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Saturday, December 22

JERRY KATZ

I've known Bob Rose of the Meditation Society of America for
a few years. He was one of the early members of this list.

Bob teaches meditation classes in Philly and publishes a
quality newsletter online and in hard copy. The latest issue
is at <http://www.meditationsociety.com/it54456/index.html>

Bob does a great job of presenting all perspectives on
meditation. His knowing of what meditation is, gives him the
freedom to hear all voices. And believe me he's got
everything from simple inspirational poetry -- "The snow is
falling, the wind is blowing..." -
Bruce Morgen and Michael Read, among others, are also
featured in the current edition. A couple other long lost
members from this list are also featured. Anyone remember
Rusty Morgan or Kir Lir whatever? (sorry, can't remember the
name.)

Take some time to view the rest of the website. Bob is one of
the good, open people in this spirituality biz. If you know
anyone into meditation, send 'em to Bob!

__________________________________________________________________________

JAN BARENDRECHT

You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe
to unfold. That is how important you are! --Eckhart Tolle

Whence the assumption the universe has a purpose? It just is
and in less than a wink of an eye, entire galaxies are blast
to cinders by gamma-ray bursts. Humans have no more
importance than the extinct dinosaurs, who at least weren't
in the act of destroying the planet... And the way it looks,
the visible universe is expanding with an increasing speed -
as if every atom likes its neighbors best at infinite
distance :)

MICHAEL READ

stride forward confidently smile as though every step carried
you toward something grand

touch your hand gently throughout the wondering day playing
with whatever comes

though nothing great awaits and what will come will come you
are free

JAN BARENDRECHT

i don't have to heed scriptures or the 'holy men' freedom has
no need

______________________________________________________________________________


JAN SULTAN

Blanketed by an azure sky, the orange-yellow rays of the
setting sun can, at special times, gift us with a moment of
such considerable beauty, we find ourselves momentarily
stunned, with frozen gaze. The splendor of the moment so
dazzles us, our compulsively chattering minds give pause, so
as not to mentally whisk us away to a place other than the
here-and-now. Bathed in luminescence, a door seems to open to
another reality, always present, yet rarely witnessed.
Abraham Maslow called these "peak experiences," since they
represent the high moments of life where we joyfully find
ourselves catapulted beyond the confines of the mundane and
ordinary. He might just as well have called them "peek"
experiences. During these expansive occasions, we sneak a
glimpse of the eternal realm of Being itself. If only for a
brief moment in time, we come home to our True Self.

Russell E. DiCarlo [in forward to Eckhart's "Power of Now"]

______________________________________________________________________________

FROM MEDITATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA YAHOO CLUB

Question (from class); I know that Mantra is the saying of a
word or phrase over and over, but why do it? Answer: As the
Bible (In the beginning was the Word, etc.), and science (In
the beginning was the Big Bang), tell us, we are sound. And
like a radio, sometimes the sounds we make are static. Mantra
"tunes us in". to the vibration of the harmonics of the
universe. Once adjusted correctly, we receive the perfect
note we need for our spiritual evolution and freedom from
suffering. The quest for Truth is sometimes referred to as
"The Search for the Lost Chord". It can be
found/heard/experienced in silence and by attuning yourself
to it's clarified vibration through Mantra. Mantra will lead
to the Silence/Void/state of No-mind from which every sound
and everything arises. More people practice Mantra than all
the other meditation techniques put together. At any given
time, hundreds of millions of people are doing Mantra. When
we do our Mantra, we join all of them in the divine vibration
that transcends the illusionary "separate from the rest of
the universe" view of reality that causes our suffering. We
then join and enjoy the infinite, eternal wonders that are
our birthright and know our unity with All and Everything.
And live happily ever after.

