The Seer

There are two of us at all times. Even now, in this very moment, there are two of you living your life. Or it could be said, that Life is living you as two dimensions …

There is the You which is pure formless awareness, and, there is the you that you think you are and all of its stories and history and hopes and dreams. Another way of saying this is that you are consciousness itself AND you are an ego personality that exists in and because of your thoughts.

If we look at these two side-by-side, we get an even clearer picture:

Pure Consciousness ~ Ego Personality
Formless awareness ~ Thought forms
Known through presence ~ Known through thoughts
Present-moment being ~ Past and future idealization
Lives here and now ~ Lives elswhere, in the past and future
Body-centered ~ Thought-centered
Identity-less; free from all attachments and identifications ~ Identified with personal story, status, roles, nationality, jobs, things, etc

Transcendent ~ Temporal
Inner sense of aliveness ~ Mental thought processes
Infinite depth ~ Outer surface
The Observer ~ The supposed doer
Peaceful serenity, quiet equanimity ~ Drama, reactivity, suffering
At one with all that is, harmoniously ~ Separate from others; often in conflict

By dis-identifying with the ego, we naturally gain access to the experience of our true nature, the present-moment awareness that we know by being here, now.

~ by Eckhart Tolle. See >>>video clip

Question: What is our relationship with our personality after awakening and does it change?

Eckhart Tolle: Strictly speaking, before awakening, to a large extent, you don’t have a relationship with your personality; you ARE your personality. If you can have a relationship with your personality – which is the ego, with its way of reacting and thinking, and emotions – who is having a relationship with the personality?

What that means is you are witnessing it. There is a witnessing consciousness there, and if there is a witnessing consciousness, then you can have a relationship with your personality. What that really means is, you can be there as a witnessing presence when your ego is doing something silly. And you can laugh at yourself, maybe in the moment, maybe afterwards. If you are totally in the grip of your personality, or your ego, then of course there is no relationship because you have become it.

You’re so one with all your reactive patterns and all your conditioned thinking, that you don’t even know that there’s anything else in you. You ARE it. As you awaken spiritually, the awareness that is nothing to do with your personality increases, and the power of the personality, with its conditioned patterns, decreases.

Gradually, the personality is no longer opaque; it is transparent to the light of awareness, or consciousness. It loses its solidity. This is why you find that in people who are awake, or people who are awakening, there is more of a lightness to them. If there’s only personality, then there’s heaviness, a psychic heaviness in you. Everything is dreadfully serious, and [you are] defensive, always wanting something, or defending yourself against something.

When you’re relating to somebody in whom there is no awareness, then you always get a slightly uncomfortable feeling, because that person is completely ill-at-ease. Ultimately, all personalities are ill-at-ease. They may pretend that they are very confident, but underneath the role of ‘confidence’, there’s always a person who feels ill-at-ease. They need to prove something, or they want something from you.

That’s the personality. As you awaken, that part become a little less opaque and it becomes lighter. There’s more of an awareness that shines through the person. Ego is complete identification with your thinking and your emotions. When you are unconscious, personality and ego are one thing. As you awaken, you become more aware of your patterns, which may to some extent still operate.

I’m choosing to define personality as something that you can be aware of. It was the ego before, but you can be aware of it as patterns that still operate within you. If there is no awareness, and you are it, then it’s totally ego. As you become aware of your ego, the ego becomes the personality, and then you can have a relationship with your personality in the sense that you can be the witness.

If you have a difficult relationship with your personality, that’s a delusion. Then your personality has split itself into two, one part is having a relationship with another, and one part says “You should be better, why can’t you be more conscious?” That means there is no witnessing presence there. One part of the personality is arguing with another.

The witnessing consciousness doesn’t judge. You don’t judge yourself in any way, you just see behavior. There’s no good or bad, it just is. The need to be right, for example, is a very common thing with the ego. If it’s a deep-seated need, then you can’t be wrong in an argument. There’s a compulsion to defend yourself. Then suddenly you can see it in yourself. Ultimately, having a relationship with your personality implies that there is a witnessing presence.

