, arising and disappearing. So to the one who is deeply rooted in the unmanifested, the manifested could very easily be called unreal. I don’t call it unreal because I see it as not separate from anything.

AC: So it is real?

ET: All that is real is beingness itself. Consciousness is all there is, pure consciousness.

~ To read the complete interview: >>>Click Here

The problem of Jesus’ last name is a misunderstanding most Christians have about who Jesus was. Even Pope John Paul II’s book of private reflections, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, contains this metaphysical misunderstanding.

There is a metaphysical distinction between Jesus of Nazareth, the historical human personality, and the Christ as God’s “Only-Begotten Son” (Nicene Creed), the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Ordinarily, when we speak of Jesus, we talk as though Christ were Jesus’ last name.

We say, “as Jesus said to the woman at the well,” or we might say, “as Christ said to the woman at the well,” or again, “as Jesus Christ said to the woman at the well.” This ordinary usage is convenient but it can create a serious problem in understanding not only who Jesus was but also who we ourselves are.

Most Christians, of course, know that Christ was not the last name of Jesus of Nazareth but a title given to Jesus by the early Christians, meaning the “anointed one” or Messiah. Nevertheless, even though we know the origin and meaning of the title, Christ, we still ordinarily use the word Christ as if this were Jesus’ last name in the same way that Smith is used as a last name for persons whose ancestors were blacksmiths. Understanding the origin of the last name doesn’t alter the usage in either case.

What exactly is the problem? The problem comes when we try, in light of this familiar usage, to interpret the words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God.” What we usually end up mistakenly thinking is that the Creed means Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Only-Begotten Son. That is, we mistakenly think that Jesus, and Jesus alone, was God’s Son, and that all other humans are therefore less than Jesus.

That is not what the Creed means. To think so is a serious metaphysical error. And this error is so grave that, unless corrected, it can actually prevent us from taking our place with Jesus in the Christ Consciousness, and later in the Kingdom of the Father. It is the Christ who is God’s Only-Begotten Son, not Jesus.

True, Jesus of Nazareth knew he was the Christ; that is, that he had the Christ Consciousness (and the higher nondual consciousness of oneness with the Father). He knew that, as Christ, he had been directly begotten by God from all eternity. But Jesus knew and preached that the same was also true for us.

We too, according to Jesus, are to become Christ by putting on the mind of Christ, that is, the awareness that we too are directly begotten by God. One of the reasons Jesus called himself the Son of Man was that he wanted us to realize that our reality and destiny are the same as his.

Most Christians make this theological mistake of thinking that Jesus of Nazareth, rather than the Christ, was God’s only-begotten Son. I made it myself, and it caused me a great deal of confusion when my consciousness was trying to realize Christ Consciousness. ….

To see the rest of this article by Jim Marion: >>>Click Here.

~ From: Putting on The Mind of Christ, by Jim Marion

“Can a horse tell you what it means to be human? How can a horse get beyond the boundaries of being a horse and say what it means to be human? Why do we think a human being can say what it means to be God? And yet we’ve done that; we’ve done that and we said that we’ve got it so right that if you don’t believe it we’ll burn you at the stake. That’s a very strange idea.”
~ John Shelby Spong.

“I walked to-day in sheltered wooded valleys; and at one point, in a very lonely and secluded lane, leaned long upon a gate that led into a little forest clearing, to watch the busy and intent life of the wood. There were the trees extending their fresh leaves to the rain; the birds slipped from tree to tree; a mouse frisked about the grassy road; a hundred flowers raised their bright heads.

None of these little lives have, I suppose, any conception of the extent of life that lies about them; each of them knows the secrets and instinct of its own tiny brain, and guesses perhaps at the thoughts of the little lives akin to it. Yet every tiniest, shortest, most insignificant little life has its place in the mind of God.

It seemed to me then such an amazing, such an arrogant thing to define to describe, to limit the awful mystery of the Creator and His purpose. Even to think of Him, as He Is spoken of in the Old Testament, with fierce and vindictive schemes, with flagrant partialities, seemed to me nothing but a dreadful profanation.

