The Seer

I’ve discovered that it’s actually impossible to find happiness. As long as you’re seeking to find happiness ’somewhere’, you’re overlooking where happiness is.

As long as you’re seeking to find God someplace else, you’re overlooking the essential truth of God, which is omnipresence.

When you seek to find happiness someplace else, you’re overlooking your true nature, which is happiness. You’re overlooking yourself.

I’d like to offer you the invitation and the challenge to stop overlooking yourself, to simply, radically, and absolutely be still — to put aside, at least for a moment, all of your ideas of where God is, or where truth is, or where you are.

Stop looking anywhere. Stop seeking. Simply be. I am not talking about being in a stupor, or going into a trance, but going deeper into the silence of your heart where the revelation of omnipresence can be revealed as your true nature.

I’m asking you to be still in pure presence. Not to create that, not even to invite it, but simply to recognize what is always here, who you always are, where God always is.

At this point in our human history, what was once reserved for the most rare beings is available to ordinary people.

Because we have considered ourselves ordinary, we have kept a certain door closed within our brains and within our hearts to the truth at the core of it all.

But at this time there is a crack in our conditioning. If you are reading this you are already aware of it to some degree or you wouldn’t be subscribed to this eZine.

This is a time of the ordinary awakening. This means you, not only those born under the brightest stars but the ordinary person as well.

~ Gangaji — From: The Diamond in Your Pocket www.gangaji.org/

After centuries of philosophical inquiry and intense scientific exploration, for the first time in history we now know with certainty exactly what the material world is made of. Physicists have announced it, astronomers have proclaimed it, and technicians have proven it without a doubt in their laboratories; and yet hardly anyone in the world seems to be aware of the fact that everything is made of light.

Even those physicists who describe how the primordial photons of light transformed themselves into material particles do not seem to fully grasp the significance of the fact that everything in the universe is made of light.

Everyone has heard of the ‘Big Bang’, how all material particles were formed from that initial ‘fireball’ of high-energy photons; and yet it still has not sunk in to the contemporary psyche that everything is made of light.

Scientists say that the light from which the world of matter is made had to have come from the explosion of an unstable super-dense chunk of matter which they call a “singularity”, while people of religious or spiritual beliefs have understood since the most ancient of times that that light was caused by an act of God.

And yet still hardly any of the people in the world have fully grasped and understood the fact that everything is made of light.

Though so much of what passes as ’science’ today is merely the passing fashion of the moment or a speculative theory that can never be substantiated, the current understanding among scientists that all matter is an evolute of an original light is one which seems to allow of no possible future refutation.

That energy and matter are interconvertible, and that the light-energy of the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of fourteen billion years ago transformed into the quarks and leptons that make up the entire world of matter is a discovery that is so incontrovertible, so uncontestable, as to effectively put an end to all future speculation as to what our world is made of.

And, despite the fact that scientific thinkers believe that that pristine burst of light was a ‘natural’ phenomenon (whatever that means), and spiritually oriented people are certain that the light came directly from God, the fact remains that an unimaginably immense blast of high-energy light flashed at the dawn of time in a nascent universe, and each photon of that light became a matter-antimatter pair contributing to make the phenomenal universe of form and substance that we live in today.

Philosophers and sages from the beginning of time have declared that, in addition to the light from which all ‘things’ are made, there is a conscious principle at work in the world that functions as life and awareness, which has been referred to as “spirit” or “soul”.

Materialists deny that such a universal principle exists — even though by doing so, they tend to deny the existence of their own intelligence; while the mystics, seers, and all the worshippers of a transcendent/immanent God affirm the principle of a divine “soul”, and base their lives and actions upon it.

Some say that “soul” is a subtler invisible light that emanates from God and coexists along with the grosser light of which all physical bodies are made, giving life and movement to those bodies, along with awareness and intelligence. And yet, still, nearly everyone in the world seems to be blind to the undeniable fact that everything is made of light.

And even fewer have traced that light, both gross and subtle, to its ultimate source, and come to know the one Spirit who is the Self of all, the One who alone shines in this world as the light from which both body and soul are created.

~ Swami Abhayananda, Body And Soul: An Integral Perspective. available in paperback from amazon.com and Online.

The three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are largely about the historical Jesus who worked miracles, who taught, who promised us a new way of seeing, a new way of life in this world. It is seldom pointed out, however, that Paul is not talking about Jesus; Paul is almost always talking about “Christ.”

