The Spanish language is the most honest in this respect. It uses the same verb, te quiero, for “I love you” and “I want you.” To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change.

The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of ‘not enough,’ of anger and hate, which are closely related. These are facets of an underlying deep seated feeling in human beings that is inseparable from the egoic state.

When the ego singles something out and says “I love” this or that, it’s an unconscious attempt to cover up or remove the deep-seated feelings that always accompany the ego: the discontent, the unhappiness, the sense of insufficiency that is so familiar.

For a little while, the illusion actually works. Then inevitably, at some point, the person you singled out, or made special in your eyes, fails to function as a cover up for your pain, hate, discontent or unhappiness which all have their origin in that sense of insufficiency and incompleteness.

Then, out comes the feeling that was covered up, and it gets projected onto the person that had been singled out and made special — who you thought would ultimately “save you.” Suddenly love turns to hate.

The ego doesn’t realize that the hatred is a projection of the universal pain that you feel inside. The ego believes that this person is causing the pain. It doesn’t realize that the pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being — not being at one with yourself.

The object of love is interchangeable, as interchangeable as the object of egoic wanting. Some people go through many relationships. They fall in love and out of love many times. They love a person for a while until it doesn’t work anymore, because no person can permanently cover up that pain. Only surrender can give you what you were looking for in the object of your love.

The ego says surrender isn’t necessary because I love this person. It’s an unconscious process of course. The moment you accept completely what is, something inside you emerges that had been covered up by egoic wanting.

It’s an innate, indwelling peace, stillness, aliveness. It’s the unconditioned, who you are in your essence. It’s what you had been looking for in the ‘love object’. I’s yourself.

When that happens, a completely different kind of love is present which is not subject to love / hate. It doesn’t single out one thing or person as special.

~ by Eckhart Tolle (March, 2012)

Thoughts aren’t believable because they are true; they are believable because they are meant to be believable. We, as humans, are programmed to believe them. If thoughts weren’t believable, we would live in Reality instead of the illusion of being a separate self.

We are programmed to believe we are a separate self, and the programming is carried out by making our thoughts believable. Our thoughts hold the illusion of separation in place. The reality is that we are One Being, masquerading as individua l selves.

If our thoughts weren’t believable, life would be unmasked as one seamless Whole. Because of our thoughts, we experience ourselves as separate from others, divided within ourselves, and separate from life and from God — our true nature.

To discover that even some of your thoughts aren’t true is a very big step, and from there, the illusion begins to unravel. Ultimately you discover that none of your thoughts about yourself are true — or about anyone or anything else! That’s pretty radical.

The truth is radical, once it’s seen. It’s radical to discover that you don’t need that voice in your head, which seems like your own voice, to guide your life or to be safe, happy, and fulfilled. The truth is quite the opposite — believing that voice (your thoughts) takes you out of Reality, where happiness, peace, fulfillment, and true guidance are found.

What does it mean when we say that thoughts are not believable? It means that our thoughts don’t match reality — what’s here and now. Reality is what we know to be true and real right here and now. Every self-image you have and every story you tell about your life or life in general doesn’t match what is real and true right now.

Is an image or a belief about yourself, someone else, or life true right now? Can you be sure that it is true? When we begin to examine our thoughts this thoroughly, we discover that our thoughts don’t match reality, and that is a recipe for suffering.

We all have images of ourselves that we carry around, both consciously and unconsciously. Are you aware of some of these images? Do they match reality now? All self-images were created in the past, so they are unlikely to match reality right now, since reality is never the same way twice.

However, our self-images create a false reality if we believe them. For instance, I carry around an image of a complainer. If I believe that I am that, then I’ll probably complain. On the other hand, if I notice this image and don’t believe it (i.e., realize that it doesn’t match reality — who I really am), then I probably won’t complain.

By behaving as if a self-image (or a belief, such as “I’m unworthy”) is true (even though it isn’t), we bring it to life — we make it true for the time being. That’s how our thoughts create, or shape, our experience of reality moment to moment. Meanwhile, who we really are is here in the midst of this enacting of our self-images.

What would life be like if we didn’t shape reality this way with our images and beliefs? We eventually see that Reality is waiting for us to discover it, once we drop out of our thoughts about ourselves and life and are just here, stripped bare of these. Then we discover that Reality is sweet — and mysterious — and so are we.

How can any image, idea, or story match reality now, when reality is constantly changing and can’t be defined by one or even several self-images or stories? We, as humans, are concept-makers. Our mind makes up concepts, and these concepts help us function to some extent. But concepts don’t describe or do justice to reality nor to the mysterious reality that we are.

