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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3373, Saturday, December 6, 2008, Editor: Mark
The mind is only a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts have their
root in the I-thought. Whoever investigates the True
"I" enjoys the stillness of bliss.
- Ramana Maharshi
It has been said: "Stillness is the language God speaks, and
everything else is a bad translation." Stillness is really
another word for space. Becoming conscious of stillness whenever
we encounter is in our lives will connect us with the formless
and timeless dimension within ourselves, that which is beyond
thought, beyond ego. It may be the stillness that pervades the
world of nature, or the stillness in your room in the early hours
of the morning, or the silent gaps in between sounds. Stillness
has no form--that is why through thinking we cannot become aware
of it. Thought is form. Being aware of stillness means to be
still. To be still is to be conscious without thought. You are
never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are
still.
When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal
existence: consciousness--unconditioned, formless, eternal.
- Eckart Tolle, posted to The_Now2
Adyashanti at Omega 2007
Adya: I remember one time, the first time I opened up, many years
ago, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Probably some of you have
heard about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's basically this
guidebook for after death. If you are a Tibetan Buddhist it's a
guide book. If you are a Christian and someone reads it to you,
you are not going to know what the hell it says. Don't read it to
a Christian after they die cause its all Tibetan stuff. You'll
confuse the hell out of them. It's true by the way. You
definitely don't want to do that. I stayed at a Zen Monastery for
awhile, and the abbess, this wonderful woman, she had said that
she had memorized all of the last rites for all of the religions.
So that if she was in the presence of anybody who died, if they
were religious at all, that she could give them their last rites.
So she was a Buddhist priest and yet she had the good sense to
know that you can confuse somebody if you try to impose your trip
on them and speak in a way tat they're not used to, in their
language. That's a whole other story but...
So I opened the Tibetan Book of the Dead and it basically is
various descriptions of various states, bardo states you can get
into. And as I'm reading through these various bardo states, it's
kind of like little realms of existence you can get into and if
you boiled it all down the whole book is basically telling you
'don't get stuck in this state, don't get stuck in that state,
don't get stuck in that state, just keep going, just keep going.
None of it's really real. It's all a projection of your own
consciousness. It may seem real. There'll be great tendencies to
go there. Some are hellish realms, some are absolutely
unbelievably heavenly realms but don't get stuck. Visit. Pass
through and keep going you could say towards the Light.'
And I'm reading through these various bardo states and I'm
realize, 'I'll be damned! Every single one of these bardo states
exists while people are alive.' This isn't just a book of dyng,
this is a book of living. We actually can create these states in
our consciousness all the time. So we can create a hellish
nightmare out of nothing but thought. That's why you can have 300
people in a room like this having 300 different experiences.
'Cause each mind is creating its own bardo state. It's creating
its own state. Some very pleasant, some not so pleasant, some
people will feel like they're in heaven, some people may feel
like they're in hell, some people may be bored, but actually we
are all sitting in the same exact room being exposed to the exact
same stimulus and yet we can have such an incredible variety of
experiences and this is exactly what that book was talking about.
We will do this after death as we do it in life. After death it
will just take on a different type of reality. You know, you'll
think it and there it will be. This is actually kind of like that
but - that's another story too. But none-the-less on a
psychological level much less on a deeper level, that's why
people canbe in a room like this having the same stimulus and
having so many different experiences.
That's our bardo states. That's the way our conditioning is
taking in information and creating its unique dream state about
what's happening. And as long as we take that dream state that
our conditioning creates to be real, then of course we're stuck
in that state. And just as the book suggested to people, after
death, over and over and over again, that state is a projection
of your consciousness, don't get caught in it, don't attach to
it, don't reject it, just let it go. Dwell in the pure light of
awareness, just dwell in the pure light of awareness. No matter
what happens, no matter how good it gets, no matter how bad it
gets, just dwell in the pure light of awareness. And these are
not only great instructions in this event we call death, but its
great instructions for life. It is great instructions for waking
up. Because underneath the created worlds that the conditioned
mind constructs, literally a virtualreality. I'm sure you've
noticed that human beings go around creating their own virtual
realities. Just like a computer virtual reality except ours is
even more complicated. Virtual worlds! We are all walking in
seemingly the same world, most human beings are in totally
different worlds. The believer world, the non-believer world, the
Buddhist world, the Christian world, the atheist world, the
scientific world, the spiritualist world, the lover's world, the
hater's world, the victim's world, the victimizer's world. Human
beings literally walking around in their own virtual realities
talking them to be real.
That itself is a type of death. In fact its much more real death
than your heart stopping and them having a funeral over you. A
much more real death is to be caught in a dream, our whole
existence because that is not to be consciously connected with
self, with what we really are. We are always connected with what
we really are. We always are what we really are but as one great
old master said, 'I is true, indeed, that all beings are
inherently already enlightened from the very beginning but a fat
lot of good that does you if you don't know it.'
And so this is what waking up actually is. It's realizing that
the virtual realty in our mind is just that, it's virtual. It's
not real. The virtual self in our mind, is not who we are. That
which we were taught we were, that which society and parents and
friends, taught us who we were, and then later we got so good at
it, internalized it so well, we started teaching ourselves who we
think we are. And that's the dream of us. That's a bardo state.
