the sacrifice...
Flight turns unforgettable when passengers learn of fallen soldier..
By John E. DiScala 2 hours ago Los Angeles
Delta Flight 2255 from Atlanta to Los Angeles seemed to be an ordinary flight with the exception of Candy, who was the most loving flight attendant I’ve ever encountered. Besides using her Southern charm to quickly defuse every situation, she began her welcome announcement by thanking the handful of uniformed soldiers on-board for serving our country. Her poignant message was followed by applause, and it put into perspective that none of us would be able to do what we do without these brave men and women.
But this transcontinental flight turned out to be everything but ordinary. We later learned, when the captain got on the PA system about 45 minutes prior to landing, that we were transporting a fallen soldier. The plane went quiet as he explained that there was a military escort on-board and asked that everyone remain seated for a couple of minutes so the soldiers could get off first. He also warned us not to be alarmed if we see fire trucks since Los Angeles greets their fallen military with a water canon salute. See my video below.
A few minutes after touchdown, we did indeed have a water canon salute, which I’d previously only experienced on happy occasions like inaugural flights. This time, the water glistening on the windowpanes looked like tears.
Passengers in the airport must have been worried when they saw our plane pull into gate 69A, as we had a full police and fire escort, front and back.
I was on the left side of the plane and later realized that the family could be seen off to the right, standing with the United States Army Honor Guard. According to Wikipedia, each military branch has its own honor guard, usually military in nature, and is composed of volunteers who are carefully screened. One of the primary roles for honor guards is to provide funeral honors for fallen comrades.
When the jet door opened, another military officer addressed the escort who was standing at attention. He then stepped on the plane and told us passengers “I just addressed the escort. It is a sworn oath to bring home, to the family, the fallen.” He paused and then said, “Today you all did that, you are all escorts, escorts of the heart.” And then thanked us for our time and walked off the plane.
As you can imagine, everyone was silent and no one got up, not even that person from the back row who pretends he doesn’t [understand] English so he can be first off the plane. I’m sure most had meteor-sized lumps in their throats and tears in their eyes like I did.
It only got more emotional when I deplaned. There was a large number of passengers, who are normally in a hurry to get home or make a connection, standing by the window to witness something truly moving. To see the Honor Guard and family waiting patiently, while LAX baggage handlers and a military loadmaster removed the flag covered casket first from the cargo hold, was humbling to say the least. I’m not sure if it was the fallen soldier’s mother or wife who I watched slowly walk up to the coffin while a few other family members, wrapped in blankets, stood near with a dozen or so of the Honor Guards standing in salute.
As soon as I saw her reach out to put her hand on her baby’s casket, I walked away.
This ordinary flight became extraordinary and is one that I will never forget.
Thank you to all the military who protect our beautiful country and let us live the lives we are able to lead. Without you we would be nothing. And thank you to the Honor Guard for making sure these fallen soldiers, warriors and heroes are not treated like just any piece of luggage as they used to, but rather with the care and respect they so rightly deserve.
...........................
It is now time for me to comment on this individuality of Consciousness..
I served within Saigon during the 'Tet Offensive' in Vietnam..
Those that know of this time will know of my experience..
This soldier that died was filled with love for us..
He gave up his life for us..
He did not know that these wars are created to gain wealth for the banks and corporations..
He was as foolish as me, and as caring as me..
We were willing to give up our lives so that those that are slaves could be free..
In speaking of the Mystical, I must say the same thing..
We must sacrifice our lives and ego to become Free..
This story is the story of Love..
All Souls return to Reality...
namaste, thomas
have no fear...
The whole secret of life is to have no fear..
Never fear what will become of you..
Depend on no one..
Only the moment that you reject all help,
are you Freed...
Gautama the Buddha
what people say...
We're not afraid of God's blade,
or of being chained up, or
of having our heads severed.
We're burning up quickly, tasting
a little hellfire as we go.
You cannot imagine
how little it matters to us
what people say.
- Rumi
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Version by Coleman Barks
"Birdsong"
Maypop, 1993
the mentalness of everything...
We know only our mental states, although some of them appear as ‘things’.
We see only our mental images, although some of them appear to be outside.
The man of the world receives a shock, which produces laughter in most cases but terror in a few,
when he is told that if he stands aside in detachment from his experience, then all the pageant of moving creatures, all the long lines of streets and houses which environ him become only forms taken by his mind.
For he believes this to contradict every moment of his experience and to conflict with his most cherished notions.
Hence he refuses to turn an intellectual somersault but immediately scorns such obvious nonsense.
The doctrine of the ‘mentalness’ of everything seems indeed at first sight to involve such a reversal of his natural ways of thought as to be assuredly an absurd one.
The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter II, The Meaning of Mentalism.
Paul Brunton
the sage...
The sage is indifferent.
He does not hanker
after more pleasure,
nor does he refuse whatever
may come to him by way of experience.
There is
no volition, either positive or negative,
because
there is no separate entity to choose,
want or
strive for anything.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"A Net of Jewels"
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Advaita Press, 1996
without beginning nor end...
The history of universal existence is therefore the history of an endless chain of alternations between potential being and actual becoming.
Thus the universe is undergoing an evolution which is being worked out according to strict karmic law and not by mere chance, as materialists think, nor by arbitrary commands of a personal creator, as religionists think.
The modern scientific notion of evolution is only a half truth.
The real process is a rhythm of growth and decay, evolution and dissolution, following each other with inevitable sequence.
It is the combination of these two phases which makes up a universal movement that knows no finality.
If cosmic nebulae develop into solar systems, these in turn dissolve eventually into cosmic nebulae again.
The universe of forms ever returns to its starting point; it is without beginning and will be without end;
this is why it is subject to birth and death, degeneration and renewal, that is to change.
It is like an ever rolling wheel moving onward through these alternating aeons of activity and rest.
Hence the ancient teachers represented it under the figure of a revolving Swastika wheel.
The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter III, The Birth of the Universe.
Paul Brunton
Tao Te Ching...
The very highest is barely known.
Then comes that which people know and love,
Then that which is feared,
Then that which is despised.
Who does not trust enough will not be trusted.
When actions are performed
Without unnecessary speech,
People say, "We did it!"
- Lao-tzu
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Tao Te Ching
Translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
Vintage Books Edition, September 1989
your true nature...
Self is a subcategory of natural things, so it is part of the relative world.
To look into your true nature you'd have to drop from your mind your-self together with the whole-world-self, as they appear through 'understanding'.
Then you, as 'knower' will merge with the 'known-oneness' world - that is - you'd be able to look into your true nature which is the true nature of all things.
It is called no-ness of emptiness.
Peter Jalesh
the ego...
Ego Starts Growing as the Child Grows
"Ego does not exist anywhere else except in human beings, and ego starts growing as the child grows. The parents, the schools, colleges, university, they all help to strengthen the ego for the simple reason that for centuries man had to struggle to survive and the idea has become a fixation, a deep unconscious conditioning, that only strong egos can survive in the struggle of life. Life has become just a struggle to survive. And scientists have made it even more convincing with the theory of the survival of the fittest. So we help every child to become more and more strong in the ego, and it is there that the problem arises.
"As the ego becomes strong it starts surrounding intelligence like a thick layer of darkness. Intelligence is light, ego is darkness. Intelligence is very delicate, ego is very hard. Intelligence is like a roseflower, ego is like a rock. And if you want to survive, they say – the so-called knowers – then you have to become rock-like, you have to be strong, invulnerable. You have to become a citadel, a closed citadel, so you cannot be attacked from outside. You have to become impenetrable.
"But then you become closed. Then you start dying as far as your intelligence is concerned because intelligence needs the open sky, the wind, the air, the sun in order to grow, to expand, to flow. To remain alive it needs a constant flow; if it becomes stagnant it becomes slowly slowly a dead phenomenon."
Osho, Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol. 1, Talk #7
cultivate Wisdom...
"We should surrender our intention to selfishly seek merit and recognition for our merit,
instead simply plant merit and cultivate wisdom."
Jae Woong Kim
Infinity...
"the truth catches up with me,
I am not enough,
never have been,
never will be.
what relief to admit this finite container
can never contain infinity.
what joy to find infinity needs no container"
Nirmala
The Living Light...
"The light that I see is not spatial, yet it is far brighter than a cloud surrounding the sun. I cannot discern height or breadth in it, and I call it "the shadow of the Living Light.... At one and the same time I see and I hear and I know, and in an instant I learn what I know....
