The Seer

The following verses were written by the Spanish mystic, Juan Ypes, (later known as St. John of the Cross), after having spent many months imprisoned in a small cell in Toledo, in 1578. They are with his drawing The Ascent of Mount Carmel, which contained instructions for climbing to the summit of spirituality — the clear recognition of our oneness with God.

To reach satisfaction in all, desire its possession in nothing.

To come to the knowledge of all, desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing.

To come to the pleasure which you have not, you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge which you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not, you must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not.

When you turn toward something, you cease to cast yourself upon the all.

For to go from the all to the all, you must leave yourself in all.

And when you come to the possession of the all, you must possess it without wanting anything.

In this nakedness, the spirit finds its quietude and rest.

For in coveting nothing, nothing raises it up and nothing weighs it down, because it is the center of its humility.

In Australia, when you ask someone how they are doing at a supermarket or a restaurant, the response usually goes something like “Fine, how about yourself?” Happiness is often a role people play in public to mask the pain, depression or hopelessness that they are really feeling. When the ego says “everything is just fine”, it’s a way of keeping its true feelings secret. Happiness can be a way of denying or splitting off from how you really feel.

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

The 8th Century’s Shankara, from India, was one of the original masters of nondual wisdom, the understanding of reality as fundamentally one, indivisible Whole. He said: “The realization of truth is brought about by perception, and not in the least by ten millions of acts.”

What he meant by this is all the spiritual techniques and practices, and all the good works in the world, will not set you free. Working with the body or engaging in breathing techniques won’t do it. Meditation won’t do it. Compassionate service to mankind won’t do it.

These practices are beneficial — and compassion, certainly, is needed throughout the world — but only the shift in perception I’ve been talking about will actually set you free: the shift from the limited, ego-bound perspective of “me, myself, and my story” into the expanded vision of clear, thought-free, present-time awareness.

The more aware of this you become, the more you intuitively realize you are not your body, mind, or senses because these can be observed. Rather, you are what is observing. What you actually are is pristine awareness or consciousness expressing through this unique instrument, this individual body/mind/self called “you.”

You are the timeless, unchanging awareness noticing and responding to the endlessly changing drama that is life. You are the consciousness giving birth to the entire world between your ears, the world that you have always thought of as “you.”

The deeper the realization of yourself as the consciousness behind everything — as the ocean, expressing itself as the wave called “you” — the closer you draw to the perceptual shift that is true inner freedom.

Eventually, if you keep seeking the core truth about who you are, the realization becomes complete and you no longer have to “work” at being aware. You will see that the world between your ears really is a kind of dream-world, a self-generated fiction, a story of your own making, and just through seeing this, it begins to fall away.

You don’t even have to actively drop it. Once you see the story you have been so attached to is not real, you will lose interest in it, in the same way a child lets go of the Santa Claus myth (albeit with much reluctance!) upon being told Santa is not real.

Your mind no longer controls you. Instead, you as consciousness are now fully in control of it. You still have thoughts, but you now know you are not your thoughts. You still have a story, but you now know you are not your story. You still have an ego, but now you know you are not your ego.

From this place of inner freedom you can then begin to use thought in a conscious, highly-intentional way. You can use the creative power of thoughts to manifest the results you seek in your life. This is what it means to see, and to live, from the Reality behind reality.

~ From: End Your Story. Begin Your Life, by Jim Dreaver

~ Jim, originally from New Zealand and now living in Los Angeles, California, is coming to New Zealand and Australia in November. He will be leading workshop in Perth F. Nov 18 (free) Sat Nov. 19 & Sun. Nov. 20 (to book, contact Pete on 08 9336 4737 or via peter@peterspearls.com.au More details at: www.jimdreaver.com

~ To see Jim in a recent 14 min video, go to ‘Being Present’.

National, economic, religious and cultural freedoms are the reflections of the duality of existence. They exist only in varying degrees, subject to constant discordant adjustment. Even when won through persistent effort, they cannot be permanently maintained because the external conditions upon which they have been constructed are themselves subject to deterioration.

Only spiritual freedom is absolute and unlimited; when it is won through persistent effort, it is won forever. For, although spiritual freedom can and does express itself in the duality of existence, it is grounded in and sustained by the realization of the inviolable unity of all life….