~ by Eckhart Tolle — to see an excellent interview with Eckhart, >>>Click Here

Beneath the assumption ‘that you are the body’ is an even deeper one. The idea ‘that you are the body’ is predicated on the assumption that you exist, that you are a ‘me’ — a separate, individual self. The most intimate sense of your self is often this sense of ‘me’, which is a limited and incomplete sensing of your self. It doesn’t include the far reaches of your greater Being. This sense of a separate ‘me’ is not bad or wrong; it’s just limited and incomplete.

In the midst of a very profound and large experience of truth, the sense of your self can become so large and inclusive that it no longer has much of a sense of being your Being. When you awaken to the oneness of all things, the sense of a ‘me’ can thin out quite dramatically. If you are the couch you are sitting on, the clouds in the sky, and everything else, then it simply doesn’t make sense to call it all ‘me’. If it is so much more than what you usually take yourself to be, then the term ‘me’ is just too small.

In a profound experience of truth, the sense of ‘me’ softens and expands to such a degree that there is only a slight sense of ‘me’ as a separate self remaining, perhaps just as the observer of the vastness of truth. Beyond these profound experiences of the truth, is the truth itself. When you are in touch with the ultimate truth and the most complete sense of Being, there is nothing separate remaining to sense itself — there is no experience and no experiencer, no Heart, and no sense of self. There is only Being.

The experience of bigger truths and even the biggest truth doesn’t obliterate your capacity to experience a small truth and therefore, a separate self. But with many experiences of shifting in and out of a small sense of self, this separate self feels more like a suit of clothes you can take on and off rather than something permanent.

As you move in and out of many dimensions of Being and even beyond experience itself, the boundaries between all of these dimensions become very permeable and inconsequential. It turns out that these boundaries are just thoughts anyway. They don’t actually separate anything.

The question isn’t how to get rid of a small sense of self, but what is the sense of your self like? Is it fixed or is it constantly shifting — opening and closing, expanding and contracting, tightening and loosening, and sometimes even disappearing altogether?

The sense of a separate self can therefore be loosely held even though it continues to contract appropriately when a small truth is triggered. What is your sense of self like right now? What is true right now? Your Heart is the only guide you need for exploring even the biggest truths.

~ From: Living from the Heart (part 2). by Nirmala . (Sent in by Elena — Thanks Elena)

“Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)

Perfection is not a flawless state, a state when one ceases to make “mistakes”, but a state where one has transcended the need to judge seeming flaws and faults. It is unconditional love and unconditional acceptance that allow us to see the perfection beyond the duality of good and bad.

What we call “pain”‘ results from our belief in separation, in the belief of the reality of the egoic self which lives in a state of perpetual fear and desire. What we call “evil” also stems from ignorance of our Oneness but is coupled with willful actions to maintain and enhance a separate self — at the expense of others.

Believing in separation from the One Self, we produce on-going cycles of individual and collective winners and losers, victims and perpetrators. It is by willfully acting on our Oneness that we will bring these negative and destructive cycles to an end.

Unconditional love means to love without condition, to see only perfection — then that is what exists. The Divine One Self sees all as perfect, since it sees with the eyes of unconditional acceptance and love.

Do you love your life as it is? This is not easy, the human egoic mind has developed many stipulations on what it takes to be perfect. These conditioned beliefs keep us from seeing our perfection.

How do you respond to your life with its seeming ups and downs? Is this present moment good enough for you? Are you attentive to life and patient enough with it so that you can see the light behind the shadow, the sacred fire in the darkest experiences?

Can you see your life is just perfect because you chose to create it just as it is right now? If you created a shadow,it was in order to better see your light in contrast to it. Our humanity does not interfere with our divinity:, it simply makes it more evident.

~ From: Living As God by P. Raymond Stewart pp 101

Puppetji speaks like no-one else on the famous question: “WHO AM I ?”

(We are assured that any connection between Puppetji and the late Indian sage, H W L Poonja, affectionately known as Papaji, is purely conincidental ; )

To hear/see this diminutive, though world famous guru, sit on the floor, cross your legs and Click Here

Sometimes the question arises, ‘If all is one, then why don’t I know what you’re thinking?’

