The Seer

When I look back over 2011, I feel that one of the most significant things to happen in my spiritual journey has been the ‘discovery’ of a newly published little book by the awakened Romanian mystic, Ilie Cioara, who was born in 1916, and died in 2004. I am deeply moved as I read and reread it and have the strong impression that Cioara’s writings are going to have the same kind of impact as Nisargadatta Maharaj’s spiritual classic, I Am That.

The book is entitled: The Silence of the Mind and is the first in a tetralogy (1 of 4) to be published by Obooks. The other titles out in 2012 will be: The Wondrous Journey into the Depth of Our Being, Life is Eternal Newness and I Am Boundlessness.

Like, I Am That, this rare work has been made available to readers throughout the English-speaking world through a perceptive and awakened translator — in this case, Petrica Verdes. For the past few years, Verdes has been practicing meditation and living in various meditation communes in Italy, Germany and the UK. Translating Ilie Cioara’s work has been for him a labour of love and a process of spiritual growth.

Verdes said: “In 2002, I came across one of Ilie Cioara’s books in a bookshop, and I wrote the publisher straight away, asking if they could pass me the address of the author. The book just mesmerized me, I felt an energy around the text and I used to meditate with it and carry it with me.

We just “see” something and understand it profoundly, intuitively, without needing to filter any knowledge through the mind. This practice has become part of my life. It is a great gift to understand that truth is very simple. Applying it is more difficult, but this apparent difficulty is easily overcome with a little persistence and thirst for the divine.”

Ilie (rhymes with lily) is unique in a way, in the sense that he lived in almost complete isolation in Romania. Early in his life, he was hunted by the secret police and finally gaoled for six years because he did not support the communist regime. He seemed to be just an ordinary man, with a deep longing for the divine, living in very adverse circumstances. He belonged to no tradition of enlightenment, he wasn’t part of a lineage, he had no master, he never travelled to India.

Originally a Christian mystic, he repeated a mantra-like prayer frequently each day for over 20 years. One day, he felt an intuitive impulse to drop the mantra, and just practice ’silence of the mind’, by listening to the noises on the street etc, in the now. After following this practice for a few years, one morning, as he was waking up from his sleep, ‘he’ suddenly experienced what some have called, ‘liberation’ or ‘enlightenment’.

Until the age of 55, when Ilie awakened spiritually, he hadn’t written a single page, and never tried to be a teacher. Because he lived in almost complete isolation, his words have a freshness and a direct simplicity, devoid of any spiritual jargon. Ilie felt the impulse to share his experience and insights using short verses which could give the reader a taste of no-mind. The verses were followed by prose explanations (see example below).

Most of these writings had to be hidden in the apartment of a friend, until 1990, when the iron curtain fell, so as not to be confiscated by the communist authorities. They describe the practice of ‘Self-knowing’ using all-encompassing Attention. Like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti etc, his is a simple message of discovering our inner divine nature through the silence of the mind.

~ Resourced by Pete from: The Silence of the Mind blog, Non-Duality Magazine and Yogi Times

~ Book details: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara. Trans. Petrica Verdes. Softcover: 145 pp. Obooks, John Hunt (Oct, 2011) ISBN:10: 1846948290 & 13: 978-1846948299

~ You can get good used copies Here

The Poetry

Eternal youth is a natural phenomenon,
It is each person’s destiny — as a mature, realized individual;
It ensues spontaneously, as an authentic experience,
An energy without support, bound by nothing.

Physically, youth depends oh the number of our years,
On the body’s progress towards maturity.
There are no contradictions. People consider themselves
As old as their physical age, according to their life expectancy.

Whereas psychologically it is a-different matter,
Youth is directly connected with Life’s constant newness;
Life itself demands that we encounter it,
The same way She is, as absolute newness in each movement.

Without this eternal, ever-renewing youth,
We will not understand the newness of the Universal movement.
We need to have a fresh, lucid and clear mind,
Completely detached from time, from the wandering memory.

Such a state is attained naturally,
When we understand the “ego” and its powerless nature,
Unable to embrace and really comprehend
The innocence of the naked moment.

The moment makes us young, if we encounter it constantly,
Without the old “self” — based on old residues;
Youth is unrelated to time, years do not define it,
In eternal youth, everyone and everything becomes integrated.

The Prose

Eternal youth is a natural phenomenon; it is the destiny of every human being who has reached a stage of spiritual maturity. This spiritual attainment appears spontaneously — as a true experience — when man discovers the Reality of his being, as immortal Divinity. In this fortunate circumstance, he has a Pure Energy and Consciousness without dimensions or cause.

