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Nondual Highlights Issue #1511 Saturday, August 2, 2003 Editor: Mark
When you begin to come to rest in the native Blissfulness of God, you realize freedom and you receive Grace. Grace is the humor you enjoy by always already resting in God. Grace is not ultimately a matter of achieving all kinds of successes in life. Success may come also, but that is just part of the game of experience. Grace is the liberation that comes when we rest in God. Then the locks in the heart are loosened, and the seriousness of experience is dispelled. We feel Radiant. Our occupations become Blissful. Our capacity to enter into the spiritual process is clarified and intensified. We have energy for spiritual life. The process of self-transcendence is quickened, and we move into higher stages of the transforming process until Enlightenment is Radical or Perfect, uncaused and unsupported. In that case, there is simply rest in God, or Grace Absolute, and the world and the body-mind are allowed to float in Infinity. There is no tension in the body-mind and no illusion.
The only Happiness is the release of the heart, or the differentiated self, which is not a fixed entity. The self is just like this clenched fist. Relax the fist and there is nothing inside. Relax the heart and there is no one inside. The sense of self is just the tension in the body-mind that gives it the sense of independence. Relax the tension and the body-mind becomes transparent. There is no ego. There is no ego in experience. That is why Enlightenment is not really an event in the universe. It is not associated with experience of special, so-called "Enlightenment phenomena." It would seem, from the ordinary point of view, that Enlightenment is the dissolution of this separate self. But Enlightenment is the Realization that there is no such self and that there never was; that there is no such self in all the other beings that now continue to exist, and that there never was a self when one was struggling to become Enlightened or to transcend oneself.
- excerpt from "The Mood of Enlightenment - A Talk Given by Master Da Free John to His Devotees"from What Is Enlightenment: Exploring the Goal of the Spiritual Path Edited by John White and published by Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.
Nothing outside of yourself can give you an explanation that releases you from this quest. Your Being is the only place to find your freedom and your release. When you find yourself totally innocent and realize your innocence is held deeply inside you, God-Awareness is right behind. You must find that place of total, innocent purity. You are pure, conscious awareness. The first word is no mistake. Purity is an energy, alive inside your consciousness, in your body, now!
To find that energy, we begin by loosening the binds that hold you to ego. One of those is the underlying belief that you are a body. You are not a body. You are pure, conscious awareness manifesting in all things, and connected intimately with the Source that gave rise to your Consciousness. You are as your Creator created you, and your Creator is not a body. Much of your confusion and immersion in guilt comes from the misidentification of what you are. If you are talking about your body, the words that come out of your mouth, and the actions your body performs, then you cannot escape the fact that you have done things with them that have harmed others. Is there anyone who can deny that this is true? If you are a body,if you are these actions, if you are those words, if that is who you are, then you stand guilty. But what if you are not that? If you are innocent of these charges, your liberation will come as you begin to identify with what you really are.
Your mind tries to bring about some kind of karmic payoff because of the damage it believes your body and mind have caused. If you look closely, you will find that every so-called harmful act you have ever committed can be traced back to a place within you that felt that you as a body needed to do certain things in order to be safe. Therein lies your difficulty, because you have misidentified again. You will never be safe as a body. How can you be safe as a body? The body is under attack all the time. You can walk out your door and in five minutes be dead on the street! Where can you find safety in the ever-changing world of bodies? Identify with your body and you will constantly be filled with fear.
What you have done you can undo. Since there really is no such thing as time-space, it can also be done in a moment. Misidentification comes from thinking yourself to be something you are not and then believing it. You feel guilty about the acts you have performed under that misidentification. But in truth, when you are filled with fear, you will do anything you can to protect yourself. The only way to have harmlessness alive on this planet is for the majority of you to stop feeling afraid. When you no longer feel fear, you no longer have the need to attack others in order to assure your safety. But as things are now, you have fear, and that makes your love unreliable. Fear results in attack. Love produces harmony. You are always afraid of harming others and being harmed yourself. That is the reality of the fear-separated consciousness. Until mankind finds a way to break out of fear, you will go on harming and being harmed. There is no blame for that pattern. How can you be blamed when you are motivated out of a sense of terror?