And then all these anxious visions left me; and I felt for awhile like a tiny spray of seaweed floating on an infinite sea, with the brightness of the morning overhead. I felt that I was Indeed set where I found myself to be, and that if now my little heart and brain are too small to hold the truth, yet I thanked God for making even the conception of the mystery, the width, the depth possible to me; and I prayed to Him that He would give me as much of the truth as I could bear.”
~ From: The Thread of Gold, by A C Benson

Raimon Panikkar-Alemany (1918 – 2010) was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and a proponent of inter-religious dialogue. As a scholar, he specialized in comparative religion. He entered the Opus Dei organization in 1940. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946, and was a professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid.

He made his first trip to India in 1954 where he studied Indian philosophy and religion at the University of Mysore and Banaras Hindu University, where he met several Western monks seeking Eastern forms for the expression of their Christian beliefs. “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian,” he later wrote.

In 1962, he was summoned to Rome by Opus Dei director, Josemaría Escrivá, who expelled him after a brief trial where he was charged with disobedience! He became a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. in 1966 and a professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972. For many years he taught in the spring and spent the rest of the year doing research in India.

Here’s a clip of Panikkar speaking on the metoaphor of ‘windows’ in inter-religious dialogue

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

Q: If Being, or God, is the creative source of all energy and thoughts, and some thoughts from the ego are a negative form of energy, don’t these negative thoughts originate from Being? In other words, did God create evil?

A: That kind of question has been asked and talked about by many philosophers and it has remained a kind of stumbling block in the Christian religion. So let’s see what the intuitive answer is. In this sense-perceived universe, if you want to use anything here to compare God to, the most appropriate thing in this sense-perceived universe would be the sun.

The sun is the source of seemingly inexhaustible energy, and the giver of life. The very heat in your body comes from the sun indirectly. The sun of course is not eternal, but compared to the human life span it can be considered virtually eternal, it’s so much vaster. And it gives freely of itself, millions and millions of years of pouring out energy.

Now let’s say the sun is in a process of becoming conscious of itself, because my intuition is the Universe, or rather that which underlies the Universe, or the One behind the many, is in the process of becoming conscious of itself in the dimension of time. The One also exists in the timeless dimension, where there is no past and future.

So God, to use that word for a while, in the timeless, God is already complete and perfect. But it seems that in the realm of time, God is becoming conscious through all these life forms. Now if that were the sun, then in the process of becoming conscious, the sun continuously emits zillions of photons, light particles. Let’s say the individual photon is part of the process of becoming conscious for the sun.

Now in that process, the individual photon would undergo a change of consciousness arising. Temporarily, the individual photon, as it becomes together with the sun, as consciousness arises it mis-perceives itself as a separate entity. It no longer realizes its oneness with the sun. There’s a continuum, it never really loses connection with the sun. So temporarily, as part of the process of becoming conscious, it believes itself to be separate. It’s a temporary thing.

While it believes itself to be separate, it creates all kinds of illusions that reflect the basis illusion of separateness. That’s basically where we are at, where humanity is at. The human being is the photon, the sun particle, so to speak. The consciousness within is the consciousness of God, there’s only one consciousness. And that consciousness, in the process of the whole becoming conscious, mis-perceives itself temporarily. And that creates the illusion of separateness in the individual human.

That creates the illusion of the identification with form, which is the illusion of separateness. That’s seeing oneself as a separate entity. The stronger that illusion is, the more that gets reflected in its actions outside, which then become deluded. And that’s called evil.

Ultimately in evil, nothing is destroyed. The essence of all life forms is eternal. But on its own level, it’s not pleasant. From the point of view of the larger whole, it’s only a brief dream episode that takes place as the One is becoming conscious. So that is the answer to “Did God create evil?”

So the teachings that say that evil ultimately is not real, of course that is correct. But it’s a question of levels. If you look at it from one level, it has a certain reality. The fact that it ultimately is not real doesn’t mean that on this temporary level it appears very real. But it must be recognized as deluded.

Evil can be defined as complete identification with form — that is the illusion. The more an entity is identified with form, the more seemingly evil the entity creates, and the more suffering is created.

What’s the answer? The answer, of course, is why we’re here. We are the arising of the answer. The answer is not just the answer, it’s the end of the illusion of separateness and the end of so-called evil.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.eckhartteachings.com

What tempts you? When we answer that question we virtually always name something that’s outside us. It’s no real surprise that we see it this way, since even the dictionary tells us that temptation comes from something or someone outside us that entices, coaxes or lures us.