"In the same light I sometimes, not often, see another light, which I call "the Living Light." I can say much less about how I see it that in the case of the other light, and while I am gazing at it all sadness and all pain are taken from me, so that I am like an innocent girl and not an old woman.... My soul drinks in as from a fountain what I see and hear at that time in the vision, and that fountain remains always full and inexhaustible.
"My soul never lacks the first kind of light, what I call the shadow of the Living Light. I see it like the dome of heaven in a bright cloud and I behold it without stars. In this light I see what I often speak about, and from the flash of the Living LIght, I give answer to those who ask questions of me...."
Hildegarde of Bingen
in Bernard McGinn, Ed.
The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism
NY: Modern Library, 2006, p. 333-334
Love comes naturally...
If you try to be more loving, you will probably not succeed..
It is the ego that is trying to be that which ego is not..
ego is the opposite of the Love Energy..
The Energy of Love Consciousness is born from the dissolving of the egoic consciousness..
The more ego disappears, the more room for Love to enter the consciousness and mind..
In duality, there are two of everything, always opposites..
We, as Consciousness have decided to dream of this region of experience..
Why?..
Why not !..
After all, time does not exist and We are in no hurry to do anything..
If We have chosen to experience the false and the Real, why are We in pain ?..
The answer is that We began to believe that We are the dream that We are dreaming..
We are dreaming, We are dreaming, We are dreaming...
This is why every spiritual teacher yells at You to 'Wake Up'..
Waking up is the process of surrendering this belief in egoic consciousness and Awakening into Reality..
Sounds easy enough, does it not ?..
The suicide of the ego is the most difficult experience that you will encounter in this dream..
This is why many choose the 'Long Path' of slow dissolving of the illusion..
But, those of courage will enter meditation and dissolve all illusion at once..
If you are serious, Grace will help...
namaste, thomas
Inside the Archon (jinn) plane...
As we close-in on our destination, one of the first things that becomes apparent is that the behaviour of the entities who inhabit this place is marked by a certain heaviness. Where there should be movement there is instead stagnation. The entity we decide to observe is not motivated by spontaneity of any description. To function, it appears to need very little photon absorption; like fish living at the very bottom of the deep ocean.
An imploded vibrancy field draws upon low frequency carbon sources as a sustaining factor, and an inverted auroric field takes the form of a microcosmic black hole, situated below the plexus.
To this is attracted all that has failed to utilize its life potential in the outer world. Particularly in the human realm. All that has made no attempt to raise its consciousness and is therefore dependent upon the distorted consumerist miasma of daily existence. This is the source of the fuel that maintains the devouring nature of this perpetually hungry void.
As we move in closer, we can feel a certain numbness chilling the atmosphere, a blanket which cuts off incoming vibratory waves that normally interact with the inner sensitivities of conscious beings, forming the staple ingredients of our awakened lives.
Penetrating further, we allow ourselves to absorb something of "the state of being" of this entity. This manoeuvre, which is not without danger, is a prerequisite for our gaining a true understanding of the make up – the composition – of that which we are exploring.
If we can't empathise with it - we can't influence it.
At the centre of this strangely void and dark interior where we now are, is a sense of intense inward contraction. As though the entity is holding something within a prison of privacy, power and protection. These 'emotions' forming a neutron around which 'life' appears to revolve. This is a polarised reverse gravitational field, the opposite to that of loving sentient humans.
Now we must perform a little trick that will allow us to slip sideways through the low vibrational plasmic field of this entity; turning ourselves around on the inside so that we face the way we came in. This is so as to maintain "the connect" with the cord of umbilical light that is accompanying us at all times on this journey into the underworld.
We are performing the same role as Theseus in the Minotaur's lair. A line from the light resonance centre is our golden thread which ensures the continuity of higher energy is never lost while on this mission into darkness. It is only when we have arrived here - on the inside of darkness - that we can start the process of reversing the sequences that lie behind the destructive behaviour patterns of Illuminati initiates.
We are called upon to set in motion the transformation of the dark gravity fields that have, up until now, been venomously sucking outside energies into their mass, obscuring the inner source of sentient compassion so that it can find no outward expression.
Now, if you have been able to follow me on this journey so far – congratulations! Stick with it, for here comes the crucial, delicate part of this operation that can set in motion a paradigm shift capable of bringing light and balance back to a deeply disturbed internal and external order.
For the Illuminati mind is caught, mostly of its own will, in an alien world that reverses the normal sequence of events. Just as the Gestapo Swastika is the reverse image of an ancient spiritual peace symbol – so the ritualistic engagement in satanic worship in which the Illuminati participate - reverses the positivity of loving emotion and hardens it into an oppositional counterpart.
In consciously entering into this domain ourselves, we experience certain patterns within this darkness that are familiar to us. That are part of our motional vocabulary.
Now this is a crucial discovery, as it means that we have penetrated a veil within ourselves that has regarded, up until now, the dark motivation that is characteristic of an Illuminati mind set – to be something wholly alien. Something that we can conveniently place outside ourselves - something "inhuman".
As we slowly gyrate around this strange and murky environment, like an astronaut floating in outer space, we gradually detect just the tiniest ray of pure light! It's the way that light is observed by deep sea explorers peering out of their submersibles at great depths beneath the ocean's surface.
This discovery is of profound significance because it reveals that a "living" light element exists within the dark entity which must connect right through to the opposite spectrum: the centre of light. A not-well -understood truth that has come down to us from the great sages of the past.
Equally importantly, it reveals that the dark entities, so capable of reeking havoc on our planetary existence, also have within themselves a "divine spark" capable of transforming their crudeness – even if this spark remains almost completely smothered by the entity's current extreme opposition to its manifestation.
Gaining the sense of recognition that this state is common to both "us" and "them" opens up a valve within us that release a pheromone of compassion. This pheromone speaks to the little photon of love that burns - up until now undetected - within the dark entity. So here we are, camped on the inside of this dark hole - and yet able to feel a waft of genuine compassion for its predicament!
Is such a thing possible?
Of course it is.
In the second that this "reconnection" is established with the little photon of light – a defining moment is catalysed. A moment so profound that it resembles the birth of the universe itself.
For it awakens the cellular tissues that lie dormant within the sleeping sentient plain of the dark entity. Without this touchpaper having been activated, we are unable to set in motion the operation that we have come here to perform.
Once a human being - gifted as all are with divine powers to take control of the greater destiny of this universe - crosses the Rubicon, and, keeping his/her divine torch burning throughout, penetrates the greater darkness and releases that which holds back its evolution into light – we will finally have fulfilled the aspirations of the great legendary heroes – King Arthur, Theseus, Orpheus, and all great mythic explorers of the underworld.
Once we have recognised and accepted that we, too, hold within our composition, the seed of darkness, the power of destruction, the capacity to exert compassion-less will power, only then can we carry though the mission that our Creator equipped us to perform.
So now, working from within this microcosmic black hole, the pheromone of our compassion helps spark within this entity a little stirring - and that stirring causes the entity to have a 'feeling' to which he/she is quite unaccustomed, yet which acts like an ancient memory.
You see, somewhere deep inside, this entity knows that the light which presently scares it is also its one chance for transformation and release. Release from the cold vice-like clamp which seals the heart away from love - the black hole that this entity has aligned itself with. A black hole whose imploded gravitational field is maintained via vampiric sucking on the innocent energies that can be enticed to offer themselves unto it.
And indeed, this is the horrific nature of paedophilia, archon subversions, satanic rituals and violent sustained acts of aggression and war; always with the aim of maintaining power over others. An ambition which is born out of a deep fear for the ways of truth.
As this activated photon vibration gets under way, its transformative vibratory pulse opens into the light of day that which, for so long, has festered on the bottom rung of cyclic decay.
Unlike the task given to St. George and and Theseus - it is not for us to "slay the dragon" - but to help it to know that this is not its final form. We are here to encourage that little spark of remaining light to expand and to awaken the cellular tissues, so that they can ultimately metamorphose this deathly entity into a being able to enter the higher planes of existence. A process whereby its scaly old skin will simply fall away.
I think we all know that the "us" and "them" syndrome is essentially a kind of stalemate that tends to further provoke aggressive tendencies by both parties and never reaches an empowering or satisfactory conclusion. Yet it's tortuously difficult to get beyond this state.
The breakthrough comes when we see that we are neither divisible nor separate from those we oppose and who oppose us. And that, once whole, we can embrace the darkness and the light and find pathways towards the evolution and resolution of what otherwise appear to be irreversible and unresolvable dichotomies.