____________________________________________________________________________

An interview with Eckhart Tolle by Andrew Cohen contributed
by Jan Sultan

from What Is Enlightenment?, issue 18 - Fall/Winter 2000
Copyright ©2000 Moksha Press

Andrew Cohen: Eckhart, what is your life like? I've heard
that you're a bit of a recluse and that you spend a lot of
time in solitude. Is that true?

Eckhart Tolle: That was true in the past, before my book The
Power of Now came out. For many years I was a recluse. But
since the publication of the book, my life has changed
dramatically. I'm now very much involved in teaching and
traveling. And people who knew me before say, "This is
amazing. You used to be a hermit and now you are out in the
world." Yet I still feel that inside nothing has changed. I
still feel exactly the same as before. There is still a
continuous sense of peace, and I am surrendered to the fact
that on an external level there's been a total change. So
it's actually not true anymore that I am a hermit. Now I'm
the opposite of a hermit. This may well be a cycle. It may
well be that at some point this will come to an end and I
will become a hermit again. But at the moment, I am
surrendered to the fact that I'm almost continuously
interacting. I do occasionally take time to be alone. That is
necessary in between teaching engagements.

AC: Why is it that you need to take time to be alone, and
what is it that happens when you take the time to be alone?

ET: When I'm with people, I'm a spiritual teacher. That's the
function, but it's not my identity. The moment I'm alone, my
deepest joy is to be nobody, to relinquish the function of a
teacher. It's a temporary function. Let's say I'm seeing a
group of people. The moment they leave me, I'm no longer a
spiritual teacher. There's no longer any sense of external
identity. I simply go into the stillness more deeply. The
place that I love most is the stillness. It's not that the
stillness is lost when I talk or when I teach because the
words arise out of the stillness. But when people leave me,
there is only the stillness left. And I love that so much.

AC: Would you say that you prefer it?

ET: Not prefer. There is a balance now in my life, which
perhaps wasn't there before. When the inner transformation
happened many years ago, one could almost say a balance was
lost. It was so fulfilling and so blissful simply to be that
I lost all interest in doing or interacting. For quite a few
years, I got lost in Being. I had almost relinquished doing
completely-just enough to keep myself alive and even that was
miraculous. I had totally lost interest in the future. And
then gradually a balance re-established itself. It didn't
re-establish itself fully until I started writing the book.
The way I feel now is that there is a balance in my life
between being alone and interacting with people, between
Being and doing, whereas before, the doing was relinquished
and there was only Being. Blissful, profound, beautiful-but
from an external viewpoint, many people thought that I had
become unbalanced or had gone mad. Some people thought I was
crazy to have let go of all the worldly things I had
"achieved." They didn't understand that I didn't want or need
any of that anymore. So the balance now is between aloneness
and meeting with people. And that's good. I'm quite attentive
to that so that the balance doesn't get lost. There is now a
pull toward increasing doing. People want me to talk here and
talk there-there are constant demands. I know that I need to
be attentive now, so that the balance is not lost, and I
don't get lost in doing. I don't think it would ever happen,
but it requires a certain amount of vigilance.

AC: What would it mean to get lost in doing?

ET: Theoretically, it would mean that I would continuously
travel, teach, and interact with people. Perhaps if that
happened, at some point the flow, the stillness, might not be
there. I don't know; it may always be there. Or physical
exhaustion may set in. But I feel now that I need to return
to the pure stillness periodically. And then, when the
teaching happens, just allow it to arise out of the
stillness. So the teaching and stillness are very closely
connected. The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when
I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my
favorite place.

AC: When you're alone, do you spend a lot of time physically
being still?

ET: Yes, I can sometimes sit for two hours in a room with
almost no thought. Just complete stillness. Sometimes when I
go for walks, there's also complete stillness; there's no
mental labeling of sense perceptions. There's simply a sense
of awe or wonder or openness, and that's beautiful.

AC: In your book The Power of Now you state that "The
ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but
in transcendence of the world." Could you please explain what
you mean?