But fundamentally, temptation exists in two parts: 1. The being, action or object we desire. 2. Our own strength or weakness in confronting it. In both cases, temptation is internal, rather than external. What might surprise you is that many cultures had no concept of temptation as something primarily external until they came into contact with Christianity.

Temptation takes center stage in both the Bible’s Old and New Testaments where humans are not only tempted by people or objects, but have the additional burden of resisting the temptations offered by powerful evil forces. The ‘apocalyptic’ view is a theory that the Jewish people came up with to explain the misery they experienced even though they kept the laws they believed God had given them.

The book of Job is a symbolic explanation of the theory that tells us the misery we see on earth is the result of a cosmic war between good and evil, with humans in the middle of the struggle. Many of Jesus’ earliest followers shared this apocalyptic view and interpreted his teachings through this belief system. These ideas still permeate our culture, whether we’re believers or not, so it’s important that we see them for what they are.

Temptation began to take a starring role as early as the story of original sin found in Genesis as Eve is coaxed by a serpent to eat forbidden fruit. The story of Adam and Eve paints the picture of a fearful world where even in paradise, evil lurks. No wonder the famous “Lord’s prayer” includes the line, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

If we believe this line of thinking, the stakes have become far higher than our regret over eating an extra piece of cake or buying something we can’t afford; eternal salvation is involved. But is this true? What really is temptation, where does it come from and what can we do about it?

Most people who have some familiarity with the Bible are aware of an account that describes Jesus being tempted by an evil force, Satan the Devil, just before he begins his public teaching work (Luke 4:1-13).

Although these verses read like an historical narrative, there were no witnesses to the encounter that could have reported it. It’s far more likely that Jesus originally told the story himself as a parable filled with symbolic meaning. It’s interesting to note that a very similar story of temptation is told about Buddha that also takes place at the same stage of transition in his life.

The verses tell us that after Jesus was baptized he was “filled with Spirit” and led to the wilderness where he spent 40 days fasting. Because Jesus lived in and near desert areas, we take it for granted that the story is literal and takes place in a actual location, but the desert and wilderness were also used in the Bible to symbolize a place of revelation.

While a crowded urban area might be likened to a mind filled with preconceived notions, attachments and aversions, a vast open wilderness pictures the mind that has let go of social conditioning and is open and willing to experience the Divine. Like a “sea change” the desert experience also symbolizes a major transition or significant life change, which certainly took place in Jesus’ case.

Bible readers also take the 40 day fast that led up to the temptation literally, but there’s good reason to see this as another symbol. The number 40 is mentioned 146 times in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament: Noah’s flood lasted for 40 days and nights, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, and Moses was on the mountain for 40 days.

Usually the number is associated with a difficult or trying situation and a transition. Although we’re not familiar with the symbolism Jesus used, we must remember that those who were listening to him were.

For people who believe Jesus was either a god or demi-god (half god, half man), a 40 day fast may seem possible, but most fasts of that duration, even with water, result in hallucinations, convulsions, irregular heartbeat, organ deterioration, the loss of extremities and very often death.

If Jesus was superhuman, there was really no point to the fast or any reason for a struggle between good and evil because he would be beyond temptation. If he was human, the fast would have rendered him unable to resist a bug, let alone a powerful evil force. Again, we must come to the conclusion that we are dealing with a symbolic parable meant to take us past the surface and teach a deeper truth.

In fact, Jesus later clarified the symbolic nature of this temptation story when he said, “What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts.” (Mark 7:20-23) So what can we learn from the story? Where does temptation really come from?

Jesus’ apocalyptic followers were unable to let go of their belief that the universe was locked in a cosmic struggle, so that is the slant they put on the parable. Their view took precedence and formed the foundation for the majority view of temptation down to our day. But a few of Jesus’ followers understood the universe in a very different way. They knew that the Oneness at the foundation of the universe is not a mixture of good and evil.

They also understood that our dualistic material universe is built on a very different foundation, one of polar opposites like good and evil. Our true identity remains in quantum Oneness, but as long as we continue to project duality, the positive will always be accompanied by the negative. The temptations that we feel and the evil that we see acted out in the world all originate in this dualistic mind set.