It is therefore now possible to suggest that the dark side's attempts to crush and obliterate the thinking, feeling inhabitants of planet Earth will ultimately deny these destroyers the one means they have left to come alive and be freed.
For there is no escaping the ubiquitous and loving photon power that casts its ever broader beam over a wild yet waking world. And it is we - we human beings - who have been entrusted by our Creator with bringing about this task of transformation. So that Illuminati - with nowhere left to hide - can finally embark upon the genuine road of "illumination" or be driven into hiding ever deeper into still uncharted corners of this universe.
The ability to summon sufficient bravery to encourage the gift of light to awaken in those who we have every reason to despise, is the next great threshold in the evolution of awaking man.
Julian Rose
One with it's Maker...
"The dart wherewith He wounded me
Was all embarbed round with love.
And thus my spirit came to be
One with its Maker, God above.
No love but this I need to prove:
My life to God surrender'd is
And my Beloved One is mine
And I at last am surely His."
Saint Teresa of Avila
in Alan Jacobs, Ed.
_The Element Book of Mystical Verse_
Rockport, MA: Element, 1997, p. 116
All is God...
"The Master said: 'Everything that exists is God.'
The pupil understood it literally, but not in the true spirit.
While he was passing through a street, he met with an elephant.
The driver (mahut) shouted aloud from his high place, 'Move away, move away!'
The pupil argued in his mind, 'Why should I move away? I am God, so is the elephant also God.
What fear has God of Himself?' Thinking thus he did not move.
At last the elephant took him up by his trunk, and dashed him aside. He was severely hurt, and going back to his Master, he related the whole adventure.
The Master said, 'All right, you are God. The elephant is God also, but God in the shape of the elephant-driver was warning you also from above.
Why did you not pay heed to his warnings?'"
Sri Ramakrishna
in F. Max Muller
_Ramakrishna: His Life And Sayings_, 15
Longmans, Green, And Co., London & New York, 1898, p. 102
above all thoughts...
Anything you do for the sake of enlightenment
takes you nearer.
Anything you do without
remembering enlightenment puts you off.
But
why complicate?
Just know that you are above
and beyond all things and thoughts.
What you
want to be,
you are it already.
Just keep it in mind...
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"I Am That"
Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Acorn Press, 1973
Meditation...
If Meditation fails to attain its goal,
it is in most cases because the person tires of making the needed effort,
and returns to his ordinary state too soon.
Success demands an untiring persistence,
a refusal to get up from the seat until he is established in THAT.
Titled Items 2 (56-1)
Paul Brunton
the Heart-Mind...
Don't waste your time in arguments and discussion
attempting to grasp the ungraspable.
Each thing reveals the One,
the One manifests as all things.
To live in this Realization
is not to worry about perfection or non-perfection.
To put your trust in the Heart-Mind is to live without separation,
and in this non-duality you are one with your Life-Source.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hsin Hsin Ming
Translated by Richard B. Clarke
Am I saying too much ?...
Most teachers of spiritual knowledge will only tell you of the First Reality..
This is what Jesus did to the common listener but told more to His disciples..
He taught them what they could understand..
I hope that what I am saying ,readers can absorb without them leaving, because they do not yet understand the deeper Knowledge..
You have been taught of a God of Creation but you have not been taught that You are that God..
But, this board of teaching is meant for the advanced mind of spirituality..
Mystics will understand what I am trying to convey..
If you feel confused by the different levels of Knowledge, continue to read and you will find satisfaction..
It takes time and work to become Free..
Do not give up..
namaste, thomas
Was Jesus, God ?...
Of course He was!..
There is nothing that is not God..
We are God!..
Is it not yet entered your mind that God is an Energy of Light, Love, and Consciousness?..
There is no old man on a throne demanding that you sing praises for eternity..
This would be the highest of ego and not of Reality, which is Humility and Love..
What will really surprise you is when you discover that there is a Reality above this Divine Consciousness that we call God..
What could this be ?..
Remember, Love is the existence of energy without egoic consciousness..
There exists no division between Love..
Love is the energy of Nothingness..
Difficult to understand, is it not?..
Once again remember, that Source has no personality or ego..
Pure Awareness...
A mystery that cannot be solved,
only entered...
namaste, thomas
" you must die, to be born again"...
The bible has been translated many times and usually translated by
someone that was not Enlightened..
especially during the leadership of Emperor
Constantine and the council of nicea in 325ad..
Constantine shaped the words and
contents to suit his own agenda of making Jesus into God and not just another
spiritual teacher..
therefore, the bible states that Jesus said;" you must be
born again"..
but, any Mystic knows that you must let the ego die to enter
Reality..
entering Reality feels as though you were just born again ..
Therefore,
knowing that Jesus was a master mystic,
I am certain that He was
misquoted....
namaste, thomas
The Dream called God...
If you do not fear egoic death, then you are one of the very few humans on earth with this power..
In meditation, surrender Everything!..
All life, All egoic desire..
and fall into the blackness of non-existence..
If you are honest in this desire of non-existence,
Grace will carry your Energy into the Love, Light, and Consciousness of Reality..
This is the First Reality of God..
The Final Reality of God is the Realization that You do not exist..
This is usually accomplished after the Realization of First Reality..
This is the Reality of Pure Awareness and is the Source of all Dreams,
even the Dream of the Creator called God...
namaste, thomas
Death of the Ego...
THE FOLLOWING
FROM AN ARTICLE BY:
David Loy
The Fear of Death is not an instinct: it is a reaction of the animal who is conscious enough to become aware of himself and his inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned.
But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact we just see, or is this, too, something constructed and projected, more like an unconscious game that each of us is playing with himself? According to Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead is how the Ego affirms itself as being alive;
so it is the act by which the Ego constitutes itself. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not dread death, because they are not aware of themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not something the Ego has, it is what the Ego IS.
This fits well with the Buddhist claim that the Ego-self is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying with this fiction for the simple reason that I do not know and cannot know what this thing that I supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.
Now we see what the Ego is composed of: death terror.
The irony here is that the death terror which is the Ego defends only itself. Everything outside is what the ego IS terrified of, but what is inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that the self-protection this generates is self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend the Ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum which needs protection. And if it turns out that what is innermost is so weak because it is...nothing, then no amount of protection will ever be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to extend our control to the very bounds of the universe.
If, however, the Ego is constituted by such a dualistic way of thinking, it means that an Ego can die without physical death and without consciousness coming to an end.
What makes this more than idle speculation is that there is ample testimony to the possibility of such Ego death:
No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead. (St. Gregory)
The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead. (Eckhart)
We are in a world of generation and death, and this world we must cast off. (William Blake)
Your glory lies where you cease to exist. (Ramana Maharshi):
"All of a sudden, he was seized by a chill of Fear. He felt he was almost dying by an all encompassing Fear of Death. Trying to prevent this feeling from weakening him, he began to think of what he should do. He said to himself:
"'Now death is approaching. I am dying. What is death? This body gets lost.'
"Then he held his breath completely, closed his lips and eyes, lay down as one dead, and began to ponder:
"'Now my body is dead. They will carry this body, motionless, to the cremation ground and burn it. But do I really die with this body? Am I merely this body? My body is now motionless. But still I know my name. I remember my parents, uncles, brothers, friends and all others. It means that I have a knowledge of my individuality. If so, the "I" in me is not merely my body; it is a deathless spirit.'
"Thus, as in a flash, a new realization came to Venkataramana. His thoughts may seem boyish fancy. But one thing must be remembered. Usually a man wins God realization by performing tapas for years and years, without food and sleep; he subjects the body to great suffering. But Venkataramana won the highest knowledge without all these. The fear of death left him. Venkataramana became the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi."
NOTE: It should be brought to the attention of the reader that in 1912, at age 32, fifteen years after Sri Ramana's initial death experience, he was once again confronted by death, in his little known Second Death Experience.
A moving example of death and resurrection is of course one of the sources of Western culture; but examples are found in many religious traditions. The problem is demythologizing these myths, extracting the core of psychological and spiritual truth from the accretions of dogma and superstition that all too often obscure their meaning, in order for that truth to spring to life again within our myth--the technical, objectifying language of modern science (in this instance, psychology). Blake's quotation (from The Vision of the Last Judgment) points the way because it implies that we are not seeing clearly but projecting when we perceive the world in terms of the dualistic categories of birth and death.