Concepts define and limit reality. So what is reality really like right now? What are you really like right now? What do you actually know? A self-image may be present, but what else is present that is much bigger and truer than any self-image?

This is really good news — that you’re not your self-images, your beliefs, your past, your desires, your future dreams! You’re too mysterious and vast to be so narrowly defined. Let yourself be as vast as you are right now. Let yourself discover who you are beyond all images, beliefs, opinions, likes, dislikes, and desires.

~ by Gina Lake

A while back, a friend was sitting in a waiting room listening to an Alan Watts lecture on his iPod.

Distracted, he glanced up at the TV screen fixed to the wall above him. It was showing the classic Pink Panther episode “The Pink Phink”.

At that moment, something amazing happened; Watts’ words became perfectly juxtaposed with the visual. The storyline of the cartoon was flawlessly in sync with Watt’s wisdom.

So, here it is for your viewing pleasure: Pink Panther and his little friend playing a hilarious game of duality and pointing, with Alan Watts, to nondual awareness.

If you can’t see the video above, Click Here.

The Watts extracts are from ‘You’re It!: On Hiding, Seeking, and Being Found’ ©2009 Sounds True. The Pink Panther episode is ©2006 MGM.

What you are now stands before me immortal and true. I see it in the ground underfoot, and in the clouds in the sky, and in the mist gathering among the canyons, and in the face of the old man walking his grandchild down the sidewalk.

In the robes of monks I see it, and in the rags worn by the women begging for change outside the supermarket. I see it in the sympathetic eyes of the mother greeting her young son as he returns home from the war, and in the father trying to comfort his baby daughter as he stands in line at the grocery store. I see it in the curve of my face in the mirror, and in the multitudes of stars in the sky.

I not only see it but I hear it as well. I hear it in the cries of the newborn baby hungry for its mother’s breast, and in the laughter of the old men sitting in the donut store together, and in the quiet sobs of the man placing flowers at his wife’s grave. I hear it in the ancient chants echoing through the open window of the old church, and in the ladies sitting on benches in the garden laughing with delight, and in the man working at the butcher shop asking his customers “Who’s next?”

What calls the ear to listen or the eye to see more than the surface façade that shrouds the essential spirit? Parting the strata and dross, what is essential picks its way through the manicured narrative of endless lives. In each moment of every day, Truth is not lacking or held in abeyance for some later date; it is given in full measure, and abundantly so.

Don’t be afraid of what appears to be chaos or dissolution — embrace the full measure of your life at any cost. Bare your heart to the Unknown and never look back. What you are stands content, invisible, and everlasting. All means have been provided for our endless folly to split open into eternal delight.

Awakening is all about perspective. From a narrow focus on personal identity, we awaken into an infinitely vast yet intimate view, where we see everything as it really is: eternal and sacred.

~ (Download the free video, A Matter of Perspective, HERE)

~ by Adyashanti, 2011.

~ Also, you can see/hear Renate McNay’s interview with Adya for Conscious TV. (56 mins)

You can see/hear Dr Lukoff gives brief introduction to Transpersonal Psychology >>>HERE. We also speak more about it on our Web site. If you’d like to find out more, contact Pearl.

We also recommend: Undivided: the Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychology which was launched last October by editor-in-chief, John Prendergast, Ph.D. It’s free, peer-reviewed, multimedia and interactive.

The journal focuses on the confluence of nondual awareness and psychology and includes sections on contemplative essays, articles by nondual teachers and about nondual teachings, clinical practice, video and audio talks, book reviews, poetry and doctoral dissertations.

The Spring 2012 issue will be online this May. Enjoy!

Have you ever felt that there must be something more to life, something beyond our mundane experience of the everyday world? From our childhood on we are programmed to conform to the reality we perceive around us, the reality that our family and friends perceive.

We are conditioned to believe that we are only our personality, our thoughts. Yet, this is not so. The conditioned mind and structured personality are just a set of energies that overlay the original Self. Then how do we discover the nature of this original Self?

Jnana yoga is a system of Self-inquiry whereby we gradually let go of our identification with the personality until the true Self is revealed. Just as hatha yoga stretches and opens the body, jnana yoga stretches and opens the mind.

As we dissolve our description of reality, we realize the world is different to what we had imagined before. Life becomes new, fresh. We become more discerning, more peaceful inside. Insights and clarity arise more readily and our lives become balanced and filled with Grace.

