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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4223, Sunday, April 17, 2011
The only true meditation is the constant impersonal witnessing of
all that takes place in one's life as mere movements in the
universal Consciousness.
- Ramesh Balsekar, posted to ANetofJewels
The world with all its wonders is nothing. When you know this,
desire melts away. For you are awareness itself. When you know in
your heart that there is nothing, you are still.
- from The Heart of Awareness: A Translation of the Ashtavakra
Gita, by Thomas Byrom, posted to AlongtheWay
We are the sole creators of this dream, which has absolutely no
purpose other than our awakening from it.
In reality, we are surrounded by and embraced in unconditional
love, whether we respond to it or not. Our experience in time
sets up a perfectly appropriate creation, exactly suited in its
grand happenings and tiny nuances to the particular and unique
needs of our reawakening. The source of the hidden principle is
ourselves, and it is fired by our longing to come home.
- Tony Parsons, posted to AlongTheWay
Think and meditate about the mind, and how it involves you in all
kinds of schemes and desires. Try to watch how the mind works,
and how thoughts arise. For a while become an observer of your
mind and its thoughts. Follow the way they arise, move and make
way to other thoughts. Pay attention how they entice you to think
them.
Now you have done something you may have never done before. You
have thought about your thoughts, you have viewed the mind from
the outside, as if you were watching someone else's mind. Without
realizing it, you have watched the mind as if you were separate
from it. Wow! Think about it!
Now I ask you, who are you, the mind and its thoughts, or the one
watching the mind? If you have followed the above advice, then
you have made a great discovery: You are not the mind. You are
the one who is watching it.
It is possible to develop the habit of looking at the mind as if
from the outside, as if it is not yours. Try not to be involved
in the thoughts and desires that arise, and at least in theory,
separate yourself from the mind. Just convince yourself that it
is not you. Do it often, until you really start to see that you
are separate from the mind, which is some kind of a power you can
use.
Each day devote some time watching how thoughts enter your mind.
Don't try to think, just follow their movement dispassionately.
Watch how they come, try to claim your attention, grow, then
wither, and new thoughts arise.
By experience you will come to appreciate how great and useful is
this way of treating the mind. If your concentration ability is
strong enough, it will be easier and faster to reach the
conclusion that you are not the mind.
If you treat your thoughts with indifference, you will experience
inner silence. In this silence there is happiness, power, content
and the certainty that nothing can harm or disturb you anymore.
By "you", I do not mean your body, I mean you, your
consciousness that at this moment of inner silence you consider
as yourself. You now know without the slightest doubt that you
are not your thoughts or mind, but something bigger and vaster.
A different kind of Consciousness...
When there are no thoughts, there is no vacuum. There is a
feeling of beginning-less and endless consciousness and
awareness. Not awareness of something, but just awareness. You
can get some idea of what I mean, if you remember how you felt in
a completely dark and quiet room. You could see and hear nothing,
yet you were conscious. It was some sort of lack of sensory
perception, yet you had full consciousness. Not consciousness of
something, but just awareness of yourself. It is the same here,
but vaster.
It is not the body that enters a peculiar and different state. It
is neither the mind, because it is silent. At this moment there
are no concepts or thoughts in the mind. As there are no
thoughts, this consciousness cannot be an illusion, as it is the
mind that creates illusion, and it is not present now.
This consciousness is not something new. It is not something
strange, peculiar, unnatural or supernatural. It the substratum
of our life, but we never pay it attention. We let the mind rule
and create our life. You may not accept it, but what we call
life, is actually a dream, a sort of a movie weaved by the mind.
We never stop to think and examine the mind and its thoughts. We
have got accustomed to live in the mind, rely on it, and accept
whatever it presents us.
This Consciousness you are reading about is real, eternal, one
and indivisible. Due to ignorance and the way the mind works, we
consider ourselves as a separate organism with body and thoughts.
From the standpoint of the Indian philosophy Advaita-Vedanta all
is illusion-Maya. It is only the One great Universal
Consciousness that exists. While sleeping and dreaming, we see a
world. This life we call awakening is also a dream, but a longer
one. When we stop our thoughts and quieten the mind, we find out
who we are and always were. When the coverings and sheets of the
mind are removed, we see reality as it really is...
- Remez Sasson, posted to SufiMystic