Precisely that claim is central to the Buddhist tradition. "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?" bemoaned Ionesco; the answer is in the anaatman "no self" doctrine, according to which we cannot die because we were never born. Anaatma is the "middle way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self survives death) and annihilationism (the self is destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The evaporation of this dualistic way of thinking reveals what is prior to it. There are many names for this "prior," but it is surely significant that one of the most common is "the unborn."
In the Pali Canon, what are perhaps the two most famous descriptions of Nirvana both refer to "the unborn," where "neither this world nor the other, nor coming, going, or standing, neither death nor birth, nor sense objects are to be found."
"There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the born...."
UDANA viii, 3
Similar claims are common in Mahayana scriptures and commentaries. The most important term in Mahayana is Sunyata, "Emptiness, " and the adjectives most used to explain Sunyata are "unborn, " "uncreated, " and "unproduced." The best-known Mahayana scripture, The Heart Sutra, explains that all things are Sunya because they are "not created, not annihilated, not impure, and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing." This is echoed by Nagarjuna in the preface to his MMK, Muula Madhyamaka Kaarikaas, which uses Eight Negations to describe the true nature of things: they do not die and are not born they do not cease to be and are not eternal, they are not the same and are not different, they do not come and do not go.
Moving from India to China, we read in the "Song of Enlightenment" of Yung-chia, a disciple of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, : "Since I abruptly realized the unborn, I have had no reason for joy or sorrow at any honor or disgrace." That "all things are perfectly resolved in the Unborn" was the great realization and later the central teaching of the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Bankei: "When you dwell in the Unborn itself, you're dwelling at the very wellhead of Buddhas and patriarchs." The Unborn is the Buddha-mind, and this Buddha-mind is beyond living and dying.
These passages (many more could be added) are important because, although it may not be clear what "the unborn" refers to, in each case it is an immediate experience that is being described (or at least claimed) , rather than a philosophical conjecture about the nature of reality. For a case which combines personal experience with philosophical acumen, we shall turn to Japan's foremost Zen master and philosopher, Dogen:
"For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death is only one instance of a more general problem, dualistic thinking. Why is dualistic thinking a problem? We differentiate between good and evil, success and failure, life and death, and so forth because we want to keep the one and reject the other. But we cannot have one without the other because they are interdependent: affirming one half also maintains the other. Living a "pure" life thus requires a preoccupation with impurity, and our hope for success will be proportional to our fear of failure. We discriminate between life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other, and, as we have seen, our tragedy lies in the paradox that these two opposites are so interdependent: there is no life without death and--what we are more likely to overlook--there is no death without life. This means our problem is not death but life-and-death."
At issue are the boundaries of the Self as a symbolized entity. There is a clear sense of the relationship between awareness of death and a delineated Self. The second is impossible without the first. Even prior to the disturbing syllogism, "If death exists, then I will die," there is an earlier one: "Since 'I' was born and will die, 'I' must exist."
If we can realize that there is no delineated Ego-self which is alive now, the problem of life-and-death is solved. And such is the Buddhist goal: to experience that which cannot die because it was never born.
If our minds have created this dualism, they should be able to un-create or deconstruct it.
This is not a devious intellectual trick which claims to solve the problem logically, while leaving our anguish as deep as before. The examples above make it clear that we are referring to an experience, not some conceptual understanding. It can be no coincidence that the praj~naapaaramitaa scriptures of Mahayana also repeatedly emphasize that there are no sentient beings.
losing oneself in God...
True self-denial is losing one's self in God.
Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan
Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:
Man, absorbed from morning till evening in his occupations which engage his every attention to the things of the earth and of self interest, remains intoxicated.
Seldom there are moments in his life, brought about by pain or suffering, when he experiences a state of mind which can be called soberness.
Hindus call this state of mind sat, which is a state of tranquility.
Man then begins to become conscious of some part of his being which he finds to have almost covered his eyes.
When we look at life from this point of view we find that an individual who claims to be a living being is not necessarily living a full life.
It is only a realization of inner life which at every moment unveils the soul, and brings before man another aspect of life in which he finds fullness, a greater satisfaction, and a rest which gives true peace.
Can he speak about this to his fellow men?
And if he does, what can he say? Can he say, 'I am purer,' or 'more exalted than you' or 'I understand life better than you?' As life unfolds itself to man the first lesson it teaches is humility; the first thing that comes to man's vision is his own limitedness.
The vaster God appears to him, the smaller he finds himself.
This goes on and on until the moment comes when he loses himself in the vision of God.
In terms of the Sufis this is called fana, and it is this process that was taught by Christ under the name of self-denial.
Often man interprets this teaching wrongly and considers renunciation as self-denial.
He thinks that the teaching is to renounce all that is in the world.
But although that is a way and an important step which leads to true self-denial, the self-denial meant is the losing oneself in God.
The Glance of Grace...
"The Guru has given me this one understanding:
there is only the One, the Giver of all souls.
May I never forget Him!
Even if you could live throughout the four ages, or even ten times more,
and even if you were known throughout the nine continents and followed by all,
with a good name and reputation, with praise and fame throughout the world-
still,
if the Lord does not bless you with His Glance of Grace, then who cares?
What is the use?"
Guru Nanak
_Shri Guru Granth Sahib_, Jup 1.2:6-7
Essence is emptiness...
Essence is emptiness.
Everything else, accidental.
Emptiness brings peace to your loving.
Everything else, disease.
In this world of trickery emptiness
is what your soul wants.
- Rumi
Version by Coleman Barks
"Birdsong"
Maypop, 1993
the world as idea...
Looked at from the outside, the universe comes forth out of nothingness and passes away into nothingness.
But looked at from inside, there has always been an eternal hidden reality in its background.
This reality is Mind.
The world is only its manifestation.
For if every effect is previously contained in its cause and that again is confined in what preceded it, the chain goes back and back and stops only when it stops with the source of all ideas, Mind.
Thus Mind embraces all things but is itself embraced by none.
Hence Mentalism teaches that the universe has the same origin as any idea, that is, in and for a mind;
therefore the correct way to regard the relation between the universe and its originator is to see it as being similar to the relation between any human idea and the mind in which it is begotten.
The World Mind does not need to ‘create’ the universe out of nothing when it can bring it to birth out of its own self.
And as a mental principle it does this by projecting the world as its idea.
The world is its self projection.
The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter III, The Birth of the Universe.
Paul Brunton
Courage...
Is there any difference between you and I ?..
Of course not, skin color or religion is just a thought..
We think, therefore, we are..
The thinkers are the creators of this dream..
Are we not yet tired of this dream ?..
We continue to dream and yet we do not realize that We exist as Light, Love, and Consciousness, doing this dreaming..
This plane of existence, we call God..
We suffer within this dream as Gautama has informed us of..
And yet, we desire to continue this pain because we fear the unknown..
I think that it is time to laugh..
Why would we fear Love ?..
Courage is the key word..
Courage is proceeding even within the thoughts of fear..
If you are truly intelligent, you will realize that fear must be stompted within the ground, if You are to attain Freedom..
I leave the final answer to you...
namaste, thomas
Thoughts Tonight...
It is not strange that Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists read this blog..
After all, It is in Reality the same Knowledge..
You have passed from the teachers of duality and into Reality..
Is this space in time, not strange to you ?..
In the lower space of your mind, it is strange,
but, in the deepest part of your heart, it is correct..
You have overcome the mind control of the illusion..
Where will you go from here ?..
Excuse me, while I laugh with joy..
You have become free and yet, you are still pulled within the illusion of ego..
Do not fear, You are experiencing Reality..
Walk with me into the Nothingness of Pure Awareness..
There is no longer any pull into the reincarnation of egoic pain..
Think and meditate upon this level of consciousness...
namaste, thomas
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene...
Chapter 4
(Pages 1 to 6 of the manuscript, containing chapters 1 - 3, are lost. The extant text starts on page 7...)
. . . Will matter then be destroyed or not?
22) The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.
23) For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.
24) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
25) Peter said to him, Since you have explained everything to us, tell us this also: What is the sin of the world?
26) The Savior said There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin.
27) That is why the Good came into your midst, to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root.
28) Then He continued and said, That is why you become sick and die, for you are deprived of the one who can heal you.
29) He who has a mind to understand, let him understand.
30) Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature. Then there arises a disturbance in its whole body.
31) That is why I said to you, Be of good courage, and if you are discouraged be encouraged in the presence of the different forms of nature.
32) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
33) When the Blessed One had said this, He greeted them all,saying, Peace be with you. Receive my peace unto yourselves.
34) Beware that no one lead you astray saying Lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you.
35) Follow after Him!