The problem appears because of our life-long experience as an ‘individual.’ We totally identify as an individual and see others as individuals too.

Once it is understood that I am Awareness and not just this human form, it is also seen that there really is no-one here or there – no ‘me’. The ‘me’ who believes it has control and power is in reality imaginary.

Einstein talked about the mind of God. This can be expressed as if ‘God’ is dreaming and we are all dreamed characters.

The ‘individual’ is imaginary — a belief only — and a dominant belief, as beliefs tend to be. This whole imaginary world is within a belief system.

What we (all) are is the awareness of a human experience. The individual experiences which are yours and mine appear as you and me in awareness. This experience can’t hear your thoughts and that experience can’t know mine.

Awareness is all there is, everything else is an appearance in or on it. In growing up we have been taught to identify with the perceptions of the human form that we came to think we are, that we’ve identified as. With the development of the ‘me’ belief as a central idea it is then thought that ‘I’ exist as an individual in a big world.

The perception is from a ‘me’ perspective that receives its thoughts just as different TVs around the world are receiving different images. My TV can’t receive a programme that’s airing in Newfoundland and vice versa. ‘My’ thoughts, which aren’t mine anyway, appear to me — to this dream figure. That dream figure receives its own thoughts and sometimes different figures receive the same thought but react to them differently. And we don’t ‘think’ anyway — thoughts appear.

The important thing is to understand, at least theoretically at first, that I am the awareness of everything that happens to this human. We ask the question, of ourselves, WHO AM I? And notice the answers that arise in the mind. At some point we may simply notice that the real ‘I am’ is watching this whole process (as if from above or behind).

There is nothing intellectual, philosophical or difficult about enlightenment although it often appears so and is usually treated so. The truth of who you are is unbelievably simple — it’s the mind that complicates it. Right now, whether you know it or not, you are awareness and it is as if you have stepped forward into (and identified with) the character you thought you were.

Now it’s time to metaphorically step back to what you have always been in essence — infinite, eternal, limitless, spacious Awareness..

~ by Roy Townsend

There is only one thing that truly matters — are you expressing love right now? Love legitimizes all. When you love, you are declaring your true nature.

The fabric of your very existence, the substance of your soul, the stuff of atoms and of the entire cosmos is love. Yes, love helps you on your human journey. Yes, love brings harmony to your relationships. But most importantly, it is when you are loving that you most beautifully express your God essence. When you love, you live as God – you live God into our world.

You don’t need to nor can you ever get love. You only need to express it. And it is not love when you give in order that you receive something you desire in return or to accumulate good karma. The reason you need to express love is that when you love, the finer energy vibration that is released is the expression of your true self. By extending love, you come to know your true self – beyond the limitation of form and more encompassing than anything you can think or imagine you are.

Love moves us. Only steps taken in love move us forward. All else is but a stationary dance. We get many opportunities, perhaps even many lifetimes to learn to love unconditionally – to express the Self that we are. We are here to learn how to love every experience, every thing, every person and every moment fully.

We cannot truly love without experiencing our Oneness. And to help us learn how to truly love, we can start by being intimate with All That Is, meaning acting on our Oneness with whatever is present – living that unity by loving whatever is, and opening our heart to its gifts.

Our Oneness is our reality. But we need to act on this reality in order to experience it. This is how we break through the illusion of separation.

Let our prayer be for Immediate Intimacy. May we be able to feel our Oneness and the reality of our love essence in every moment, with every person, every thing, every experience.

Immediate Intimacy involves embracing every person, situation, experience without the weight of our conditioned past, our personal baggage. It means setting judgments aside and relating to others without fear, without the need to be stronger or better than others or to control the encounter. It means meeting another and whatever the present moment brings without needs or limitations of any kind.

Let us be open, vulnerable, and unconditionally accepting of every part of the One Self. Let us greet everyone and everything with a willingness to love in whatever way feels highest. That is how we express our God Self on earth. It is our reason for human existence.