On a physical plane, youth is determined by the age of our body, by its progress towards maturity. From this point of view, there are no contradictions. People consider themselves as old as their years, according to the climate or the geographical location they live in.

On a psychological level, it is a different matter. In this circumstance, youth is closely connected to the way we integrate and welcome Life’s eternal freshness. >•

Practically, Life itself requests us to encounter it in the same way She is — as absolute newness, with each movement. Without this Eternal Youth, we will never be able to encounter or understand the newness of the Universal movement. Only by being detached from time and space — from the wandering memory — we are able to understand that which is new and real, brought “here and now” by the constant mobility of Life.

How can we reach this eternal Youth within us? Only in one manner, that is: when we understand the “ego” and its powerless nature, unable to embrace and comprehend the purity of the present moment. When understanding occurs — as a direct experience — this fiction becomes silent, in humbleness, because it has understood its fundamental incapacity. In the psychological void thus created, we expand to Infinity and we acquire a new mind, perfectly functional and without limits.

Encountering the moment correctly leads us to a state of eternal Youth — without the senility based on mental accumulations. Youth is not a prisoner of time and it is not influenced by how many years old our physical body is.

In a state of complete inner freedom, on the threshold of the incoming moment – we remain untouched and just as free after the moment has passed, without recording any memory residues. We die psychologically to what has been and, simultaneously, we are reborn just as alive, fresh and always young in each second of Life in Its perpetual movement.

~ From: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara pp 59.

There are now some videos up on the Net based on the writings of Ilie Cioara. To me, the background music runs somewhat contrary to the spirit and intention of what he’s pointing to, but nevertheless they are there and you may like to view them.

The longest is entitled: The Silence of the Mind (11.39)

If the video doesn’t appear above, >>> Click Here

Others in the series are:

1. Perfectly Conscious (1.54)
2. How Can We Free Ourselves? (3.26)
3. Creation is Eternal Freshness (3.55)
4. The Power of Emptiness (1.39)
5. Listening and Watching (3.20)

To compliment our focus on Ilie Cioara in this issue, I’d like to draw your attention to another now fully awakened individual who also served time in prison and whose writings today point to the same deep divine Presence that is our true beingness.

John Sherman describes his former self as ‘a two-bit hustler in the sixties who morphed into a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary bank robber and bomber. After being captured and breaking out twice, and several years on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, he was caught and spent the next eighteen and a half years in a federal prison.

Three years before his release, John stumbled on a little-known Eastern spiritual teaching, and awakened to reality. After his release, John met and married Carla and together they ’stumbled’ upon the actual secret of eternal peace and joy, and are now happily sharing this with others. When encouraging others, John says …

“I want to suggest something to you that you can do for yourself that works. I know it works because it worked for me, and it worked for Carla, my wife, and it has worked for a growing number of people around the world now; people who have, maybe even despite their better judgment, actually tried to do what I suggest.

I do have a theory as to why it works, but my certainty that it works comes from my own experience, rather than from a theoretical understanding, and the ‘why’ of it is actually entirely beside the point. So here it is, the simple act of inward looking that snuffs out the fear of life.

Step 1: Learn to Move the Beam of Your Attention at Will

To begin, just relax for a moment, and notice the obvious fact that you have the power to move your attention at will. As you read this, move your attention away from the text for a moment, and direct it instead to the feel of your underlying nature. If you’ll try, with your whole heart, to bring the beam of your attention into direct contact with the reality of your true nature, you will snuff out the fear of life, which is the first cause of all human misery.

I call this action looking at yourself. If you’ll just try to look at yourself with the eye of attention, the ‘fear disease’ will disappear, and with it the perception of your life-experience as a problem to be solved, a threat to be destroyed. It’s that simple.

Notice the feel of your chest and belly expanding and contracting, and then bring attention back here to this page. Do that a couple of times so that you become familiar with what I mean by ‘moving the beam of your attention at will.’

That action of moving attention at will, as you just did, is all that’s needed to accomplish what I’m asking you to do. The more you practice this simple act, the more you’ll become familiar with how it feels to do it. And the more familiar you become with the feel of it, the more skillful and direct you’ll be in the effort to move the beam of attention where it must go.

Step 2: Turn the Beam of Your Attention Inward

Use that skill to actually turn the beam of attention inward, trying to make direct, unmediated contact with the reality of your own nature, by which I mean you, just plain and simple you. You know What you are, and you will surely recognize yourself when you see yourself in this way. It really is that simple. Repeat this as often as it occurs to you to do so.

There’s no step three.