It's called an ego or a 'me.' And bardo states and virtual
realities and dreams are very ephemeral. They can end and alter
at any second. They are totally subject to the whim and current
of other dreams and dreamers. And so they are very unstable.
That's why in the state of separation actually it's just a state
of fear, because it is so unstable. It is so subject to anything
that's happening. And, of course,the deeper state of illusion is
when we hear something like this and we think, 'Okay! Very good.
I will then get rid of my own personal bardo state, my false
self.' That is sort of the most illusory dream of all. It
sustains the dream. As we've said many times during this retreat,
'Whatever you resist, sustains itself.'
It's like if you were to have a dream at night, and you thought,
'How do I get out of this dream? And you just started running in
circles. It's not going to help you wake up. You'll probably stay
asleep even longer because you're anticipating, 'When will I get
rid of this rotten dream. Whereas if you just stop right in the
middle of whatever is happening, we wake up and there is no more
feeding of our personal dream. Again we feed the dream with
indulgence. We all know that. And then we feed our personal dream
with avoidance, with resistance. And when this starts to be
understood, intuited, felt, and not resisted, not judged, not
condemned, not pushed away, then consciousness spontanously
starts to come out of its dream. The dream still may be going on
but consciousness is no longer obsessed with it.
That's why nonjudgment is so powerful 'cause it breaks the
obsession. Whatever we judge we're obsessed with. Whatever we
condemn we are obsessed with. Whatever we grasp we're obsessed
with. So when consciousness starts to come out of this dream,
simply by letting it be, that's what stillness is. That's what,
'be still' means. 'Let it be.' In perfect stillness, there's no
pushing. There's no pulling. There's just a state of balance. And
in that state of stillness, which is balance, consciousness
spontaneously comes out of the dream. Cause it has no energy to
hold it in the dream. And then we come into something that's not
personal, that's not of the dream. Then we come into our being
and that being is universal.
In that state of being, we all realize the same thing. All of us
realize the same thing. In the state of dreaming, we are all
having very different dreams. The stateof being, when we really
experience what we are, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead would
say, 'just dwell in the clear light of awareness.' And that
place, the clear light of Awareness, which always is, in the
midst of the dream, it's not opposed to, it's always there. It's
not something we find in a corner. It's not something that's
tucked into a hidden place. It's not something that we have to
concentrate really really hard to bring into consciousness.
Everything is already happening in Awareness. It's ever present.
Grasp it, try to control it, try to use it, and you can't find
it.
Acknowledge it's existence, Awareness is. Period. It's already
functioning. It doesn't matter if you understand it, it's still
functioning anyway. It's still present anyway. It doesn't matter
if you believe in awareness. It still is. It doesn't matter if
you don't believe in awareness, it still is. And this quality is
what's illuminating, what is taking in, what is witnessing, what
is partaking of every moment. And this i the place where we
realize we are One. Awareness here, and awareness there and
awareness there, it's not different. The dreams within awareness
may vary greatly but when we come back to that, to the clear
light of awareness, the clear light of Being, we run into our
unity.
As Being, we are not separate, we're not even different. Ego is
afraid of Being because it's afraid of losing its individuality.
But really what it is afraid of is losing its separateness.
Because in the state of Being, you realize there isn't any
separateness. There isn't any way for separateness to define
itself. But it's not the destruction of individuality, that body
is very different from that body, not essentially but as an
expression. Individuality is not destroyed. Difference is not
destroyed. Uniqueness is not destroyed. If anything if we come
into the Oneness of our being, the uniqueness and the
individuality and the creativity is released. It's liberated.
Because difference doesn't mean separateness.
You go outin the forest and you look at, I don't know what kind
of trees exactly you have around here. Where I'm from we have
lots of pine tress in the forest. And you look at a pine tree,
they're all pine trees but every pine tree is totally different.
But they're all pine trees. Every human being is totally
different but they are all Being. Once Being becomes conscious of
itself, once Spirit becomes conscious of itself, there's an
immediate knowledge that its deathless because its timeless.
There is no death in it. There's no beginning and there's no
middle and there's no end. Beginning, middle and end are thought
creations. Nobody has ever had a beginning and nobody has ever
had a middle and nobody has ever had an end. The only thing you
can ever know for certain is ever happening is Now. And anywhere
you are is always Now. So Now is not a succession. There's not a
succession of Nows. There is one Now. It's constant. If you think
of your past, you think of it now. If you think of your future,
you think of it now. nd so it goes.
So by questioning the basic dream that human beings have, our
basic dream, the dream from which all of our other dreams come
from, is the one that I am a separate individual someone. And
simply by noticing that that dream itself is happening within
something much vaster. The more you try to destroy the dream, the
more it sustains itself. Believe me I tried.
Adyashanti - Omega 2007, posted to adyashantigroup
Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the
brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the
notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and
the out-breath.
When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of `'something'
becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure
consciousness arises from within you and replaces identification
with form.
- Eckhart Tolle, from Stillness Speaks