36) Those who seek Him will find Him.
37) Go then and preach the gospel of the Kingdom.
38) Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.
39) When He said this He departed.
from gnosis.org
cause and effect...
The world is a complex of countless numbers of connected events.
Consequently no absolute single cause can be strictly assigned to any single event.
From the fact that however far we attempt to trace back to a first cause of the universe,
we find every so called cause itself to have its origin in a preceding cause,
and that the latter is in its turn the effect produced by a previous cause,
it is right and reasonable to infer that there is no beginning in the universe and consequently there can be no end.
This means that the process of ever becoming is an eternal one and is the very law of the universe’s own being.
For no particular thing is a cause alone or an effect alone but must always be both at the same time.
The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter III, The Birth of the Universe.
Paul Brunton
pure unmixed joy...
As the personal 'I' disappears,
under the piercing
light of self-inquiry,
that which witnesses its
disappearance remains as it ever is --
pure unmixed
joy!..
- Mooji
the knowledge of Nothing...
"A man asked [Ramana] Maharshi to say something to
him. When asked what he wanted to know, he said that
he knew nothing and wanted to hear something from the
Maharshi.
Maharshi: 'You know that you know nothing. Find out
that knowledge [of nothing.] That is liberation
[mukti].
Sri Ramana Maharshi
_in Whitall N. Perry
_A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom_
Varanasi: Indica, 1998 (1971), p. 744-745
[Real knowledge of nothingness is Nirvana. _Nirvana_
means blowing out, as of a candle. It symbolizes the
extinction of limited mind, and the ensuing
realization of emptiness (Sanskrit _shunyata_). That
"emptiness" is the fulness of pure awareness --
Infinite Consciousness (Nirvikalpa). tjh]
the good seed...
"Even pagan masters, such as Cicero and Seneca, speak of the nobility of the inner man, that is the spirit, and the worthlessness of the outer man, that is the flesh,
saying that no rational soul can exist without God and that the seed of God is in us.
With a good, wise and industrious farmer, that seed would flourish all the more and would grow up towards God, whose seed it is,
and the fruit would be akin to God's nature.
The seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, that of a nut tree into a nut tree, and the seed of God grows into God.
But if the good seed has a foolish and wicked farmer, then weeds will grow, smothering the good seed and pushing it out, so that it cannot reach the light or grow to its full height.
But as the great master Origen says:
since it is God himself who has engendered this seed, sowing and implanting it, it can never be destroyed or extinguished in itself, even if it is overgrown and hidden.
It glows and gleams, shines and burns and always seeks God."
Meister Eckhart
"On the Noble Man"
in Meister Eckhart — Selected Writings
Translated by Oliver Davies
Penguin Classics
the long and short path...
The essential features of the Long Path are its concern with moral
effort and its emphasis on character building;
its injunctions to pray
and meditate;
its insistence on the constant striving for self-mastery
through physical, emotional, and mental disciplines.
The essential
feature of the Short Path is its quest of the flash of enlightenment
through intuitive feeling and metaphysical thinking.
Some believe, and
would be satisfied with, this flash to be brief.
Others hope for its
permanent abidance.
— Notebooks Category 23: Advanced Contemplation > Chapter 5:
Balancing the Paths > # 7 Paul Brunton
meditation...
"Whether we sit with our arms folded this way and our legs crossed that way is of little consequence.
But it is extremely important to check and see if whatever meditation we do,
is an actual remedy for our suffering."
Lama Thubten Yeshe
the dream of duality...
We dream of Freedom..
Freedom from what ?..
Freedom from duality..
And yet We enter this dream of duality to experience both..
Can We be satisfied?..
Not as long as there is a We..
Duality is separation of Consciousness..
What a game We play..
We suffer within a framework of dissolution of materiality..
The body becomes older and the pains of the dissolution of the body continues..
All manifested objects return to the unmanifested state..
And yet We as Consciousness feel fear and pain at this Reality..
When do We grow up ?..
It is when We dissolve as both egoic and material consciousness...
namaste, thomas
Krishna speaks...
“Then tell me how many
Of those who seek freedom,
Shall know the total
Truth of my being?
Perhaps one only.”
“Fools pass blindly by the place of my dwelling
Here in the human form,
and of my majesty
They know nothing at all,
Who am the Lord, their soul.”
Krishna
Hinduism and Islam...
"My grandfather [Hazrat Inayat Khan of the Chishti
Sufi order] presented the Sufi message as an essential
awareness that could be discovered in the essence of
all of the major world religions.
It is the common
thread of mystical realization that units all
prophetic dispensations.
"This has been acknowledged in the history of Sufism.
The prince Dara Shaku, who was the heir apparent of
his father Shah Jihan, the great mogul king, wrote a
book called MAJ HAMU AL BAHRAIN, which means "the
merging of the two oceans" --
one ocean being Islam,
the other being Hinduism. He made a cross-study and
comparison and concluded that, in essence, the common
realization was the unity of being [Sanskrit _sat
ekam_/parabrahman_; Arabic _tawhid/wahdat-al-wujud_].
They had different terminologies, different systems of
practice, but there was an essential unity.
"I believe that essential unity can be discovered in
all religious traditions. It is the common thread of
the depth of human experience on this planet, which is
universal, absolutely universal.
It transcends all of
the differences of acculturation, of ideology. There
is something essential about the human condition in
its fullness, and at the essence of the human
condition is a relationship with the divine."
Pir Zia Khan
_Religion and Ethics Newsweekly_ (PBS)
November 8, 2002 Episode no. 610
when I die...
The question of what will happen to me
when I die,
is indeed as misconceived as
the question of what happens to my lap
when I stand up,
or to my fist when I open
my hand.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"A Net of Jewels"
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Advaita Press, 1996
All is One...
The nature of experience is that it changes or undulates like the waves on the ocean. It's supposed to be doing that. Identity starts to shift from "me," the seeker, chasing some particular experience, to just this. Just this.
The center is always right here. The center always was right here. It's just the seeker that insisted the center could be in the spiritual high experience. But as the seeker dissolves, then right here is where every instant is the center. It's motionless right here.
And you can be having a very ordinary, a very unhappy, or a very extraordinary emotional and psychological experience, and still the center is right here. And only from here does it begin to dawn that everything is an expression of the center. Everything.
There is no expression that is more the truth than any other expression. There is no experience that is more the truth than any other experience because, in the center of it all, there is no seeker. Right here, there is nothing. All is One
~ From: Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti. www.adyashanti.org/
the soul...
In Hinduism, the soul is eternal..
In Buddhism, there is no soul, only a personality that evaporates..
Hinduism brings You into the Realization of Self as Divine Consciousness,
devoid of human ego but continuing the personality and ego of God..
Before Manifestation, there was Nothing!..
It is this Nothingness that dreamed into existence Divine Consciousness as the Manifesting Source..
Therefore, Hinduism brings You to the First Reality of Self as Divine Consciousness (God)..
Buddhism brings You into the Nothingness of Original Source called Pure Awareness..
There is no personality or ego within Original Source..
The manifested souls of Divine Consciousness can remain as this Light, Love, and Consciousness for Eternity or until Pure Awareness decides to end this dream..
The soul cannot pass higher than Divine Consciousness..
The return to Original Source is found through the Realization that You do not Exist,
Only Pure Awareness Exists..
You are the dreams from the Awareness of Original Source..
namaste, thomas
sense of self...
"When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought,
is no longer conceptual,
there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving,
that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts.
You are that depth."
- Eckhart Tolle
the natural state...
If the mind falls asleep, awaken it.
Then if it
starts wandering,
make it quiet.
If you reach
the state where there is neither sleep nor
movement of mind,
stay still in that,
the
natural (real) state.
- Sri Ramana Maharshi
a monk...
"He who has no thought of 'I' and 'mine',
whatever toward his mind and body,
he who grieves not for what he has not,
he is, indeed,
called a _bhikkhu_ [monk].
Gautama the Buddha
_Dhammapada_ 367
in Andrew Wilson, Ed.
_World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts_
St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1995, p. 638
I am Free...
I am free from the three kinds of afflictions -
those in
the body,
those from other beings,
and those caused
by higher powers.
I am different from the gross, subtle
and causal bodies.
I am the witness of the three states
of waking , dream and deep sleep.
I am the very Self,
indestructible and changeless.
- Adi Shankara
the mapmaker...
"The stranger asks the way of him who knows it:
taught by the skilful guide he travels onward.
This is, in truth, the blessing of instruction:
he finds the path that leads directly forward."