A Few Tips About Where to Look

The act of inward looking may be simple, but the actual doing of it can seem anything but easy. But consider this: the feel of you is the only thing that is always here. All else — thought, belief, understanding, things seen and heard and felt, emotions, pain, pleasure — literally all else comes and goes.

So, looking for you is looking only for what is always here. Anything that is newly arrived, no matter how wonderful it may be, cannot be you. Likewise, anything that has been here and left, even if it might return, cannot be you.

Furthermore, you’re the plain and unmoving field in which all else comes and goes. You have nothing to give to you or take away from you and you are, therefore, profoundly uninteresting to the mind’s eye, which has no purpose other than to keep vigilant, to stay on the lookout for things to grasp, things to reject and destroy, and things that are safe to ignore in a forest of bright, shiny, ever-moving, fantastically fascinating parade of phenomena.

The fear of life is a kind of auto-immune disease. Its only function, insane as it may be, is to keep you safe from your own life, and this mission demands ceaseless attention to incoming phenomena. Because of this, its natural orientation is ever outward.
You, on the other hand, are wholly and perfectly inward.”

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

~ For more info on John’s work, visit his website

~ You can also download John’s Free eBook — Look At Yourself.

Through silence, the mind in its totality had become an immense mirror in which the outside world was reflected. And the world I was perceiving directly through my senses revealed its own reality to me. My fellow beings, close friends or complete strangers, were being regarded indiscriminately, with a feeling of love I had never felt before.

If any reaction of the mind surfaced, it disappeared immediately in contact with the sparkle of impersonal Attention. A state of quiet and all-encompassing joy characterized me in all circumstances, whether pleasant or painful. My behavior was that of a simple witness, perfectly aware of what was happening around me, without affecting my all-encompassing state of peace.

The State of the Sublime is, of course, difficult to describe, but not impossible to experience by someone who authentically practices awareness. In order to communicate it, a simple and direct language is used, which is not filtered through reason, because the “ego”, with its subjective perception, is no longer there. To put it this way: the psychological emptiness is the one who lives the present moment, expresses this encounter into words and still remains present and available to the next moment.

As a result of this direct encounter with the moment, always new and renewing itself, I felt the need, initiated and fueled by intuitive impulses, to express “Self- knowing” using verse. It was a natural thing to do. In few words I could encompass and communicate the essence of the experience. In the first year I wrote 300 poems. Later on, their number reached 1000, of which 600 are accompanied by prose explanations, such as the ones in this book.

I would also like to describe a few effects which, as a result of becoming aware of the reactions of my own thinking process, have completely disappeared, without any other intervention from my mind.

After experiencing this phenomenon, I felt like a broken vessel, from which the following started to disappear: my interest in astral journeying, my religious beliefs, my egoism, desires, fear, envy, pride etc. My awareness remained open all the time, offering me the possibility to pass from the finite dimension into Infinity.

After encountering this extraordinary phenomenon^ with the help of a global perspective I understood the whole human tragedy, caused by the misinterpretation of life in its constant mobility and newness from one moment to another.

Faced with the freshness and the aliveness of life, each individual — according to his own conditioning, as a result of wrong education — behaves completely inappropriately, because the structure of the mind cannot in any way comprehend arid embrace the beauty of life. The shadow of the past is actually a memory pattern, clouding and distorting the reality of the present moment.

Life cannot be encountered and understood objectively, unless we are in a state of complete freedom and serenity of the mind. Life is newness, moment by moment, and it demands, even forces us to encounter it with a new mind, with a new brain and with new brain cells, which have not been used previously.

It is a well-known fact: scientists claim that man, during the whole span of his life, uses no more than 10-15% of his brain cells and memory potential. As you can see, our psychological possibilities are almost unlimited.

After these explanations, it will be easier to understand the process of our own conditioning, as well as the phenomenon of breaking the shell of the “ego”.

As I had shown previously, life demands that we encounter it directly, without any memory baggage. How do we lose the memory baggage? It is all very simple! Here is how:

We encounter the movement of the mind with the flame of total Attention — requested by the aliveness of life in its continuous flow. Without the light and serenity provided by Attention, nothing can be understood in a real way. In the light of Attention, any reaction of the mind (thought, image, fear, desire) — which functions chaotically, obsessively and dominates us — is instantly dissolved.

In the psychological void that follows, a new mind appears, expanding into Infinity, as a state of Pure Consciousness, pure understanding as well as transformative action. This simple state of “being” is in itself an action in which the entity who performs the action doesn’t exist anymore. The old man, conditioned by his behavioral patterns, loses his authority as the chaotic, uncontrollable reactions dissolve — energies which sustain and fuel the “ego”.