There are three main methods used in this Self-inquiry. The first is called “activating the witness consciousness”. Our witness is our unbiased, neutral, eternal Self. It is who we really are. In order to cultivate our witness we consciously and deliberately examine how we feel, think, and behave.

With this, we gradually strip away our layers of social conditioning and identification with the ego. We discover that the mind and awareness are not the same and that there is an intelligent part of us that can observe our mind dispassionately.

The second method is to ask the question “Who am I?’ The approach used here is normally a stripping away of who we are not, which leads us to a place beyond the mind where nothing remains to describe the individual being but the true, essential nature of the Self.

The third technique involves bringing what has been unconscious into consciousness. It’s important to uncover and dissolve the hidden patterns wedged in our unconscious in order to be free of them, as the newness and freshness constantly coming to us from Source is blocked by these patterns.

Here we look at aspects of ourselves such as our unconscious behaviors, habits and addictions. We bring what has been in the dark into the light. It’s as though we have to understand the functioning of this human system fully before we can move beyond

it. We own all of our parts, and then we let them go.

As we progress in our practice of jnana yoga, we take a step back and observe ourselves on the stage of life, playing our role, like watching a movie on a screen. We are the actor, yet we also get to write our own script. Our witness is really our Divine Self watching the ego living life in this way.

The more we strengthen our identification with our witness and the less with our egoic personality, the more we grow spiritually. As this process continues, we experience an emptying out, a letting go of our attachments, desires, fears, and stories.

The more we empty, the greater our Presence and our love; the less we attach, the greater our delight and joy in the mystery of life; and the more we cultivate acceptance, the greater our contentment. We experience a “lightening up”. Indeed, this is the process of achieving “en-lighten-ment”.

~ by Julia Tindall (coming to Perth to give a weekend Jnana Yoga workshop, Oct. 2012.)

~ For more on the techniques and practices of jnana yoga, see Julia’s two books, 20 Questions for Enlightened Living and Your Presence is Enough and Website.

All little boys should have a cat so that they’re not so stunned and unprepared when they grow up and meet a real woman.
~ Murphy Malloy Kall

There’s a lot of difference between a dog and a woman. When you come home at night, a dog don’t care where you been.
~ Lewis Grizzard

It’s obvious who is man’s best friend … if you locked your wife and your dog together in the broom cupboard for a couple of hours … when you finally open the door to let them out, which one of them is going to be pleased to see you?!
~ Anon.

~ To see/hear Eckhart Tolle and ‘dog-whisperer’, Cesar Millan, discuss living with dogs, Click Here.

A: It’s a good distinction. Religious spirituality is usually associated with a long tradition and certain stories. Secular spirituality is basically this: It doesn’t deny God or the transcendent, but it doesn’t mix God or the transcendent with stories that one needs to believe.

Of course, you can have spirituality within a religion. You can have religion with spirituality, and you can have religion without spirituality — which also happens quite often. Religion without spirituality is just ideology, such as certain belief structures in the collective mind that one identifies with, and that’s not helpful.

And then at other times, religion may still have its stories and rituals, and even beliefs, but they are no longer so dense that the light of consciousness cannot shine through. Religion can be an open door into the realm of the transcendent, or religion can be a closed door, depending on how it’s used. Then comes something relatively new, which I suppose is secular spirituality. We can call it that.

Although he represents ancient religious traditions, the Dalai Lama seems to be moving in that direction. He once said: “I believe deeply that we must find, all of us together, a new spirituality. This new concept ought to be elaborated alongside the religions in such a way that all people of good will could adhere to it.”

There’s no need to give up your religion as a result of this teaching, but you can deepen it. As the Quaker writer, Ralph Heatherington, once put it …

“Spirituality seems to refer to something inherent in the individual rather than in the institution, developing from first-hand experience rather from a culturally loaded system of beliefs acquired from social training. It speaks of awareness, sensitivity, openness, and compassion. It’s a marker of personality development towards wholeness and realisation of our Potential. The term religious experience would, in this sense, mean spiritual experience in a religious context.”

Also, the wise words of Indian philosopher and statesman, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan seem relevant in closing …

“Religion” he wrote, “begins for us with an awareness that our life is not of ourselves alone. There is another, greater life, enfolding and sustaining us. Religion, as man’s search for this greater self … will not accept any creeds as final or any laws as perfect. It will be evolutionary, moving ever onward.

“The witness to this spiritual view is borne, not only by the great religious teachers and leaders of mankind, but by the ordinary man in the street, in whose inmost being the well of the spirit is set deep. In our normal experience events happen which imply the existence of a spiritual world.