_Rig Veda_ 10.32.7
in _The Hymns of the Rig Veda_
Translated by Ralph T.H. Griffith
London, 1889
Zen Poem...
I laugh at myself, old man, with no strength left,
inclined to piney peaks, in love with lonely
pathways...
Oh well,
I've wandered down the years to now,
free in the flow,
and floated home the same,
a drifting boat.
- Shih Te
[from 'Cold Mountain Poems' translated by J.P. Seaton]
wine...
What the Sufi calls wine,
is the pleasure he derives when he sees what activates all the different lives.
It is like drinking wine.
One will always find that the most evolved sages can be amused.
It is the tickling of the mind that produces humor.
HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN
Selected & Arranged By
HAZRAT PIR VILAYAT INAYAT KHAN
A night for Thought...
Saturday, a night of drinking and dance..
The soul seeks pleasure and contentment within the dream..
Although, I did not participate in these festivities, I acted as the 'Watcher of the dream'..
Consciousness seeing the dualities of Consciousness..
Such a game We play..
Alcohol releases the ego in some and increases the ego in others..
All seek Happiness, this is the goal of life..
And yet most are lost within the dream of duality..
Love is sought within the group and sometimes ego wins the battle of the dream, the dream then becomes a nightmare of egoic consciousness..
Yes, the ego is ever present..
Have we not chosen to play this game ?..
Because, we believe that we are separate entities of consciousness, we are foolishly confronted with the other actors..
We are on the stage of entertainment that We observe as Consciousness..
This stage is a dream..
And yet, we fight to the death to continue to play our parts..
Who will die, as the hero or villain ?..
Laughter, escapes from my lungs..
Saturday night continues without me...
namaste, thomas
Beyond Belief...
What is Belief?..
Thoughts and education of the thinking mind, usually given by others..
This thought pattern will keep the mind focused on the reality that has been chosen for you and may not be the correct Reality..
Only, when you drop all belief and surrender Everything to the Infinite can you Realize Reality..
Belief will only create a wall of illusion of what others believe is Real..
Going beyond mind and belief is entering Enlightenment..
namaste, thomas
kindling intelligence...
The metaphysics of truth is set out in such a way that the student believes he is proceeding step by step purely by logical deduction from ascertainable facts, that his reasoned thinking upholds the findings of transcendental experience,
whereas not only is he doing this but at the same time is proceeding upon a path which conforms to his own latent insight.
It kindles a higher intelligence in its students.
Consequently the sense either of sudden or of growing revelation may often accompany his studies, if he be sufficiently intuitive.
The authentic metaphysics of truth can bring him close to the mystical experience of reality.
Then the trigger-pull which will start the experience moving need only be something slight, perhaps a printed inspired sentence, perhaps just a single meeting with one who has learnt to live in the Overself, or perhaps a climb in the mountains.
For then the mind becomes like a heap of dry wood, needing only a spark to flare up into a blazing pile.
The close attention to its course of thought then becomes a yoga-path in itself..
— Notebooks Category 7: The Intellect > Chapter 7: Metaphysics of Truth > # 6
— Perspectives > Chapter 7: The Intellect > # 33 Paul Brunton
Ishvara...
Ishvara (God) is an object as a tree is an object.
Your point of view in respect of the Absolute is
called Ishvara. It is a point of view only, it does
not really exist. If you cease to exist, it also goes.
You will not see Ishvara when you reach the
Absolute.
It is like an X in mathematics. It is a great help
in finding a solution but it is not in itself existing
there. Without it you cannot have the solution
and it in itself has no meaning. Ishvara cannot
be avoided as long as the world is seen with
your eyes.
The Ishvara concept is an automatic outcome
of your belief in the reality of the world and
when the world exists, Ishvara has to exist
as the cause thereof, but if the world does not
exist, Ishvara need not exist because if the
effect is not there, what is the use of the cause?
- Swami Krishnananda
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Facets of Spirituality
Complied by S. Bhagyalakshmi
Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1986
Didn't I tell you ?...
Didn't I tell you,
Do not leave me, for I am your only Friend,
I am the spring of life.
Even if you leave in anger for thousands of years
You will come back to me, for I am your goal and your end.
Didn't I tell you,
not to be seduced by this colorful world
for I am the Ultimate Painter.
Didn't I tell you,
you are a fish do not go to dry land,
for I am the deep Sea.
Didn't I tell you,
not to fall in the net like birds,
for I am your wings and the power of light.
Didn't I tell you,
not to let them change your mind and turn you to ice,
for I am your fire and warmth.
Didn't I tell you,
they will corrupt you and make you forget,
that I am the Spring of all virtues.
Didn't I tell you,
not to question my actions,
for everything falls into order, I am the Creator.
Didn't I tell you,
your heart can guide you home,
because it knows that I am your Master.
- Rumi
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Rumi: Hidden Music
Translation by Azima Melita Kolin
and Maryam Mafi
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2001
giving up belief...
Belief, any belief, is based on the sense of
insecurity.
Only when all belief is given
up are you free to know yourself.
In self-
discovery what you find is the Truth -
that
Truth which is total,
self-evident and
which needs no outside support
or justification..
- Ramesh S. Balsekar
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"A Net of Jewels"
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Advaita Press, 1966
Belief...
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
Gautama the Buddha..
(Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)
Works...
"Works are for the purification of the mind,
not for the realization
of reality.
The realization of Truth results from discrimination
[of
the real and the unreal],
and not in the least by ten million acts."
Shankara
in Aldous Huxley
_The Perennial Philosophy_
NY: Harper, 1945, p. 294-295
A Zen Master Speaks...
"How can one penetrate to the True Face of the Lotus? To do this one must raise the great ball of doubt. What is being pointed out when we speak of the True Face of the Lotus? It is the Wondrous Law of the One Mind, with which you yourself are endowed from the outset. It is nothing more than to see into your own mind.
And what is this "own mind?" Don't look for something white or something red, but by all means see it at once. Courageously and firmly establish your aspiration, raise up the great vow, and night and day investigate it to the end.
For investigating the mind there are many methods. If you are a practitioner of the Lotus Sutra who ignores the teachings of other schools, then you must transcend the practice of the Lotus Samadhi. The practice of the Lotus Samadhi is from today on to determine, despite happiness and pain, sadness and joy, whether asleep or awake, standing or reclining, to intone without interruption the title of the Sutra alone: Reverence to the Lotus of the Wondrous Law Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.
Whether you use this title as a staff or as a source of strength, you must recite it with the fervent wish to see without fail the True Face of the Lotus. Make each inhalation and exhalation of your breath the title of the Sutra. Recite it without ceasing with intense devotion.
If you recite it without flagging, it will not be long before the mind-nature will truly be set as firmly as a large rock. Dimly you will gain an awareness of a state in which the One Mind is without disturbance. At this time, do not discard this awareness, but continue your constant recitation.
Then you will awaken to the Great Matter of true meditation, and all the ordinary consciousnesses and emotions will not operate. It will be as if you had entered into the Diamond Sphere, as if you were seated within a lapis lazuli vase, and, without any discriminating thought at all, suddenly you will be no different from one who has died the Great Death.
After you have returned to life, unconsciously the pure and uninvolved true principle of undistracted meditation will appear before you. You will see right before you, in the place where you stand, the True Face of the Lotus, and at once you body and mind will drop off. The true, unlimited, eternal, perfected Tathagata will manifest himself clearly before your eyes and never depart, though you should attempt to drive him away.
This is the time that the Tendai school refers to as "plunging into the treasure abode, where the Dharma-nature is undisturbed, yet constantly illuminating." In Shingon it is to be illumined by the Sun Disc of the Inherent Nature of the Letter A. In the Ritsu it is the harmonize with the unparalleled Diamond-Treasure Precepts of the Many Buddhas. In the Pure Land School it is to fulfill one's vow for rebirth in Paradise, to see before one's eyes the marvelous birds and trees of Paradise and to keep constantly in mind the wondrous ornamentation of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha."
Hakuin
Zen Master Hakuin's Letter in Answer to an Old Nun of the Hokke [Nichiren] Sect
Translated by Philip B. Yampolsky
The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings
Columbia University Press: New York. 1971 edition, pp. 86-123
recognize your own reflection...
When the mind goes out looking for the reality of
Consciousness, all that it will ever find is just more
mind.
Instead, turn around and see whose mind is doing
all this so-called looking.
Who you really are has absolutely no polarity.
Since Consciousness stands in opposition to
nothing, it creates no real opposite.