Let’s return to the parable to see what lay beneath the surface. (Keep in mind that the parable was written by early Christians who: 1. Held the apocalyptic view 2. Wrote their accounts years after Jesus’ death. 3. Did not know Jesus. So, it’s impossible to know how the parable was originally told.)

At the conclusion of Jesus’ 40 day fast, Satan showed up and tempted Jesus to turn a rock into bread. This first temptation was not really about food, but spiritual hunger. The inner temptation originating in Jesus’ own heart was to feed his spiritual hunger with something other than truth. He was tempted to return to the temple and fit in with the crowd instead of speaking the truth and making himself a target for those who feared truth.

The real question Jesus was asking himself was whether he would choose to satisfy his inner hunger with the things the world had to offer, or would he continue to choose nourishment that comes from a direct connection with the Divine?

Jesus’ second temptation is symbolized by Satan’s offer of rulership over all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus’ apocalyptic followers saw this as further proof that an evil force controlled the world, but if that were true, we would be forced to believe that God created an evil entity that had the strength to overpower God, or that good and evil were in partnership.

But let’s look at this from another direction. Since we are all pure consciousness that projects the material universe, each of us is already the master of all material existence. We have the ability to keep projecting it, or stop any time we wish. This is at the crux of Jesus’ inner struggle: would he continue to project the visible world, or would he stop?

In the last temptation, Satan again symbolizes Jesus’ own inner struggle, this time with doubt. Jesus is told to throw himself off the temple so God will save him from physical harm. Jesus had experienced the Divine, but in a moment of weakness before he commits to speaking publicly about what he knows, he wants a physical sign that will show him he’s doing the right thing.

Jesus’ three symbolic temptations were a conversation between the portion of his mind that had projected the material world of separation, and the One Mind we all share with the Divine. In the end, the True Mind prevailed, but we can all take heart that Jesus faced these struggles just as we do.

We each face the choices illustrated in Jesus’ parable. Will we listen to what the world tells us and try to fill our spiritual needs with junk food, or will we look within and discover what the Divine has to say? Will we continue to look for security in the material things the world has to offer, or will we realize we’ve traded away something far greater?

Will we be racked with doubts and look for signs, or will we acknowledge that our inner voice is telling us the truth? If we believe Jesus was superhuman, we may give up before we even start to ask these questions. When we know that Jesus was just like us, we realize that we too can stand up to our own inner temptations.

~ by Lee & Steven Hager in Why Does Suffering Exist www.thebeginningoffearlessness.com/

Imagine a sheet of paper with two slits cut in it and a thin slip of paper woven through the slits.

No matter which side of the paper you look at, you can see the strip of woven paper, but you can’t see the entire strip at one time.

This image fits nicely with Eckhart Tolle’s explanation of life, “Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.”

There’s always more to life … the life that we are … than meets the eye, and like the strip of paper, though it can’t be seen by us in its entirety, it nevertheless exists eternally.

The sensation of the wind on our face is one single sensation. However, thinking conceptualizes it as two. Thinking fragments this single sensation into two apparent objects, the wind and the face. In fact, it is one. We could call this new sensation ‘windface.’

The division of ‘windface’ into wind and face is a conceptual division that seemingly divides experience into a face, ‘me’, and the wind, ‘not me’. As a result the ‘person’ and the ‘world’ seem to become two distinct and independent entities or objects.

In this way the seamless intimacy of experience is fragmented into two apparent parts — an inside self and an outside object, other or world — which are imagined to be joined together by an act of knowing, feeling or perceiving. Hence we say, ‘I know such and such,’ ‘I feel the wind,’ ‘I love you’ and ‘I see the tree.’

However, in the seeing of a tree for instance, there’s no seer and there’s no seen. There is no inside ‘I’ that sees and there is no outside ‘tree’ that is seen. The ‘I’ and the ‘tree’ are concepts superimposed by thinking onto the reality of the experience, which in this case could simply be called ‘seeing’.

It’s thinking alone that divides the seamless intimacy of experiencing into a subject and an object, into an ‘I’ that sees and a ‘tree’ that is seen. However, awareness, or ‘I’ and the reality of the tree are not two separate experiences. They are one. ‘I’ and ‘tree’ are one experience in the same way that the wind and the face are one experience. There’s never a subject or an object of experience. There’s always only seamless intimate experiencing.