If we cannot greet another with authentic openness, we limit the love that can be expressed. If we cannot be intimate with the many forms of our One Self, we cannot know our many faces. Let us be open to loving the stranger with the same would have when meeting our long-lost brother, for he is our long-lost brother. Lost because we thought he was a stranger, found because we now remember our connectedness.

~ by P. Raymond Stewart (aka, Rob Paul McRae) — author of Living As God: Healing The Separation

I don’t know if you’ve heard the music of the awakened US singer/songwriter, Kirtana, but if you have, you’ll know how insightful her lyrics can be. For example, take the words of The Train Song from her latest CD, Falling Awake … it just about says it all.

Just because the tracks are laid … or just because your ticket’s paid for …
and some crazed conductor keeps on calling out your name,
you don’t need to board the train. No, you don’t need to board the train.

Trains of thought will come and go,
but you are not your thoughts, you know -
so why get all caught up in where they lead?

You are who these thoughts are passing through – don’t you see.
You are who these thoughts are passing through. Be free. Be free.

Even when you’re feeling frightened, sad or hurt or unenlightened,
you can find a peace that underlies what passes by.
Don’t mistake the weather for the sky (of your being) — Why mistake the weather for the sky?

Feelings rise then fall away — even those you wish would stay,
so why equate your sense of self with mood?
You are who emotion passes through – don’t you see.
You are who emotion passes through. Be free. Be free.

What a blessing to have taken birth in this human form –
with the chance to see that who we are was really never born,
can never die, is always free.

If Destiny decides to strike some version of the script you like
And make a melodrama of your endless cabaret,
you know you can still enjoy the play (yes you can) —
if you’re still and you know how to play.

Just treat it like a mystery and view it from the balcony.
Laugh and cry and stomp your feet, but don’t believe a thing.

You are who these scenes are passing through — don’t you see.
You are who this play is passing through. Be free. Be free.

If you haven’t discovered Kirtana yet, you can see her CDs Here

Meaning is inherent in life — life is meaningful. However, wanting meaning is just one more desire that we humans suffer over. While meaning comes from Essence, our essential Self, the desire for meaning comes from the ego. We only desire what we feel is lacking, and the ego is what experiences lack and therefore desires.

It doesn’t experience the inherent meaning that exists in any moment, so it desires it. It is out of touch with this, so it desires it. When we are identified with the ego, we are always looking for something to satisfy what is never satisfied — the ego — and meaning is just one more thing the ego seeks, when it is right in front of its nose, so to speak.

Meaning is right here, right now in the experience — the gift — of life. Being alive is meaningful, and whatever springs out of this moment is meaningful. Life feels meaningful when we are in touch with Essence and Essence’s experience of life. The ego, however, is looking for something more, as usual, something that will make it feel meaningful. It isn’t necessarily looking for the experience of meaning, which is already here.

What will make me and my life meaningful? asks the ego. The ego is what wants to be meaningful and wants its life to be meaningful. To whom? we have to ask. The ego wants its life to be meaningful to others so that it is cherished and loved and admired, which is why it wants much of what it wants.

Wanting meaning is a form of spiritual ego. It is a higher desire, not as materialistic as wanting a new car, but ultimately this desire is still in service to enhancing the ego’s self-image, and it imagines it will feel better about itself once and for all if it finally finds meaning.

The trouble is that the ego looks for meaning in all the wrong places. It looks for meaning in accomplishments and experiences, but these come and go, and the ego never has enough accomplishments and experiences to be satisfied. It experiences meaning briefly from these, and then it is back to lacking it, to needing more meaning.

The one place the ego doesn’t look for meaning is in the beauty of this moment. It doesn’t expect to find it there, so it looks everywhere else. How can there be meaning in just existing? This makes no sense to the ego. To it, only a fool or a child could be satisfied with that.

It overlooks the one thing that can satisfy — the moment.

But this should be no surprise because when we drop into the moment, the ego disappears. It turns out the ego is just thoughts about ourselves and our life, and when we are no longer engaged with our thoughts but involved in the experience of our being existing in this moment, the ego (the “I”) disappears.