Who you think you are, however, does appear
to have an opposite.
The Game begins anew whenever you start
pretending again that you don't recognize your
own reflection.
- Chuck Hillig
Love Itself...
Love itself is the healing power and the remedy for all pain.
Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan
Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:
There is no greater power than love. All strength comes with the awakening of love in the heart. ... If there is any protecting influence in the world, it is no other than love. In all aspects of life, wherever we find protection, its motive is always love, and no one can have trust in any protection, however great, except the protection that love offers. If a giant were to frighten a child, the child would say, 'I will tell my mother.' The strength and power of any man is too small in comparison with love's protection which the mother affords her child. Love can heal better than anything in the world.
Behind all this world of various names and forms there is one life, there is one spirit. This spirit which is the soul of all beings is attracted towards unity, and it is the absence of this spirit which keeps the world unhappy. To a person who has just had some unpleasantness with his brother or sister, his food is tasteless, the night without sleep, the heart restless, the soul under a cloud. This shows that we do not necessarily live on food; our soul lives on love, the love that we receive and the love that we give. The absence of this is our unhappiness, and the presence of it is all we need.
True life cannot be ours until unity is achieved. It is the work of religion to promote the spirit of unity, in the knowledge and love of God to whom all devotion belongs. Man often seeks for psychic, occult, and magnetic powers. This is not the purpose of religion; these developments come of themselves. Where there is life and love, there is magnetism; love itself is the healing power and the remedy for all pain.
The dark clouds brought romance between Thee, my Beloved, and me.
an unselfish life...
To live a pure unselfish life,
one must count nothing as one's own,
in
the midst of abundance.
Gautama the Buddha
the notes of Truth...
"THE flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is love:
When love renounces all limits, it reaches truth.
How widely the fragrance spreads!
It has no end, nothing stands in its way.
The form of this melody is bright like a million suns:
incomparably sounds the vina,
the vina of the notes of truth."
Kabir
Songs of Kabir, L
Translated by Rabindranath Tagore
New York, The Macmillan Company, 1915, p. 96-97
conscious of being...
There is only one state of being.
There is not
a single moment when one is not conscious
of being.
What we are in our sentient state is
the consciousness of being present.
When
this conscious awareness is aware of sensory
forms, it operates as witnessing.
When it
identifies itself with a witnessing organism as
a separate entity,
it operates as an individual
person who suffers and enjoys.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"A Net of Jewels"
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Advaita Press, 1996
Leave the lower dimensions alone...
If one has the capacity to make progress and to tune in to the True Divinity,
he must--if he is to continue and not become sidetracked--
renounce all interest in mediumistic or other so-called spiritualistic practices.
Such an individual should strive to better his own character,
cultivate his intuition,
and increase his knowledge about the higher laws by studying inspired and reliable books.
— Notebooks Category 2: Overview of Practices Involved > Chapter 9: Conclusion > # 35
Paul Brunton
His Light...
When a lamp has derived its light from a
candle,
every one that sees the lamp certainly
sees the candle.
Either behold the light of
God from the lamps of the saints,
or behold
His light from the candle of those who have
gone before.
- Rumi
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Daylight"
Threshold Books, 1994
A letter from God...
Hello everyOne,
I know that we don't get together all that much to have any real conversation, so I decided to write a few words..
I know about all the pain and fear that you daily suffer and I wish that I could do something about it...
but, these are your creations and I have given My promise of your free will to create and destroy..
This is usually My job,
as I am 'Divine Consciousness' and have the power of creation and destruction..
My Source and Creator, is called 'Pure Awareness' and does not even Know Itself,
as there is no ego to see Itself..
This is why I run things here in the lower frequencies..
I realise that there is separation, but, this also is a creation of your mind..
You and I are actually the same Creator..
this speaking to Myself feels a little weird,
but needed...
The real message that I want to give you is to "Wake Up"..
I'm tired of sleeping and need to return Home,
just as You do.....
namaste, thomas
Mystical Quotes...
Christian quotes can be linked directly to Buddha quotes and Krishna quotes.
Jesus Christ taught the path of love as did Krishna and Buddha.
We can call on Jesus, Krishna or Buddha to assist us in our pursuit of enlightenment.
There is only one Christ appearing as Jesus, Buddha and Krishna.
The teachings of Jesus, Buddha and Krishna are essentially the same.
Buddha, Krishna and Jesus all taught that the ego must be removed in order for God to be revealed.
Jesus is lord, Krishna is lord and Buddha is lord because they are all emanations of the same Christ Consciousness.
The esoteric mysteries are revealed in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha and Krishna.
Esoteric Jesus is the hidden or inner path. The blood of Jesus Christ is love. Every major religion can be connected.
Spiritual awareness is what is needed for enlightenment.
Compassion is common to Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and other major world religions.
Inner peace and happiness are the goal of Christian mysticism. The anti Christ is the ego. To love Christ is to become Christ.
Spiritual metaphysics is the practice of seeking God within one's self.
Ego death is required to merge with God.
Mysticism is the path of finding the direct experience of God.
There is no need for the world religions to compete with one another. The second coming of Christ has to do with the discovery of the Christ that is within us all.
It is easy to favorably compare Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism if one realizes the unity of all life.
Spirituality is like the depths of the ocean while religion is the surface.
The supreme wisdom lies at the heart of every being...
...Taken from a book titled, "Quotes of the Buddha"..
Exaltation...
Exaltation comes by touching the reason of reasons and realizing the essence of wisdom, by feeling the profound depth of one’s heart, by widening one’s outlook on life, by broadening one’s conception, by deepening one’s sympathies.
A further cause of exaltation comes when we have asked forgiveness and humbled ourselves before someone towards whom we were inconsiderate.
We have humbled our pride then.
Or when we have felt a deep gratitude to someone who had done something for us, when we have felt love, sympathy, devotion that seems endless and that seems so great that our heart cannot accommodate it,
when we have felt so much pity for someone that we have forgotten ourselves,
when we have found a profound happiness in rendering a humble service to someone in need, when we have said a prayer that has come from the bottom of our heart, when we have realized our own limitation and smallness in comparison with the greatness of God.
All these experiences lift man up.
HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN
Selected & Arranged By
HAZRAT PIR VILAYAT INAYAT KHAN
seeking pleasure...
What you seek is pleasure and not an object.
So do not
make the mistake of thinking that your mind wants this or
that object.
You do not want anything, only pleasure.
And
if you think that a particular object can give pleasure you
go near it, but if it does not give satisfaction you will leave
it alone and go to another place for another object.
In this
way, your life is spent looking for pleasure and not for a
particular object which it really cannot find.
And nowhere
you will find this pleasure you are seeking - nowhere.
Because it is not a commodity of this world.
It belongs
to some other realm altogether.
- Swami Krishnananda
Truth is a living Being...
"truth is a living being
that must be nourished and fed and loved
then it grows and blossoms
filing the air with pure aroma
making us gasp with delight
truth is a friend
that asks for loyalty and acceptance
then it enters our hearts
dissolving the boundaries freeing us from loneliness
truth is a demanding lover
that requires constant affection
and endless gifts
then it rewards us with a glimpse of indescribable beauty
making us faint with satisfaction
and finally truth is an empty hand
that asks for and requires nothing"
Sri Poonja
self-reliance...
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path.
Gautama the Buddha
Self-Realization...
"Self-Realization" is essentially a very comprehensive understanding, a profound, direct, experiential realization that "who I am" really has nothing to do with a concept about who I am. The basic realization of who you are, who you REALLY are beyond all concepts, roles and images of a "you", is simply who you are in direct experience and not "who you are" conceptually. So, lets investigate this a bit. Who am I in my own immediate, direct experience in this very instant, right now? Who are you? What is the direct, most basic experience of "being" which we all experience?
One way of pointing to this basic experience of "being" that we are all experiencing all the time, is to use simple grammatical terms that we all learned as children. The first person singular, present tense of the verb "to be" actually points to this reality of simply being. This verbal phrase is the first person, singular, present tense of the verb "to be" and NOT the verb "to do". It is not a doing but a being. The first person singular, present tense of the verb "to be" is: "I Am." This is simply, basically, essentially just "I Am" with no adjuncts or additions at all. It is not "I am a woman" or "I am a Man" or I am a butcher, a baker, or a candle-stick maker. Nor is it even about the idea or concept, "I am enlightened" either! Can you see how the statement, "I am enlightened" and the conceptual beliefs and personal identification with that statement are just the formation of another concept about who you are, or who you or others seem to believe you are?