Or we could say that the apparent ‘I’ and the apparent tree share the same reality, are the same reality. It’s only a concept, an idea, which apparently divides them. However, this division between the seer and the seen, between the experiencer and the experienced, never actually happens. Separation is an illusion. It’s never actually experienced.

In other words, I don’t see a tree. In the experience of seeing, I am the tree. I am its reality. The only substance present in our experience of the tree is seeing and seeing or, more generally, experiencing, is awareness, our self. The awareness that’s seeing and the reality of that which is seen are not two separate things. They are one and the same.

We should say, ‘I am tree-ing.’ That is, ‘”I”, awareness, is treeing.’ The amness of ‘I’ and the isness of ‘tree’ share their being. The amness of self is the isness of things. The apparent mind, body and world is ‘I’ mind/body/world-ing.

All the great religions are founded upon this realization. For instance in Christianity the saying, ‘I and my father are one,’ means precisely this. It means that ‘I’, the awareness that is seeing these words or experiencing whatever is being experienced in this moment, is one with whatever is being experienced, that is, it is one with the reality of the universe.

The Sufis say, ‘There is only God.’ The Hindus say, ‘The Atman (the apparently individual self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality of the universe) are one.’ The Buddhists say, ‘Nirvana and samsara are one.’ This isn’t an extraordinary experience, known only by a few enlightened sages. It’s the direct, intimate, immediate experience of each of us, although it may not have been noticed.

In fact, the knowing of this unity between ‘I’ and the ‘world’, is a very familiar experience. It is known as beauty. When we are struck by the beauty of an object or landscape, all that keeps us at a distance or separate from that object dissolves and in that timeless moment, timeless because the mind is not present there, we realize our identity with the apparent object.

The experience of beauty is the dissolution of the apparent ‘objectness’ of the object and the ‘subjectness’ of our self, leaving only the seamless intimacy of experiencing.

Of course, when the mind returns it recreates the separate inside self and the separate outside object, other or world and we think and feel, as a result, that ‘I’ see the ‘landscape’. Thinking now attributes beauty to the landscape and in that moment beauty is downgraded from a revelation of the eternal nature that pervades all seeming things into a relative quality of the mind that belongs to some objects and not others.

In that moment, time and distance or ‘otherness’, which is another name for space, are created and the true experience of beauty is again veiled. When the same dissolution between ‘I’ and an apparent other is known, the very same experience is known as love.

Happiness, peace, humour and intelligence are all names that are given to the experience of this direct recognition of the seamless intimacy of experience. In fact, all the names of the mind, body and world refer ultimately to this one reality. It’s for this reason that love, happiness and peace are said to be unconditional, absolute. They depend on nothing. They are interwoven into the fabric of all experience.

Once the ‘I’ and the object, other or world have been conceptually separated from the seamless intimacy of experience, love, happiness, peace, beauty, etc., which are inherent in all experience, seem to become veiled and, as a result, the seemingly inside self embarks on a search for them in the apparently outside world.

The resolution of the search, which is known as peace, happiness or love, always involves the recognition that experience is not divided into two parts — ‘I’ and ‘other’, ‘me’ and the ‘world’ — whether or not it is actually formulated in these terms. Likewise, suffering always involves the forgetting or ignoring of this simple, primordial fact of experience.

Happiness is simply the unveiling of this ignorance. It is not a new experience. It does not come and go. It cannot be given or withdrawn. It can only appear to be forgotten and remembered or recognized. It’s like the keys under the papers. They seemed to be lost but are, in fact, always there. In the experience of peace and happiness the inside self and the outside world dissolve. In the experience of love, the one who loves and the one that is loved dissolve.

In fact, our only experience of the world and all others is made only of knowing, so we could say that in the experience of peace and happiness, the apparent otherness or outsideness of the world is dissolved in our experiential understanding that there is always only knowingness or awareness. That is peace, happiness, love and beauty.

However, it is only the mind that thinks that peace, happiness and love seem to be lost and seem to be found. Presence never loses itself.

~ From: Presence Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience, by Rupert Spira. For more info about Rupert’s books, Click Here

Today I woke up with only one aim –
to walk my way to myself.
There were sun and the grass and flowers;
There were river and bridge and animals;
There were also wind and clouds and rain.
There were me and you and others on the way.
Other things and beings, visible and invisible.