Paul hardly ever quotes the historical Jesus and never knew him in the flesh. Really rather shocking when you realize that his letters are one third of the New Testament! The phrase “in Christ” is his most common usage­over 100 times, I’ve been told. We take Paul as a touchstone of orthodoxy, the central, foundational teacher of Christianity -­- and yet he hardly quotes Jesus!

Something else is going on here, which has largely been off of the Christian radar. Paul has largely fallen in love with “the Christ” and it was Jesus who pointed him there. Most Christians still need to make the same movement, and to believe in both Jesus AND Christ. They are two distinct faith affirmations.

Jesus is the microcosm; Christ is the macrocosm. There is a movement from Jesus to the Christ that you and I have to imitate and walk, as well. A lot of us have so fallen in love with the historical Jesus that we worship him as such and stop there. We never really followed the same journey which he made, which is the death and resurrection journey –­ Jesus died and Christ arose.

As Bede Griffiths insightfully put it: “The real resurrection is the passing beyond the world altogether. It is Jesus’ passage from this world to the Father. It was not an event in space and time, but the passage beyond space and time to the eternal, to reality. Jesus passed into reality.”

Unless we make the same movement that Jesus did, from his one single life to his risen and transformed state, we probably don’t really understand what we mean by the Christ ­– and how we are part of the deal! That is why he said “follow me.” The Jesus that you and I participate in, are graced by, and are redeemed by is the RISEN Jesus who has become the Christ, which is an inclusive statement about all of us and all of creation.

Stay with this startling truth in the days ahead and it will rearrange your mind and heart and change the way you see everything, because you are the Christ Mystery too!

~ Richard Rohr. From his book: The Cosmic Christ

Life without a reason, a purpose, a position… the mind is frightened of this because then “my life” is over with, and life lives itself and moves from itself in a totally different dimension. This way of living is just life moving. That’s all.

As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that’s unreality. Life doesn’t need to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. Life doesn’t need to know the “right” way to go because it’s going there anyway.

Then you start to get a hint of why the mind, in a deep sense of liberation, tends to get very quiet. It doesn’t have its job anymore. It has its usefulness, but it doesn’t have its full-time occupation of sustaining an intricately fabricated house of cards.

This stillness of awareness is all there is. It’s all one. This awareness and life are one thing, one movement, one happening, in this moment — unfolding without reason, without goal, without direction. The ultimate state is ever present and always now.

The only thing that makes it difficult to find that state and remain in that state is people wanting to retain their position in space and time. “I want to know where I’m going. I want to know if I’ve arrived. I want to know who to love and hate. I want to know. I don’t really want to be; I want to know. Isn’t enlightenment the ultimate state of knowing?” No. It’s the ultimate state of being. The price is knowing.

This is the beautiful thing about the truth: ever-present, always here, totally free, given freely. It’s already there. That which is ever-presently awake is free, free for the “being.” But the only way that there’s total and final absolute homecoming is when the humanness presents itself with the same unconditionality. Every time a human being touches into that unconditionality, it’s such peace and fulfillment.

In your humanity, there’s the natural expression of joy and love and compassion and caring and total unattachment. Those qualities instantly transmute into humanness when you touch into emptiness. Emptiness becomes love. That’s the human experience of emptiness, that source, that ever-present awakeness.

For the humanness to lay itself down — your mind, your body, your hopes, your dreams, everything — to lay itself down in the same unconditional manner in which awareness is ever present, only then is there the direct experience of unity, that you and the highest truth are really one thing.

It expresses itself through your humanity, through openness, through love. The divine becomes human and the human becomes divine — not in any “high and mighty” sense, but just in the sense of reality. That’s the way it is.

The only price is all of our positions. The only price is that you stop paying a price.

~ Adyashanti. www.adyashanti.org

I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind
And stand now in the spirit’s silence free,
Timeless and deathless beyond creature-kind,
The centre of my own eternity.

I have escaped and the small self is dead;
I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
I have gone out from the universe I made,
And have grown nameless and immeasurable.

My mind is hushed in a wide and endless light,
My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
My body a point in white infinities.

I am the one Being’s sole immobile Bliss:
No one I am, I who am all that is.

~ Sri Aurobindo, 1938

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.