This is just a "spiritual" concept, but has no more relationship to who you really are in your direct experience than any other concept like, I am "smart" or "beautiful" or "rich" or a "saint" or a "sinner" etc.....On an absolute level, there is no "me" or "you" that can claim "enlightenment" as a personal possession. It's a lot like the statement, "I am humble." Actual humility is just not being so self-referenced. It is a matter of not making a big deal about yourself. It is about a very natural un-self-consciousness that what we call a "humble person" just spontaneously radiates. The "humble" are not "full of themselves". They are not "a legend in their own mind"! Can you see how a person that sits around thinking about how humble they are and is constantly congratulating themselves on their humility, somehow loses their humility in the process?
Likewise, a person who sits around thinking about how "enlightened" they are and makes a big deal about this belief, and has a lot of identification with this idea of themselves, and is often out to prove how "enlightened" they are to either themselves or other people, is just trying to add something yet again to the basic sense of being "I Am", which is the authentic essence of what we call "enlightenment". To take this a step forward; In order to simply abide in the "I Am' of essential being, in the true "enlightenment", you must renounce the idea of yourself as "an enlightened person". Even if you have seen the "I Am' for a minute, or a day, or a week, that does not mean you have actually "realized it" in any kind of stable way. If you glimpse it and it goes away again, "realization" has not yet taken place, but perhaps "practice" has. Even if you get an authentic glimpse of this "I Am" and then hold onto an idea or concept or identification with the thought, "I am enlightened"....you are then covering over the bare "I Am" with the "enlightened" concept and so are obscuring the natural sense of en-light-en-ment, that has always been present.
If you have an identification with the belief, "I am an enlightened one" you will end up trying to maintain an image or role of enlightenment just as human beings all over the planet try to maintain various roles or impressions. Then you must always try to conduct yourself in a way that fits your own or other's ideas of how an "enlightened person" must act. This becomes a silly game that will actually serve to eventually wear you out (!) and quite effectively obscure your own simple, natural sense of "I Am', which has never left you in the first place. Just let go of all your concepts about enlightenment and return to this most basic sense of being "I Am" again and again. Then maybe you will finally discover what the REALITY of "enlightenment" is, the true seeing in light/clarity about the real nature of reality. This Reality is entirely beyond any words or concepts or beliefs you could ever possibly form about it.
The point of "Self-Realization" is to actually see this and then allow that seeing to inform one's whole life. "Self-Realization", like any authentic spiritual insight, is a door through which you walk in order to enter a "new room" spiritually speaking. When you walk through a door to enter a room in the physical world, you don't then sit around thinking about having walked through the door do you? No, you walk through the door and forget about it. Walking through the door is a beginning not an ending. Once you walk through the door you go on to explore the room you have walked into, you don't sit around thinking about how wonderful and special it was to walk through the door.
Francis Bennett
Parables...
Someone said to Bahaudin Naqshband:
"You relate stories, but you do not
tell us how to understand them."
He said:
"How would you like it if the man from whom you bought
fruit consumed it before your eyes,
leaving you only the skin?"
as collected by Idries Shah
Ram Tzu Speaks...
Ram Tzu has some questions for you...
Just who do you think you are?
Are you other than God?
Are you separate from Me?
If so...
What are you made of?
Where did it come from?
Don't look to science to help you.
The physicists have all become mystics.
They're of no more use to you than is Ram Tzu.
If you're really clever you'll turn around
And walk away
Fast!
Hang around here and you're liable to lose
Everything you hold dear.
Go back to your church, your temple,
Your therapist, your drug dealer, your ashram.
There you may find a moments peace.
You found it there once.
Here is only emptiness for you.
You'll find no food for your ego here.
What if your precious sense of self
Were to shrivel up and die?
Where would you be then?
What would happen?
Best not to risk it.
stopping the mind...
"Mystic understanding of truth,
is not perception or cognition.
That is why it is said that you arrive at the original source,
by stopping the mind."
Non-ch'uan
in _Teachings of Zen_
Translated by Thomas Cleary
NY: Barnes & Noble, 1998, p. 21
Inspired books...
A book which is truly inspired ,
will contain many a sentence that can be used suggestively in meditation.
Linger over some of them as long as you can.
It is not movement which matters here but depth.
— Notebooks Category 4: Elementary Meditation > Chapter 6: Mantrams, Affirmations > # 224
Paul Brunton
Dissolution of appearance...
The dream world contains all the relevant
features of the "actual" world.
But the
continued appearance of a thing is not
proof of its reality,
regardless of whether
it appears to the dreaming mind or the
waking senses.
Only with the dissolution
of all appearance does one awaken to the
ultimate Reality of the Self.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
"A Net of Jewels"
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Advaita Press, 1996
the Knower...
Forget the known,
but remember that you are
the knower.
Don't be all the time immersed in
your experiences.
Remember that you are beyond
the experiencer,
ever unborn and deathless.
In
remembering it,
the quality of pure knowledge
will emerge,
the light of unconditional awareness.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
already present now...
All seeking is a search outside yourself for
peace, happiness...
True peace is not found
by looking to the future,
but realizing now,
that anything and everything arises in the
already-present Peace that you are.
Siddharameshwar Maharaj
from ego to Love...
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
Kahlil Gibran
Ram Tzu Speaks...
Ram Tzu knows this. . .
The fear never leaves you.
It is part of you
As tied to your center as your breath.
Touch it,
Stroke it
Get to know it well.
As long as you are
It will be with you.
You scream
You shout
You rage
You want quit of it.
You push it away with all your strength.
But hear this. . .
It thrives on all the exercise
You give it.
It gets stronger when
You give it something to push up against.
Left alone it will wither and die.
But you know you can not leave it alone.
You must always fight the fear.
It is your nature to always fight.
Yet sometimes there is Grace . . .
You disappear into it
And there is no longer a battle.
The warrior is gone.
* * * * *
a drop of water...
"BEHOLD how this drop of sea-water
Has taken so many forms and names;
It has existed as mist, cloud, rain, dew, and mud,
Then plant, animal, and perfect man;
And yet it was a drop of water
From which these things appeared.
Even so this universe of reason, soul, heavens, and bodies,
Was but a drop of water in its beginning and ending.
. . . When a wave strikes it, the world vanishes;
And when the appointed time comes to heaven and stars,
Their being is lost in not being."
Shabistari
The Secret Rose Garden Of Sa’d Ud Din Mahmūd
Part III - The Sea And Its Pearls - A Drop Of Sea-Water
Rendered From The Persian With An Introduction by Florence Lederer
London, J. Murray, 1920, p. 36
Tao Te Ching...
Between birth and death,
Three in ten are followers of life,
Three in ten are followers of death,
And men just passing from birth to death also number three in ten.
Why is this so?
Because they live their lives on the gross level.
He who knows how to live can walk abroad
Without fear of rhinoceros or tiger.
He will not be wounded in battle.
For in him rhinoceroses can find no place to thrust their horn,
Tigers no place to use their claws,
And weapons to place to pierce.
Why is this so?
Because he has no place for death to enter.
- Lao-tzu
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Tao Te Ching
Translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
Vintage Books Edition, September 1972
Kings of a Nightmare...
Those souls that are Awake and Aware, know of the rulers of this world..
This manifestation called world is a dream of Consciousness and consists of the duality of egoic and non-egoic selves..
Those, that rebel against Reality have chosen the false self of ego as their God..
They seek eternal life within the physical manifestation of earth as their reward for serving the negative entities called Archons, that survive by absorbing the negative energy of fear..
This is why, there are constant wars and violence and the fear of survival..
These Archons are also called evil spirits of possession and Jesus would often dispel these entities from the bodies afflicted..
In Islam, they are called Jinn..
They exist between the third and fourth dimensions..
These Archons have convinced certain bloodlines of rulers that they will reincarnate within a body and family of wealth and power..
This is why the same family bloodlines are ruling the world today..
They belong to secret societies that swear an oath to remain silent of their mission..
As Jesus once said;
"What does it profit a man, to gain the world but lose his soul ?"..
These people gain the world but live in constant fear of their own survival and detection..
They remain imprisioned within the continuous reincarnations into this world of physical and mental pain..
Being in this constant state of egoic consciousness, they do not feel the Joy of Love for other souls..
So perhaps, instead of hating these mass murderers of war manifestation, We should pity them for their choice of eternal imprisionment and pain..
This is their mental, spiritual, and physical state called Hell...
namaste, thomas
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