Only in this way, by a simple encounter with the reactions of the mind and its subsequent demise, the barrier of the “ego” is broken. Through a momentary opening, our real being is revealed, transforming and healing us. This all-encompassing Attention, without any purpose, is the Sacred itself in action.

There is, in fact, another type of attention directed by will, which behaves subjectively by limiting itself to one object. By its very nature, this type of attention defines itself as lack of attention.

Beware, nevertheless, not to make a mere theory of this simple meeting with yourself! Simply becoming aware of “what is”, of what we encounter, brought about by the flow of life, without having any purpose or expectations, places us in a state of simply “being”, which transforms us by itself. That is all there is to it.

~ From: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara pp 131-134

A Russian Communist Party official was driving through the country when he saw a farm worker kneeling in the middle of a field praying. He stopped the car and stomped over to the man.

“Aha! You waste your time like this instead of ploughing and planting for the Party.”

“But, Commissar,” the worker replied, “I’m praying for the Party.”

“Praying for the Party! Huh, and years ago you probably prayed for the Czar and his corrupt ministers who oppressed and exploited the peasants.”

“I did, Commissar.”

“Well, look what happened to them.”

“That’s right.” The man replied.

From all sides at each moment, the summons to Love rushes to us. ‘Do you want to come with us?’ ~ Rumi

Western civilizations revere brain intelligence to the point that we’ve all but forgotten there are other forms of intelligence available to us. As a result, it comes as no surprise that we often think of spiritual awakening as an intellectual pursuit. We devise steps, methods and formulas that titillate the brain and spend years refining every nuance.

The brain loves everything that keeps it engaged and it will happily lead us around and around in circles as long as it’s able to remain at the center of that circle. Methods can be helpful, but there’s a more direct path: the way of the intelligent heart.

We all associate the heart with love, but in our world, love is often about levels and conditions. The heart is seen as the seat of sentimental emotion, something that can easily lead us astray and cause us pain. But when spiritual masters speak of love, it is not an emotion, but a state of being that originates in the intelligent heart.

The heart actually contains at least forty thousand neurons, which rivals the subcortical centers in the brain. We’ve been taught that the brain is the command center for the heart, but it often works the other way around. When the brain sends a signal, the heart may choose to disregard it, but when the heart sends a message to the brain, the brain obeys.

Spiritual masters like Rumi have long recognized that it’s the heart that serves as a bridge to the Divine, and that bridge is crossed with unconditional love. When Shams-iTabrizi, Rumi’s teacher, said “The door of the heart must be opened,” he was encouraging us to see past the emotional love to the fullness of intelligent love that embraces all without distinction.

The ancient writer of the Mundaka Upanishad recognized the difference between brain and heart intelligence when s/he said, “The Lord of Love may be known through love but not through thought.” The brain dislikes the path of love because it’s exquisitely simple. There are no secrets, methods or formulas involved, we just love. We can still benefit from Rumi’s sage advice, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

As our love expands, the veils that have caused us to see a world of separate forms fall away, and we recognize the interconnected oneness of everything in existence. When we can say, “I love you like everybody” to everybody and everything, then we are love.

The brain is afraid of all-encompassing love. Its logic tells us that we must get something in return for everything we give. It is wrong. The path of the intelligent heart will lead you to a level of love, joy and peace beyond anything this world recognizes. Although most people believe “you can’t take it with you,” we’re betting you can always take love.

Love is the only reality, and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation. — Tagore

~ Lee & Stephen Hager www.thebeginningoffearlessness.com/blog

There’s a particular dimension where creativity arises. It’s a little bit like the wick burning the flame, and its sustenance is the oil — it’s in an oil lamp, and you are the flame. All the analogies, by the way, are very deficient, but it’s just a distant approximation to get you into a sense of what that place is.

So you are the flame, and you feel your way into the very source — down the wick into where the oil is, inside yourself. That’s the place, the source, so if anything is new, creative, then it has a fragrance of the source.

Somehow, humans, even humans who are still very much identified with their mind, many of them are touched by when they see or hear or whatever — come into contact with — something that came out of that deeper level, whether it’s a work of art, or a piece of music, or it could just be somebody talking. And the words come from that deeper level.

It could just be somebody who has a good sense of humor — even that is already a form of creativity. Spontaneous humor is to suddenly see something that one wouldn’t normally see — a connection between two seemingly unconnected things, and suddenly you connect them and everybody laughs.

Some people have that. Some people have one small area in which they can be creative, and that can be enough to provide you with fulfillment and an income, for the rest of your life — and to contribute that gift to others.