One important condition of spiritual freedom is freedom from all wanting. It is wanting itself which chains life by attaching it to the conditions in environment which would fulfil that want. If there is no wanting, there is no dependence, and therefore no limitation.

The individual never achieves true freedom until he is no longer pushed or pulled by any inner compulsion. When he has worked through all the desires and worn them so threadbare that he can be, or not be — have, or have not — then he is free.

When the individualized soul breaks through the encasing steel armour of wanting, it emancipates itself from its illusory bondage to bodies, mind and ego. This is the spiritual freedom which brings with it the final realization of the unity of all life and puts an end to all doubts and worries….

It is only in spiritual freedom that one can have enduring happiness and unhampered self-knowledge. It is only in spiritual freedom that one finds the supreme certainty of truth-realization. It is only in spiritual freedom that there is a final end to sorrow and limitation. It is only in spiritual freedom that one can live for all, and yet remain detached in the midst of all activity.

Any other lesser type of freedom is like a house built on sand, and any lesser attainment is fraught with fear of decay. There is no gift greater than that of spiritual freedom, and no task more important than helping others to find spiritual freedom.

~ Meher Baba, in, The Narrow Lane, ed. William Le Page, pp. 133-134

Anthony Paul Moo-Young, known as Mooji, was born on 29 January 1954 in Port Antonio, Jamaica. In 1969, he moved to the UK and he is presently living in Brixton, London. Anthony worked in London’s ‘West end’ as a street portrait artist for many years, then as a painter and a stained glass artist, and later as a teacher at Brixton College. For a long time, he was well known as Tony Moo, but is now affectionately known as Mooji* by the many seekers and friends who visit him.

Mooji is a direct disciple of Sri Harilal Poonja, the renowned advaita master, or Papaji, as his followers call him. In 1987, a chance meeting with a Christian mystic was to be a life-changing encounter for Mooji. It brought him, through prayer, into the direct experience of the Divine within.

Within a short period, he experienced a radical shift in consciousness so profound that outwardly, he seemed, to many who knew him, to be an entirely different person. As his spiritual consciousness awakened, a deep inner transformation began which unfolded in the form of many miraculous experiences and mystical insights.

He felt a strong wind of change blowing through his life which brought with it a deep urge to surrender completely to divine will. Shortly after, he stopped teaching, left his home and began a life of quiet simplicity and surrender to the will of God as it manifested spontaneously within him. A great peace entered his being, and has remained ever since.

Since 1999, Mooji has been sharing satsang in the form of spontaneous encounters, retreats, satsang intensives and one-to-one meetings with the many seekers who visit him, from all parts of the world, in search of the direct experience of truth. Few amongst the modern teachers of the advaita tradition expound the ‘knowledge of Self’, and the method of self-enquiry, with such dazzling clarity, love and authority.

Mooji writes:

“We all have the natural feeling of being, the sense that I exist; it’s a fundamental presence that confirms that we are alive. It’s the very seed of existence, the root cause of all creation. Quite simply, it is the fact that I AM. Almost all the time, this ‘I am’ is contacting the mind, is going to the mind. Suffering happens because we grow up identifying with our mind rather than with our essential ‘I am’ nature … but don’t give up.”

~ You can see and hear Mooji on YouTube talking about this and suggesting a simple practice to help you be more centered in Who you really are.

We may ask, “How are we to attain the unitive state of awareness?” (‘I and the Father are one.’) Until we are ‘lifted’ into the experience of unity by the grace of God, duality for us must continue to exist.

When that experience is about to happen to a person, that person’s mind becomes irresistibly withdrawn from worldly concerns, and becomes centered instead upon one all-consuming love, a singular sort of love, for the very source of love within.

And in the process of consummating this love, solitude is procured, giving the mind the opportunity to become detached from the pull of distracting thoughts and sense-impressions; and the mind is then focused with great intensity upon its aim.

Consciousness, like an unflickering flame in a windless room, becomes pure and clear. And then suddenly it sees or knows who it has always been.

It is God’s grace which manifests in us as that divine love that draws us so compellingly toward the experience of unity. This love is not the ordinary kind of love between a subject and an object, however; for in this case the subject and the object, and the love itself are one.

Nor is this love the result of a conclusion based on a rational premise; it is an inner experience. It is something quite real — breathtakingly and intoxicatingly real. It stirs from within, and centers on itself within.