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

It really isn’t an either/or choice, in fact, each can be enhanced by the other. However, one of these ‘tarians’ has a far greater impact than the other. You already know that a humanitarian is devoted to human welfare, certainly a noble and worthwhile pursuit. But what is a spiritarian? You may not have heard the word before; it’s not in the dictionary. We wanted a word that could be used to describe someone outside of religion, yet devoted to spiritual welfare.

In our world, the body and soul are divided in some areas of life, and are lobbed together in others. Science and religion have cleanly divided the two and each has claimed a piece, but many feel that when they are caring for human welfare they’re treating both body and soul. Some believe we have a soul/spirit within the body, others that we are a soul/spirit having a human experience.

A spiritarian takes a different view. The ancient pagan, Porphyry, realized through gnosis, “My true Self is remote from the body, without color and without shape, not to be touched by human hands.” The Bhagavad Gita agrees, saying, “The Self is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of eternity.”

To the spiritarian, the Self, the immortal child of Source, has never been, and will never be, a body. Quantum physics backs up this truth with research that demonstrates that material form is a virtual reality projected by consciousness that exists without form.

Buddha recognized this fact when he said, “Remembering that this body is like froth, of the nature of a mirage, break the flower-tipped arrows of Mara/illusion.” The result? “Freed from illusion … they have renounced the world of appearance to find reality. Thus have they reached the highest.”

We’ve all gotten sucked into a dream that felt absolutely real, yet no matter how convinced we were while the dream went on, we woke up and realized nothing real had happened. A spiritarian realizes that we’re all in a much deeper sleep having a dream that’s turned into a nightmare.

And this is where we see the difference between the humanitarian and the spiritarian. One wants to make the dream more comfortable, the other wants to assist you in waking up and escaping it. As Rumi’s teacher Shams-iTabrizi explained, “All the veils are one veil. Other than that one, there is no veil. That veil is this existence.”

Jesus was both humanitarian and spiritarian. His heart was pained by the misery he saw, so he fed the hungry, gave to the poor and healed the sick. But Jesus was no longer asleep. He woke up, and he became an example of what the waking state looks like. He was no longer fooled by material form and did his best to encourage his followers to see past illusion and “seek first the kingdom.” He made it clear that he was “no part of the world” nor was the kingdom that held his allegiance.

Unfortunately, the majority of Jesus’ followers were more interested in material solutions to their problems and followed him for the immediate aid that he gave. These followers distorted his message as they focused on the ‘doings’ of the body. They didn’t stop to realize if they were fed, they would get hungry again, if they were cured, they could easily succumb to another illness, and even if the body was raised from the dead, it would eventually die again.

Jesus recognized the problem he had inadvertently created when said that others would do “greater works than these.” It’s extremely difficult to think of anything greater than raising the dead, but a spiritarian knows that the greatest work lies in awakening minds caught in the dream of continuous birth and death.

Until we wake up and realize we are not the body or its personality, we will be unable to know our true immortal Self. As the Kena Upanishad explains, “The Self is realized … when you have broken through the wrong identification that you are the body, subject to birth and death.”

Humanitarian efforts are worthy because they awaken love and the realization of our innate oneness. But they also fail because they keep us in the prison of virtual reality. In effect, they are like a person who works to improve prison conditions but fails to tell the prisoners that the doors are unlocked and they can leave anytime they wish.

No matter how much conditions are improved, it is still a prison and can’t compare with freedom. And no matter how much humanitarian work is done in this world, it can never begin to rival or replace Reality. But Hafiz recognized the role of the spiritarian when he said, “the sage … keeps dropping keys … for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.” In actuality, we each have the key in our hand and the way out has always been available. Rumi explains:

“The second you stepped into this world of existence a ladder was placed before you to help you escape. When you pass beyond this human form … plunge into the vast ocean of consciousness. Let the drop of water that is you become a hundred mighty seas. But do not think that the drop alone becomes the ocean. The ocean, too, becomes the drop.”

If we’re humanitarians but not spiritarians, we’re prisoners who are sharing blankets with other prisoners, trying to create the illusion of freedom. If we’re spiritarians, we can put love into action by helping others on a material level, while always remembering that the best help we can give is to live in a way that clearly demonstrates the prison door is wide, wide open.

~ by Lee & Steven Hager TheBeginningofFearlessness.com Dec. 4, 2011