Clinging and resisting.
More clinging and more resisting.
Letting go a little.
Back to clinging and resisting.
Letting go deeply.
Awakening.
Discovering the home that was never left.

Infinite Emptiness, Timeless Perfection.

_____________________________

No moment can be different than what it is, or it would be different.
We feel what we feel, not what we would like to feel.
Our deepest disagreement is with reality itself.

_____________________________

There is no source of true identity. Only this. This is it.

_____________________________


It is not personal. Never has been.

_____________________________


"All a sane man can ever think about is giving love."
- Hafiz

_____________________________

"Sages do not grieve for the living nor the dead.
Never did I not exist, nor you, nor these rulers of men;
nor will any one of us ever hereafter cease to be."
(Bhagavad Gita II).

_____________________________

The Inevitable. All else is a dream.

_____________________________


“We do not see things as they are, but as we are"
Talmud

_____________________________

What is it like?

While the world is trying to solve its problems and everyone around you is trying to figure it out, you're not. While everybody around you is trying to get there, trying to be worthy, you're not. While everybody is having an argument with somebody else, and mostly with themselves, you're not.

While everybody is so sure that happiness will come when something is different than it is now, you know that it won't. While everyone on the path is getting there; you haven't gotten anywhere. While everyone on the path is trying to forgive, you are not. Because there is no resentment held.

None of this is something to achieve, because it's not achievable. You will let go when you let go, usually when nothing else works. You're alone, and you're finally comfortable with it. You're alone, more alone than you could ever imagine. And strangely, very strangely, you are more connected, more intimate, more at one with everything. And you would have never thought that those two could in any way be together: total aloneness and total oneness. You would have never guessed that that's the way it would end up. But it does, and it always has.
- Adyashanti

_____________________________

Letting go just happens when it is time.
-Trish

_____________________________

I was entirely in the present. There was neither past nor future. No expectations, no judgments of my situation. No sense of regret, for there was no sense, as I said , of past (to regret) or future (to despair for). I just existed, and it was beautiful. I was transcending eternity and in the void and I was the void and the void was me... and I would be in this place where I was forever.. and if forever were to be an instant or a thousand years was immaterial and irrelevant. I felt, "Abide with me, here, now, for I am at peace, and we are one". I felt a oneness with whoever was in the room with me, and whoever was unconscious with me, and it was good. It was just that -- good. Nothing fabulous, or miraculous, or brilliant. Just "good". Perfectly, clearly, good. I could have spent a trillion years right there, with that presence, whatever it was. But the hard thing to explain is that there was no "trillion years". There was just NOW. I had no sense of future. At the time, any concept of "eternity" was beyond my experience, for "time" was beyond my experience. The glorious euphoric peace, the presence, the empty, falling, now-ness with no past or future -- I can't recapture it, and it has changed my life, and I need to talk to others about it, and as a scientist I know that it was probably "just anoxia" -- but there is so much more to it that cannot be explained -- and yes, it has changed my life. Not what I saw, or heard, but what I felt. My priorities lined up, my values came into focus, everything in that void where one would think "Nothing" existed - the only reason it is called "Nothing", I believe, is that there is no Time, and existence is purely Being. That was my experience. Perhaps this is what the existentialist philosophers tried so hard to communicate, this "being-in-the moment", this awareness of self... what they stated was paltry compared to this. What I felt was powerful and intense and life-changing. It transcended any mere "moment". But with this experience, I know (and I don't know how) that I can't force it, or rush it. This pure, perfect psychological state, that I achieved by accident and can only recapture in memory, is real, an a genuine capability of the human mind. I need to talk about it. I did a bad job, just now, of communicating what happened. I made it seem trivial.

Alison D's NDE

_____________________________

"My teacher's teacher: Ramana, said the only way to really speak about this was in silence. Basically he just sat absorbed in bliss, in the silence of his own being. Not speaking to anyone. When people came around him, all of a sudden they started to feel ecstatic and blissful. And their mind did not function. His silence was so profound that all their troubles would disappear. Even though he did not speak and did not do anything. Simply be being. Because of the profound effect he had on people, people would realize through him. Through a glance or through a touch they would recognize their own self. When you do meet somebody that is free of all of this, you see the possibility that you can live like this too."
- Isaac Schapiro

_____________________________

Daring to look at the background;

      the silence
      the vastness
      the emptiness

Without contrast the image is blurred. The foreground is not eliminated yet changed forever. What is seen is beyond both.