The ego can’t experience true meaning because as soon as we do, the ego dissolves. Only when we drop out of our egoic minds and into Essence can we experience true meaning, and in that experience nothing else is needed, nothing is missing or lacking. What a relief it is to experience true meaning. We didn’t have to strive and struggle for it after all. It was here all along, only hidden from us by the ego that told us it wasn’t here and we had to go searching for it.

And so it is with the spiritual search as well: We think we have to seek enlightenment, when all we really have to do is just allow ourselves to be here right now in this moment without seeking, trying, striving, wanting, needing, doubting, fearing, judging, or doing any of the other things the ego tells us we have to do to be happy and safe. The ego is a liar, and once we stop believing it, we find everything we were looking for.

~ From the blog of Gina Lake.

We all begin our life vulnerable and insecure. As such, fear is our engine of survival and security becomes our main goal. The fear is evolutionarily designed for survival and will shape our mind for years to come. How? By affecting the lens through which we observe and interpret life events.

The bias in the lens is towards magnifying pain, risk and danger. The bad news is that this bias will shape the story of self that we identify with — our Ego.

To protect itself the fearful Ego will develop the following guards against any perceived threats: Avoid, Freeze, Attack and Run away. Together they create acronym that tells the impact they leave on us: They keep us AFAR from our core being, from our authentic nature and from each other.

These guards that were initially survival mechanisms may unfortunately become second nature to us. When this happens our attention goes to the guards at the expense of living fully at the present moment. We pay these guards a heavy price for their job.

Let’s look at their impact: Avoid exploring new experiences, fearing the unknown. Avoid acting on one’s dreams, fearing failure. Indecision (Freeze), in response to fear of missing out. Attack others — control, judge, blame — in response to fear of being vulnerable. Run away in response to attacks. As one can see the guards will ultimately prevent the authentic expression of who we really are.

Should we try to change the fears? Fears of pain, rejection, failure, abandonment, exposure and death are deeply rooted in the unconscious habitual mind. They are very hard to change. What is easier to change is the response to them.

Most people actually do choose to change their guards, but they often do so unconsciously in response to … a greater fear! For example, fear of disease may force you to overcome fear of injection; fear for the safety of her children may drive a battered woman to take action against her violent man; fear of separation may force a man to come to counseling and face the exposure he would otherwise dread and so on.

The reason for this unfortunate state is that most people operate from their conditioned mind — Ego — that feeds on the survival mechanism of fear of pain.

You can tell how much fear rules your life by how often you say ‘no’ to possibilities, avoid interactions or conflicts with others, present a false self and so on. This is how ego separates you from core being and from others. In the fortress it feels secure but isolated, inauthentic and lifeless.

We all use guards from time to time. We differ in how flexibly we do so. Flexibility grows as we learn to increasingly be aware and disidentify with them.

Self awareness allows us the freedom to choose CONSCIOUSLY. We don’t choose fears. They arise spontaneously from deepest parts of the brain. Yet, we can choose how to handle them. The way is to become aware of them and then respond with COURAGE.

Courage has been highly admired through the history in all cultures. Aristotle said 2500 years ago that “courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others”. In the same era, the Buddha said: “One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers a thousand men on the battlefield.”

Rumi, the Persian poet, said: “The lion who breaks the enemy’s ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.” Emerson said: “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” Josef Campbell said “The hallmark of the advanced soul is a healthy relationship to fear”, He also said “The warrior’s approach is to say yes to life: ‘yea’ to it all.” My favorite one is “Feed your courage and your fears will starve to death.”

So cultivating the virtue of courage is the answer to our debilitating fears. Modern research in “positive Psychology” provides us with enough evidence and tools to support the idea that cultivating virtues is a gateway to a happier and meaningful life.

So just as your guards are at the service of your fears your courage is at the service of your potentialities. Courage will set you free from behind the walls to explore and discover the unknown, to express authentic sides rather than suppress them, to let go of beliefs, wishes and relationships that keep you less than what you can become.

Courage is what it takes to love. It will keep you open, vulnerable and connected in relationship in spite of the many wounds and fears. So, courage will ultimately get you to love and to fulfill the greatness inherent within you.

~ by Hagai Avisar