I have discovered my deep deathless being:
Masked by my front of mind, immense, serene
It meets the world with an Immortal’s seeing,
A god-spectator of the human scene.

No pain and sorrow of the heart and flesh
Can tread that pure and voiceless sanctuary.
Danger and fear, Fate’s hounds, slipping their leash
Rend body and nerve, — the timeless Spirit is free.

Awake, God’s ray and witness in my breast,
In the undying substance of my soul
Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest.
Death nearer comes and Destiny takes her toll;

He hears the blows that shatter Nature’s house:
Calm sits He, formidable, luminous.”

~ Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950)

This place is a dream
only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought
was your grief

A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived
and he dreams
he’s living in another town
in the dream he doesn’t remember
the town he’s sleeping in his bed in
he believes the reality
of the dream town
the world is that kind of sleep

Humankind is being led
along an evolving course,
through this migration
of intelligences
and though we seem
to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness,
that directs the dream
and that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are”

~ Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (1207 – 1273), from: The Essential Rumi, Trans. Coleman Barks.

Centuries ago in China, Master Tsung-i would instruct others by saying, “The whole universe is One Bright Pearl.” (cf. ‘Consciousness is all there is’)

“One Bright Pearl” thoroughly expresses it even though not itself revealed in its name, and we can recognize it in its name.

“One Bright Pearl” directly transcends the eons, and because in eternal past it never ceased to be, it reaches up to the eternal present.

Though there is one’s mind now and one’s body now, they are just the One Bright Pearl. This grass or that tree are not grass and tree, nor are the mountains and rivers of the world mountains and rivers; they are One Bright Pearl.

Thus, the Bright Pearl, existing just so and being beginningless, transcends changes in time and place. The whole universe is One Bright Pearl.

We do not speak of two or three pearls, and so the entirety is one True Dharma Eye, the Body of Reality, One Expression. The entirety is Brilliant Light, One Mind.

When [the Bright Pearl] is the entirety, nothing hinders it. Round [like a pearl], it rolls around and around.

When it is just so, it hangs suspended in space, it is hidden in the linings of clothing, it is held under the chin [of a dragon], and it is worn in the hair topknot.’ All these are the One Bright Pearl as the whole universe.

It is its nature to be attached to the lining of clothing, so never say that it is attached to the surface. It is its nature to be guarded under the chin [of a dragon] or kept in a topknot, so do not think that it is found on the surface.

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

~ by Master Dogen Ki-gen, From: Sounds of Valley Streams, Trans. Francis Cook.

Recently, I was meditating on the words ascribed to St John, who, is believed by many in the East to be, a Jnani (a seer) as well as a Christian saint. You may remember he wrote: “God is love … “ and then added, “he that abides in love, abides in God and God in him.” (1 Jn 4:16)

To abide or dwell in love, I saw, doesn’t mean for us, as a separate entity, to have constant love for some object or person, divine or otherwise. John wants us to see here that love — true love — is not something we have or do, but rather what we are in essence — already and always.

Consider what is the greatest ‘love’ of any sentient being. If s/he had the choice of possessing either all the wealth in the world or her/his ‘beingness’ or ‘consciousness’ (call it what you will), that which gives her/him the sense of being alive and present, and without which the body would be nothing but a cadaver, what would s/he choose? Obviously, without consciousness, all the wealth in the world would be of no use to her/him.

It’s this conscious presence one loves more than anything else because without it, there is no phenomenal world, no universe, no anything! This therefore, is Presence-Love-God. And St John obviously had this in mind when he said, “God is love ….”

This conscious presence which makes us aware of this, here, now — the beingness of every sentient being on the earth — and indeed, the very soul of the entire universe, — this cannot be anything other than God.

It’s clear that he meant that he (John) and He (God) were not different as pure subjectivity, but one in conscious awareness. And, therefore, he who is anchored in the conscious presence that is Love — that is God — abides in God and God in him.

The Love John speaks of here is love for the mere (or mysterious) fact of existence itself.

As Adyashanti says, “It isn’t a love that is caused by anything. It isn’t based on whether one has a good day, or a good encounter, or a good feeling etc. In fact, it could be not such a good day, not such a good encounter, or not such a good feeling, and there will be still just as much love for it.”

This is a love that loves to live this life because in life it is actually meeting itself moment to moment.

~ Pete Sumner