The background is not so much seen as realised as one's own basic self, allowed to move forward. An absolute presence - undeniable, indescribably real. - mg

Without realising the real, love is obscured. Allowing honesty is a test of love. The real cannot be threatened, it is freedom itself, unconcerned and without striving.

John Wren-Lewis: A Personal Report

My NDE itself, which I have described elsewhere, lacked almost all the dramatic features emphasized in the now voluminous literature on the subject. I had no "out-of-body" vision of myself in the hospital bed, no review of my life, no experience of hurtling through a tunnel towards a heavenly landscape and no encounter with supernatural figures urging me to return to bodily existence. I simply dissolved into an apparently spaceless and timeless void which was total "no-thing-ness" yet at the same time the most intense, blissful aliveness I have ever known.

The after-effects of the experience, however, were dramatic indeed, and I have found no account of anything comparable in the NDE literature. I have been left with a change of consciousness so palpable that in the early days I kept putting my hand up to the back of my head, feeling for all the world as if the doctors had removed the top of my skull and exposed my brain to the infinite darkness of space. In fact the Living Void is still with me as a kind of background to my consciousness. The effect is that I experience everything, including this sixty-year-old body-mind, as a continuous outpouring of Being, wherein every part is simultaneously the whole, manifesting afresh moment by moment from that infinite Dark. As "John" I seem to have no separate existence, but am simply the Void knowing itself in manifestation, and in that process of continuous creation everything seems to celebrate coming into being with a shout of joy—"Behold, it is very good!" Yet the experience is in no sense a high, for its feeling-tone is one of gentle equanimity. My impression is rather that I am now knowing the true ordinariness of everything for the first time, and that what I used to call normal consciousness was in fact clouded.

I still slip back into that old clouded state frequently, but this is not a process of "coming down." What happens is something I would have found unbelievable had I heard of it second-hand—namely, I again and again simply forget about the pearl of great price. I drift off into all kinds of preoccupations, mostly trivial, and become my old self, cut off from the Void-Background. Then, after a while, there begins to dawn on me a sense of something missing, at which point I recall the Void and usually click back into the new consciousness almost immediately, with no effort at all.

I think this is what is meant by the mystical notion that so-called normal human life is really a state of chronic forgetfulness of "who we really are," and I suppose my NDE must somehow have shocked me into recognizing my identity with the Void, with the result that my forgetfulness is now spasmodic rather than chronic. Needless to say, I was bowled over by all this at first, and spent many weeks coming to terms with it. I soon found that the new consciousness did not seem to demand any drastic changes of life-style. In keeping with its sense of utter ordinariness, I remained recognizably John, and neither my tendency to drift out of the new consciousness nor my ability to click back into it seemed affected in any way by variations in diet, environment, or activities such as meditation.

_____________________________

Gautama sat in a meditative mood underneath the tree from early morning to sunset, with a fiery determination and an iron resolve: "Let me die. Let my body perish. Let my flesh dry up. I will not get up from this seat till I get full illumination". He plunged himself into deep meditation. At night he entered into deep Samadhi (superconscious state) underneath that Bo-tree.

He was tempted by Maya in a variety of ways, but he stood adamant. He did not yield to Maya's allurements and temptations. He came out victorious with full illumination. He attained Nirvana (liberation). His face shone with divine splendour and effulgence. He got up from his seat and danced in divine ecstasy for seven consecutive days and nights around the Bo-tree. Then he came to the normal plane of consciousness. His heart was filled with profound mercy and compassion.

_____________________________

To the awakened there is nothing out of place, not even ignorance,
bogus future or suffering; nothing is disallowed, not even disallowing.

_____________________________

I entered my heart, and I remembered what I once knew.
I remembered light coming from everywhere.
I remembered peace coming from everywhere.
-Lilly

_____________________________

The Secrets of Heaven and Hell

The old monk sat by the side of the road. With his eyes closed, his legs crossed and his
hands folded in his lap, he sat. In deep meditation, he sat.

Suddenly his zazen was interrupted by the harsh and demanding voice of a samurai
warrior. "Old man! Can you teach me about heaven and hell!"

At first, as though he had not heard, there was no perceptible response from the monk.
But gradually he began to open his eyes, the faintest hint of a smile playing around the
corners of his mouth as the samurai stood there, waiting impatiently, growing more and
more agitated with each passing second.

"You wish to know the secrets of heaven and hell?" replied the monk at last. "You who
are so unkempt. You whose hands and feet are covered with dirt. You whose hair is
uncombed, whose breath is foul, whose sword is all rusty and neglected. You who are
ugly and whose mother dresses you funny. You would ask me of heaven and hell?"