“The fact of prayer or meditation, the impulse to seek and appeal to a power beyond our normal self, the moving sense of a revelation which the sudden impact of beauty brings, the way in which decisive contacts with certain individuals bring meaning and coherence into our scattered lives, suggest that we are essentially spiritual.

“To know oneself is to know all we can know and all we need to know. A spiritual as distinct from a dogmatic view of life remains unaffected by the advance of science and criticism of history. Religion generally refers to something maternal, a system of sanctions and consolations, while spirituality points to the need for knowing and living in the highest self and raising life in all its parts. Spirituality is the core of religion and its inward essence, and mysticism emphasises this side of religion.”

~ Eckhart Tolle

There came a time after I had incorporated meditation into my spiritual disciplines and began to really encounter the presence of God within that I no longer found these taught beliefs and doctrines fitting in with my sense of what I was beginning to feel was true.

I struggled to find ways to incorporate them in the new paradigm I found myself merging into. I tried rationalizing and twisting them almost beyond recognition in order to conform. But it was to no avail. The pursuit amounted to being as futile as trying to jam the wrong puzzle piece into the wrong space. They just wouldn’t fit.

The struggle to believe in my presupposed ideas based on the doctrines I was ascribing to and their conflict with the truths I was receiving was becoming the source of my undoing. This process was suffocating me spiritually to the point where I was ceasing to find life, light and meaning in my beliefs at all. I could just see walls, like those of a prison, hindering the full view of which I had only caught glimpses of through moments of meditation. Walls, that had to come down.

I realized I wasn’t after hollow doctrine. I was after truth and thirsted to experience that truth first-hand. I wanted God, not man’s words about God, to reign in my heart. Contemplative prayer and other forms of meditation allowed me to realize that that was truly possible.

I would, however, have to let go of all that I once held dear in order to find the greatest treasure of all buried within my soul: God Himself. I would have to sell all of my land just for that one field where I knew the treasure to be buried and then spend the rest of my efforts in separating dirty ego from divine Self in discovering it.

Imagine God being like a powerful river swiftly flowing. It was as if I was relying on people’s interpretations of the river and merely viewing it from a portrait that they had painted of it. And then, still more, reviewing charts regarding the facts that defined it.

Memorizing the rules that determined its nature and the outlines of its topography and where one could swim, where one couldn’t and who was allowed to swim. The problem was, there was no swimming going on at all.

It’s as if I stood by the bank one day realizing the beauty and reality of the river and decided that rather than studying it from afar it’d be tons more fun to just jump in and let it carry me away, becoming one with it’s flow and rhythm. My experiences of meditation up to that point had gotten my feet wet. Now I wanted to saturate my soul as well.

I wanted no more barriers between myself and God and at last decided it was time to strip myself of the dogma that clothed my sense of what was real spiritually and take the plunge into the swift waters. Doing so has released in me the sense of merging into the great I Am and given me glimpses of what it’s like to live in the great We Are. Not fully, but enough to know it’s possible.

There are still rocks I reach out and cling to in desperation, as I feel truth sweeping me in its current and my own inner insecurities resisting it, trying to slow it down because it’s all so much to process in one experience.

There are a lot of analogies that use the illustration of the river to symbolize truth, reality and God. Just the other day I was having a conversation with a friend regarding the truth and how it cannot be contained … only experienced. The book I’m currently reading, The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts, illustrates this idea perfectly.

“You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.”

For so long I hadn’t just tried to “capture truth in a bucket” but I allowed it to be served to me on a platter. Served to me in the form of other men’s words and visions about God without experiencing my own. I had to learn to surrender myself to God and the process of understanding unhindered by labels and superficial rules.

I had to trust my own inner voice and not the voices of others. I felt my subconscious beckoning me to cease my struggling and to flow with the current and not resist it. For God is the current itself, the ever changing flow of what Is.

Alan Watts talks about ‘the law of reversed effort’ and how when we struggle against the water we sink but when we stop struggling we float. Finally, when I stopped struggling to cling to my preconceived notions of belief, trying to fit them in to interpret my experience, I rose to the surface of the water I had been submerged in and my spiritual lungs began to fill up with the air they so desperately needed.

~ To read the complete article, Click Here.

~ by Jessica M.

The now famous Serenity Prayer is attributed to theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 -1971), goes …

God, grant me …
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

If you can’t see the video above, Click Here.

Filmed in Toronto in 2011 by Jurek Wyszynski. For more on Paul Hedderman, see his Web site.