ET: Transcending the world does not mean to withdraw from the
world, to no longer take action, or to stop interacting with
people. Transcendence of the world is to act and to interact
without any self-seeking. In other words, it means to act
without seeking to enhance one's sense of self through one's
actions or one's interactions with people. Ultimately, it
means not needing the future anymore for one's fulfillment or
for one's sense of self or being. There is no seeking through
doing, seeking an enhanced, more fulfilled, or greater sense
of self in the world. When that seeking isn't there anymore,
then you can be in the world but not be of the world. You are
no longer seeking for anything to identify with out there.

AC: Do you mean that one has given up an egotistical,
materialistic relationship to the world?

ET: Yes, it means no longer seeking to gain a sense of self,
a deeper or enhanced sense of self. Because in the normal
state of consciousness, what people are looking for through
their activity is to be more completely themselves. The bank
robber is looking for that in some way. The person who is
striving for enlightenment is also looking for it because he
or she is seeking to attain a state of perfection, a state of
completion, a state of fullness at some point in the future.
There is a seeking to gain something through one's
activities. They are seeking happiness, but ultimately they
are seeking themselves or you could say God; it comes down to
the same thing. They are seeking themselves, and they are
seeking where it can never be found, in the normal,
unenlightened state of consciousness, because the
unenlightened state of consciousness is always in the seeking
mode. That means they are of the world-in the world and of
the world.

AC: You mean that they are looking forward in time?

ET: Yes, the world and time are intrinsically connected. When
all self-seeking in time ceases, then you can be in the world
without being of the world.

AC: What exactly do you mean when you say that the purpose of
the world lies in the transcendence of it?

ET: The world promises fulfillment somewhere in time, and
there is a continuous striving toward that fulfillment in
time. Many times people feel, "Yes, now I have arrived," and
then they realize that, no, they haven't arrived, and then
the striving continues. It is expressed beautifully in A
Course in Miracles, where it says that the dictum of the ego
is "Seek but do not find." People look to the future for
salvation, but the future never arrives. So ultimately,
suffering arises through not finding. And that is the
beginning of an awakening-when the realization dawns that
"Perhaps this is not the way. Perhaps I will never get to
where I am striving to reach; perhaps it's not in the future
at all." After having been lost in the world, suddenly,
through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that
the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment
and in the future. That's an important point for many people
to reach. That sense of deep crisis-when the world as they
have known it, and the sense of self that they have known
that is identified with the world, become meaningless. That
happened to me. I was just that close to suicide and then
something else happened-a death of the sense of self that
lived through identifications, identifications with my story,
things around me, the world. Something arose at that moment
that was a sense of deep and intense stillness and aliveness,
beingness. I later called it "presence." I realized that
beyond words, that is who I am. But this realization wasn't a
mental process. I realized that that vibrantly alive, deep
stillness is who I am. Years later, I called that stillness
"pure consciousness," whereas everything else is the
conditioned consciousness. The human mind is the conditioned
consciousness that has taken form as thought. The conditioned
consciousness is the whole world that is created by the
conditioned mind. Everything is our conditioned
consciousness; even objects are. Conditioned consciousness
has taken birth as form and then that becomes the world. So
to be lost in the conditioned seems to be necessary for
humans. It seems to be part of their path to be lost in the
world, to be lost in the mind, which is the conditioned
consciousness. Then, due to the suffering that arises out of
being lost, one finds the unconditioned as oneself. And that
is why we need the world to transcend the world. So I'm
infinitely grateful for having been lost. The purpose of the
world is for you to be lost in it, ultimately. The purpose of
the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that
seems to be what is needed for the awakening to happen. And
then once the awakening happens, with it comes the
realization that suffering is unnecessary now. You have
reached the end of suffering because you have transcended the
world. It is the place that is free of suffering. This seems
to be everybody's path. Perhaps it is not everybody's path in
this lifetime, but it seems to be a universal path. Even
without a spiritual teaching or a spiritual teacher, I
believe that everybody would get there eventually. But that
could take time.

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