Great stand up comedians, for example, have that gift. Of course, not everything they say is spontaneous, but when they prepare their stuff, they have to be creative. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to be a standup comedian, but it’s difficult. Many people try. It’s hard to be funny. But some have it, and it’s amazing — those few that have that gift. And there too, the sense of humor is spontaneously something arises, and there it comes. It’s being in touch with that.

It’s wonderful to be able to be in touch with that, and feel the power that flows from there, out into this world. Now for that, of course you need some kind of vehicle, because the power needs to flow into some kind of form. You can touch that place also, within, but it may not flow into creativity, because you haven’t developed a vehicle for it.

The very same power that gives rise to creativity can also manifest itself in different ways that we would not call creativity. It could be a healing power that comes into effect the moment you enter into relationships with others. Healing in a wider sense, not just physical healing.

You will not suddenly become a great musician if you have never touched an instrument, just because you touch that place within yourself. It’s not going to manifest as a great scientific discovery in my case, because the vehicle is not prepared for that. My mind is not prepared for that. It doesn’t even work that way.

So for me to expect to come up with the Unified Field Theory that Einstein didn’t come up with — he tried after the theory of relativity, he tried for the rest of his life to come up with that — I am not going to come up with that. It’s very unlikely. The vehicle has not been prepared. I am not going to be a great pianist, because I don’t know how to play the piano. So no matter how deeply I go within, it’s not going to flow into that. You need to prepare the vehicle for creativity.

More important than that is the place — to be able to go within to that place of vibrantly alive stillness, where creativity arises. And you can go in there, and if there’s no vehicle, it will not express itself in any form of creativity, not any conventional form of creativity. But it may actually express itself in different ways.

I just mentioned one, which is an outflow in human interactions — an outflow of … very hard to put a word to it, but you can sense it, when you meet a person who is present in the interaction. It’s a different energy frequency that operates. And that is healing. It’s so formless that it does not require a previously prepared vehicle. You can just be. And you emanate Being.

~ Eckhart Tolle www.eckharttolle.com/

Awakening — an interview with Adyashanti by Renate McNay of Conscious.TV in the UK.

Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher and the author of several books including, ‘Impact of Awakening’, ‘Emptiness Dancing’, ‘Falling Into Grace’ and ‘The End Of Your World’.

In this interview he talks in detail about his years as a Zen meditator; life as a top athlete; his two significant awakenings; the obstacles he discovered in the way, and the nature of illusion.

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

Also, don’t miss Adya’s Free live broadcast — available in both audio and video formats — on Thurs. Dec. 8th, 8am Perth Time, pre-program music, 9-10:30am Perth Time. See the time in your local area.

Available to anyone with an internet connection. Just go to: and click on “Audio Stream” or “Video Stream” according to your prefernce.

Making mistakes is a part of life … at least it is a consistent part of my life! Yet I’m always shocked when I see how easily I don’t pay enough attention to what I’m doing. So I felt I would use this is an opportunity to share some of the thoughts that arise for me when this happens.

Getting the dates wrong on an email newsletter is a relatively minor mistake, but I still feel annoyed with myself. I prefer it when I’m pleased myself, of course. Yet I also feel there is something precious in the humility that arises when I see my innate fallibility … with both the big and little things in my life.

Humbly embracing my flawed humanity has been a theme of my life in recent years, and is a major element in my new book that is coming out next year. For a long time my spiritual journey was about waking up to the deep self and the oneness of life, and this remains an on-going adventure. But now I find myself also focusing on coming to terms with the limitations of ‘Tim’ that show no signs of miraculously disappearing!

As I get older I am struck by how ‘Tim’ still stumbles and falls. Humility and embarrassment seem like old friends. And there is a vulnerability and authenticity that arises from the recognition of my human fallibility that I’m learning to appreciate. Connecting with each other and with life from the deep self is a wonderful experience. Yet embracing each other in our vulnerable, fragile, tender humanity is equally important.

It seems to me that I’m profoundly paradoxical. On the one hand so big and on the other so small. Within me are unfathomable depths, yet ‘Tim’ is also necessarily limited and imperfect. On my spiritual journey I once believed that I could one day perfect ‘Tim’ into some sort of enlightened being who was always at his best. Now it feels to me that the journey is about embracing all that I am.

This means both awakening to the deep self and humbly accepting my human limitations. It’s when I’m able to do both that I’m truly authentic. And then something beautiful and tender happens. There’s this unconditionally love of myself just as I am … a love of others just as they are … a love of life just as it is … a deep love of being.

~ by Tim Frele www.timothyFreke.com