What is needed is to be constant in your love. You will never be a consistently loving consciousness until you are safe, and you will never be safe until you go to the only place where safety lies, which is in the Heart of God. Safety is found there and no place else. You will never talk yourself into loving kindness. You cannot. It is an experience that builds in you, day after day. You have got to make the decision to experience that feeling. Make the decision now, and it will begin to unfold as you return over and over to the Heart of God.
- from Reflections of an Elder Brother - Awakening From the Dream by Bartholemew, published by Hay House, Inc.
One of the big breakthroughs was in this samadhi state of sedated aliveness, which is the only way I could describe it. There was this very deep calm but it was vibrating with awe and wonder. I looked at the body and I thought 'I get it, it's just a body, not my body.' And then at one point the cat walked by and I thought, 'It's a cat, it's not my cat. So the conditioning of ownership was starting to dissolve just through the grace of going to so many satsangs. But it would never last.
I would sit with Francis Lucille, who is so exqusite, and then Gangaji and then I found a beautiful lady called Neelam, who's Polish, from Papaji. About half a month after Robert had left, I was sitting with her and this shakti kept rising up and it made my body nervous. Once I asked her about this and I said that it was really scary and strong. And she started laughing and just said, 'Let it have you!' It was helpful to be around the women teachers because it dissolved a lot of concepts of what I thought freedom would look like. It was reassuring as they were very accessible and you could just be friends. So I spent time with Neelam and we went to Sedona - it was very beatiful and this time I was fully honouring presence. There was this decision that I was not going to be stupid about it.
Then one day during an outdoor satsang, there was a shift and it was just literally a falling into the heart. It was so simple and it was so true. I couldn't deny it and no amount of brain activity saying 'no' could cast a shadow over it - it just was.
- excerpt from Amazing Grace - an interview with Pamela Wilson in The Teachers of One - Living Advaita - Conversations on the Nature of Non-duality conducted and compiled by Paula Marvelly, and published by Watkins Publishing.
Wean
Yourself
Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.
Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.
At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."
You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.
There is no "other world."
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.
- from The Essential Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks and published by Quality Paperback
Book Club
The Sufi meditation of the heart is a method of lifting the veils of separation and awakening us to what is real. It is a simple but effective way to use the energy of love to still the mind and go beyond the ego. It is best practiced for at least half an hour every morning.
In This Meditation We Imagine Three Things
1) We must suppose that we go deep within ourselves, deeper and deeper into our most hidden self. There in our inmost being, in the very core of ourselves, we will find a place where there is peace, stillness, and above all, love.
2) After having found this place, we must imagine that we are seated there, immersed into, surrounded by, the Love of God. We are in deepest peace. We are loved; we are sheltered; we are secure. All of us is there, physical body and all; nothing is outside, not even a fingertip, not even the tinniest hair. Our whole being is contained within the Love of God.
3) As we sit there, happy, serene in God's presence, thoughts will intrude into our mind- what we did the day before, what we have to do tomorrow. Memories float by, images appear before the mind's eye.
We have to imagine that we are getting hold of every thought, every image and feeling, and drowning it, merging it into the feeling of love.
Every feeling, especially the feeling of love, is much more dynamic than the thinking process, so if one does this practice well, with the utmost concentration, all thoughts will disappear. Nothing will remain, The mind will be empty.
More about Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's Mediation of the Heart here.
The
body is a narrow house,
and the soul within is cramped.
God ruined it so that He might make it a royal palace.
I am cramped like the embryo in the womb:
I've become nine months old.
This migration is now urgent,
but unless the throes of childbirth overtake my mother,
what am I to do?
In this prison I am amidst the fire.
My mother, my bodily nature,
with its death throes is birthing spirit,
so that the lamb may be released from the ewe,
and begin to graze in the green fields.
Come, open your womb, for this lamb has grown big.
Mathnawi
III: 3555-3559
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"
Threshold Books, 1996
- from the Yahoo Group Sunlight.