The samurai uttered a vile curse. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head.
His face turned to crimson and the veins on his neck stood out in bold relief as he
prepared to sever the monk's head from its shoulders.

"That is hell," said the old monk gently, just as the sword began its descent.

In that fraction of a second, the samurai was overcome with amazement, awe, recognition
and compassion for this gentle being who had dared to risk his very life to give him
such a teaching. He stopped his sword in mid-flight and his eyes filled with grateful tears.

"And that," said the monk, "is heaven."

_____________________________


Reality cannot be threatened.

_____________________________

If I know where I came from
and if I know where I’m going to – do I then know who I am?

_____________________________

Is there fear, is there clinging, is there not knowing?
For me the answer is yes.
And that defines the essence of unfreedom.

_____________________________

There is no path. Truth comes, it is not sought.
...mg

_____________________________


Resolve. Firm resolve. To step directly from bondage into the realm of sages.
...mg

_____________________________


In meditation to be vulnerable is not the same as to be
insufficiently protected.

_____________________________


A strange moment of silence and the recognition that all fears
and concerns are and have always been utterly unjustified.

_____________________________


Doing is illusory, being is real.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj

_____________________________

Fighting loss, Resisting impermanence, Denying reality.

_____________________________

When Absolute Impermanence is resisted
Absolute Permanence is not known.

_____________________________

Absolute Invulnerability. Nothing less will do.
The price is total vulnerability.


_____________________________

Keep Breathing, Be Silent and Dare Not to Know.
- Paul Lowe

_____________________________

Stop thinking, planning, scheming;
be silent and let everything be as it is.
- Andrew Cohen

_____________________________

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.
- Zen saying

_____________________________

The state of self-realisation is an effortless state.
Stress, tension, anxiety are expressions of the effort to remain un-selfrealised.
...tdc

_____________________________

Avoiding the void is the main activity of the mind.
Best used when applied to myself.

Not avoiding the void - no void.
...tdc

_____________________________

Desire connects us to the world; fear connects us to the infinite.
Self realisation and realisation of the world appear together.
...tdc

_____________________________

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
-Marilyn Ferguson

_____________________________

Right now we do not know that the other side of fear is freedom.

_____________________________


The only difference between us and the monkeys is that we can talk about it.
...tdc

_____________________________

Just as on a sunny day the hand casts a shadow on the ground,
fear is the shadow cast by desire on the ground of consciousness.
...tdc

_____________________________

What is hope?
Hopelessness in disguise.

_____________________________

What is my deepest need?

What is my deepest fear?

_____________________________

Freedom is not offended by an occasional moment of wondering about the
effortless power that allows objects and events to appear and disappear.
The actual power, not an imaginary power.

Freedom may be offended by not taking that moment; by failing to wonder.
Mg

_____________________________

Whether or not there is such a thing as a mere object; inquire to see
if you can possibly be such a thing.

If you are determined to be a thing apart from yourself, you can take comfort
from the fact that you will have plenty of company.
Mg

_____________________________

The appearance of a person is the result of the effort to remain ignorant.
Mg

_____________________________

Deeds are the measure of sincerity.

_____________________________

The basic anxiety is anxiety about being-in-the-world,
as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world.
That is, both fear of death and fear of life.
-Heidegger

_____________________________

The core of my being is non-being.

_____________________________

Your whole life is the history of your avoidance of the void.
...tdc

_____________________________

_____________________________

Words are the expression of dissatisfaction.
...tdc

_____________________________

Any investigation of the mind is incomplete
without due consideration of the opposites.
...tdc

_____________________________

The opposite of your deepest fear is your deepest desire.
...tdc

_____________________________

The generous ones suffer no loss.
He who owns nothing can lose nothing.
...mg

_____________________________

The mind can be known only by its imperfections. The perfect mind is undetectable.
...tdc

_____________________________

Disappointments have little to do with circumstance
and everything to do with perspective.

_____________________________

Returning to what was never left. Not even returning. Never left, never returned.
You were always home. Always home. Always home.
Needing nothing, lacking nothing. Unborn.

What you call life is clinging.

_____________________________

"Sages do not grieve for the living nor the dead.
Never did I not exist, nor you, nor these rulers of men;
nor will any one of us ever hereafter cease to be."
(Bhagavad Gita II).

_____________________________

The Final Battle

Facing all fears and the loss of all, the illusory difference
between life and death, between being and non-being dissolved,
and I have emerged into the silent bliss of reality.

But who are you?

Resting in the vastness of infinite being,
free from desire and sorrow;
I am eternal.