It is not a rationally thought-out construction based on philosophical principles, but a sweetness that is itself the object of devotion. It is this Love that bhaktis (devotees) love. It has no location but the human heart, yet its source is the universal Being.

It is His gracious gift, and only those who have experienced it know What it is. It is of this love that Ramakrishna sang:

“How are you trying, O my mind, to know the nature of God? You are groping like a madman locked in a dark room. He is grasped through ecstatic love; How can you fathom Him without it? When that love awakes, the Lord, like a magnet, draws to Him the soul.

Such longing for God or Truth always precedes the experience of enlightenment, because it is the natural expression, the unfailing indicator, of a shift in consciousness toward the transcendent Unity.

To read the complete article: >>>Click Here

~ by S. Abhayananda.

Many traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and others, have nondual teachings and branches. These nondual teachings all point to the same core truth.

Or, as it’s been said, “There are many paths up the mounatin, but the view from the mountaintop is ever the same.”

The masters of our Nondual Wisdom Tradition teach that the source, course and goal of the spiritual ‘path’, including any traveler on that ‘path’, are but different aspects of one indivisible ultimate reality.

So the core message could be stated as …

I am That, You are That, All this is That, There is nothing else but That, That is all there is.

The task of the seeker is to turn “That” into “This” by consciously realizing one’s true nature.

Another way of stating the core message is simply …

All there is is Consciousness. Consciousness is all there is.

In the statement above, you can replace Consciousness with God, Providence, Universal Mind, The Christ, The Buddha, Krishna, whatever (but not ‘creation’ or ‘the phenomenal world’).

The idea is that Reality is not two… there is actually no separation between you and God, or you and anything else (appearances notwithstanding). You — and every ‘thing’ around or within you — is simply God ‘manifesting’.

Consciousness (or God etc.) can exist without the manifest universe, but the universe could never exist apart from Consciousness.

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

Our planet, whether in the first world or the third world, is going through austerity measures that causes most of us to experience a sense of lack. In fact, our minds can become habituated to ignoring that which is good is our lives and only seeing the lack.

Who is this person that chronically complains about not being treated well enough?

This is the “needy little me” that is the small mind being identified with. This part of ourselves is always finding others that are withholding from them what they need when what is really happening, is a dis-identification with who they really are.

If you see yourself as a weak, needy person abused by the world and others then that self-image will sabotage your relationships, your career even your relationship with money. In fact, identification with lack tends to bias one’s point of view to seeing lack everywhere.

The first step in changing your identification with the victim position of “I’m being taken for granted and can’t get the respect, attention, and recognition I deserve” is to acknowledge the good that can already be recognized and cherished in your life.

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. The reason you are withholding is because down below the surface of your awareness you believe you are insignificant, powerless, and have nothing to contribute.

An excellent practice to change this negative identification would be the next time you feel a lack of attention, appreciation, or nurturing from someone — just give those positive qualities to that person anyway. You will notice that as you start giving you will find that you also will start to receive.

The law that outflow determines inflow is a repeatable scientific experiment that you can try each day in your personal life.

~ by Eckhart Tolle www.tolleteachings.com

The crucially important Christian mystic philosopher, translator, theologian and poet, John Scottus Eriugena (Johannes Scottus Eriugena or Scotus Erigena), lived from about 800 to perhaps 877 CE and has been praised as the “Greatest mind of the early western Medieval period—or last great mind of Antiquity.”

John “of Ireland” (Eriu means “of Ireland,” where the Scotti were an ancient and extensive tribe) is a major figure in the development of mystical spirituality in western European Christianity. He served as the primary translator-conduit for ideas from the great Greek Christian minds of the Middle-East and Near-East to come into Europe.

Richard Woods, expert on the history of Christian spirituality, observes: “It is largely through his efforts that the mystical Neoplatonism of the Eastern Church entered the Latin West.” Or as another writer puts it: “Eriugena was responsible for the meeting of Athens and Rome in Gaul.” (Deirdre Carabine)

Eriugena’s profound theology, later condemned as “pantheism,” actually emphasizes what today many of us would call a pure panentheist view of God’s nature and of the nature of the soul and world. Panen-theism, “all in God,” goes beyond mere pantheism (“all is God”) and mere theism (God is up there, beyond all things down here), to affirm that God is both immanently within and transcendentally beyond all beings.

This mystical panentheism allows God to be truly God, utterly free of all limiting human notions of space-time, distinct entities, finite relationships and other constraints which have more to do with ignorant human conceptions than the actual Divine nature.

Expanding richly on the idea of the apokatastasis or “universal salvation” of all souls in God’s all-saving Divine Love (an idea found among great theologians of early Christianity like Origen and Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa), Eriugena also wrote of the conscious return (reditus) and merging of all beings into God.

No souls (including the souls of animals) would be left out of this grand return, no one would be damned to suffer forever in hell or wither away into oblivion, as too many Christian theologians and ministers have taught then and now. Eriugena’s enlightened and surprisingly progressive view reveals an astonishingly positive scenario of a triumphantly compassionate, ever-loving God.

This view is also radically nondual. As scholar Deirdre Carabine notes in her book-length treatment of Eriugena, a frequently repeated formula in his monumental work, the Periphyseon, is that “God is the beginning, middle, and end of the created universe. God is that from which all things originate, that in which all things participate, and that to which all things eventually return. (Periphyseon III.621a-622a).

Eriugena illustrates this conception of God as the source of all division and the end of all resolution using the example of the monad (the number one) as the source of all numbers…. The apparent duality of all natura [nature, in the broadest sense of God, souls, world] is the result of deficient human understanding…. In God, there can be no duality; beginning and end have no temporal reality but are simultaneous and can, therefore, be reduced to a unity. (P. II.527b)…

Eriugena makes one further bold step…: ’suppose you join the creature to the creator so as to understand that there is nothing in the former save Him who alone truly is… will you deny that Creator and creature are one?’ (P. II.528b) [The answer, of course, is 'No.']… According to Eriugena’s mind, the rationale for this assertion is that nothing apart from God truly is, for all things participate in God, indeed do not have being apart from God. The whole of reality, then, is God since God is source, sustainer, and end….

To read the complete article: >>>Click Here

~ by Dr Timothy Conway.

I was once, for a time, part of an organisation for teaching humanity’s timeless nondual wisdom. What others did or did not do was not my concern. Whether others understood or not was not my concern. What the teacher or teachers did to hold the organisation together was not my problem.

When I finally understood the teaching and knew my essential Self, I was deeply grateful to the teachers, to the organisation and to the people within it, to my family and ultimately to God ‘himself’. When I walked out of the organisation, I walked away knowing the wisdom within and with a heart full of joy and thankfulness. Today what I received has manifested in my own teaching work which is known as the Foundation for Self-Knowledge.

Whether students stay with me or move away, they too should keep the wisdom they have gained with them and also, if possible, nurture gratitude in their heart. Then they will be a decent person and a blessing to themselves and therefore cannot help being a blessing to others. Wisdom should be present in our every role as the situation demands, never ever forgetting one’s own essential Self.

However, when spiritual seekers have a little knowledge without understanding, or a lot of knowledge without awakening to What they really are, and think that they have arrived at the truth, they often become a wolf hiding under a sheep’s fleece. There may be millions of such people in the world, but they don’t bother us until we meet one in real life. Let me tell you about one such person that I had dealings with.

He was a smiling seeker, not one with a genuine, compassionate smile or one that revealed wisdom, but a disposition that showed that he was at least not grumpy. At the time, I was looking for young men and women to come and study the scriptures with me so that they could later on devote their lives to the propagation of the timeless wisdom of Self-knowledge.

I wanted to help them make the great transition from apparent confinement to limitless freedom, from mere pleasurable sensations to uncaused joy — which is real happiness; from relative security to the unborn, undying life where limititations like time and space gently surrender to an Infinite embrace.

This vision makes me always an inspired and enthusiastic person who cannot accept any type of defeat or suffering in life. I notice that where there’s no such vision, people usually surrender helplessly to the miseries caused by ignorance.

Recognising the limitations of finite thinking and the relative nature of worldliness, I was willing to drop these limited, and therefore, limiting notions. When the teaching opened up the potential of limitlessness, “I” happily surrendered to be one with the Absolute. That was the most effortless, sweetest and most blissful transition ever to take place! Nothing more remains to be done and the song of the Infinite lingers forever and ever.

That inspires me to fill every life with the same song, which is already the universal song that is shared by everybody — that of course includes you and me. Any human being can sing this song and that is what I have always felt.

~ to read the complete article: >>>Click Here

~ by Swami Suddhananda