Friday, September 20, 2013

Gangaji and Eli - The awakening power of two simple questions



Pathways Magazine
By Gangaji and Eli, April 2004

"Simply because you are alive and intelligent enough to read this, you are ready for the next evolutionary leap, from the isolated selfishness that is destroying the world, to the bliss of union, which holds the healing of the earth."

It is possible to awaken to the depths of one's true nature through honest and sincere self-investigation. There are two essential questions critical to this investigation: What do I really want? and Who am I?

Surprisingly, most people have never asked themselves this first question with any depth. Indeed, most people live their entire lives without ever questioning what it is they really and finally want. Most make do with whatever shows up. They are content to settle for some version of what their parents had or wanted. Others may rebel and want something totally different from what their parents had.
Most people's lives are dedicated to getting what they think they want. They live in the conditioned wants of family, and in the manufactured wants of society, with their subconscious fantasies projected out onto the world. They spend their lives invested in second-hand desires.

When you answer this question on the deepest level, you can turn your life toward something of real consequence.
As long as there is an experience of separation or alienation, there is correspondingly a longing for union. As long as there is fear and a sense of isolation, there is consciously or unconsciously a longing to return home.
It is time to tell the truth about where you have turned away from the longing for union. Only then can the call of your heart be heard.

Be willing to stay true to your deepest longing for truth. Stay true in the face of every wave of thought that arises from the ocean of mind and tries to wash you back into subconscious desires. In the end, the desire for union and true freedom will transcend all other desires. This is the only pure desire of a human life.

Having this desire has been rare in the past. But humanity is now entering a new stage. Either we will evolve or we will destroy the earth. The choice is up to us. Now is the time for ordinary people to wake up. There is no need to be a great saint. Simply because you are alive and intelligent enough to read this, you are ready for the next evolutionary leap, from the isolated selfishness that is destroying the world, to the bliss of union, which holds the healing of the earth. Perhaps the only hope for the planet now lies in our willingness to end our personal suffering.

Until the desire for truth, freedom, and love arises in a life, everything is all about "me" and "my" story of "reality." Once the desire for freedom arises, it can become the central axis, the ground of being that life revolves around. This then signals the end of the search for happiness and the birth of realization. Awakening is the end of wanting and the beginning of discovering.

Once you have discovered what it is you truly want, you are ready to make the most important inquiry of a lifetime, the second essential question: Who am I? In a certain way, this has been an implicit question throughout every stage of your life. At its root, every activity, whether individual or collective, is motivated by a search for self-definition. Typically, the search is for a positive answer to this question or a running away from any possibility of a negative answer. Once this question becomes explicit, the momentum and the power of the question direct the search for true Self.

Until the question of who you are has been truly answered, there will still be the hunger to finally know. Because no matter how you have been defined by others, well-meaning others and not so well-meaning others, and no matter how you have defined yourself, any definition is finally revealed to come up short.
Recognizing that no answer has ever satisfied this question is the crucial moment of spiritual ripeness. It is at this point that you can consciously investigate who you really are.

The question, Who am I? in its power and simplicity, throws the mind back to the root of personal identification. It throws the mind back before the basic assumption, "I am somebody." Rather than automatically accepting that assumption to be the truth, you can investigate deeper. When this very basic sense of individual self is questioned, the mind is thrown back to the I. This is called Self-inquiry.

We spend most of our days telling ourselves or others we are someone important, someone unimportant, someone big, someone little, someone young, or someone old, never truly questioning beyond conditioned definitions.

Definitions of oneself as good or bad, ignorant or enlightened, are all just concepts in the mind. All of that changes and is even forgotten every night when you drop into deep sleep. Whatever can be forgotten or continually changes is not the absolute truth. If you will stop trying to find yourself in some definition, in an instant of true and sincere self-inquiry, the indefinable spaciousness of consciousness reveals itself as who you are.

When you turn your attention toward the question, Who am I? perhaps an image of your face or your body appears. But who is aware of that image? Are you the object, or are you the awareness of the object? The object comes and goes. The parent, the child, the lover, the abandoned one, the enlightened one, the victorious one, the defeated one—these identifications all come and go. The awareness of those identifications is always present. The misidentification of yourself as some object in awareness leads to extreme pleasure or extreme pain and endless cycles of suffering.

When you are willing to stop the misidentification, when you are willing to see and to discover directly, completely, that you are the awareness itself and not these impermanent definitions, the search for yourself in thoughts finishes.
When the question, Who? is followed innocently, purely, all the way back to its source, there is a huge, astounding realization—There is no entity here at all! There is only the indefinable, boundless, recognition of oneself as the fullness of being found everywhere in everything.

The fullness of being is whole, is endless. There is no bottom to you, no boundary to you. Any idea about yourself appears in the fullness and will disappear back into it. You are awareness, and awareness is consciousness, full beyond measure.

Let all self-definitions die in this moment. Let them all go, and see what remains. See what is never born, and see what does not die. Feel the relief of laying down the burden of defining yourself. Experience the actual non-reality of the burden. Experience the joy that is here. Rest in the endless peace of your true nature before any thought of I arises.
 
 

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Annette Nibley - Step back for a moment

 


Turn your attention away from the dream right now. Just for right now, you don't need it. Let the thoughts and worries of the dream character continue as they will, but just step back for a moment and watch it happen, watch the dream character involved in its dream.
 And while the dream character is going about its business, turn your attention to the one thing right now that is shining and clear, peaceful and unassuming, steady and solid: the consciousness with which the dream character is being observed. Just rest here, in the unchanging consciousness which reflects but is not changed by what it reflects. 
This is reality. 
Nothing else is. Rest your attention here. Get to know it. Let the reality of consciousness be known to you, as you. Nothing needs to be done here. No thought affects it, and so thought is not needed. No action affects it, and so action is not needed. It's not possible to do anything with this consciousness because this consciousness is everything already. Pay attention to it for a moment right now and it is easily noticed that consciousness is complete. And since consciousness is complete, you are complete. 
The only thing that ever makes you feel like you are not complete, not whole, and that you need to 'return' somewhere to find wholeness, is that you have put your attention into the dream life, and forgotten that wholeness is all that you really are. 
So observe the dream character as it desires enlightenment, and as it desires love, reassurance, respect. Watch the dream character as its life plays out. It is not who you are. 
You are this consciousness, which has no mortality, no vulnerability, and no limits. Beyond all imagination, the nothingness within which resides the seed of all existence, the shining creation of infinite universes - this is you. 
Put your attention here, and allow your sense of this to grow. If you are looking for Wholeness, here it is. If you are looking for True Love, here it is, in the One Unlimited Self that is Reality. No other love is possible. And this Love is already here, as You. ~

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Ta-Wan - Just this unknowable way



This way...is best only as a way to realizing and being, wishing for no other way to be the way, than it is looking for what you would otherwise desire to become.
~ ~ ~
Perhaps...
There is 'where you are' and 'where you wish to be'. If these are different then you're unhappy.
Happiness is when 'where you are' and 'where you wish to be' are the same.
It is not though to change where you are or what you think, but realize that wishing to be anywhere else causes unhappiness.
Where you are, right now, is unchangeable, so accept where you are and you'll be happy.  Then the future lives on in this happiness.
When you're not looking to be happy, you can only be happy.
Consequently and apparently - happiness is only sought for by the unhappy. A goal of happiness makes the present location, by definition, unhappiness.
~ ~
Then, there is no chooser, no actor to act, to wish for another way or to accept the current way - there is only the way - no actor, no acted.
Just this unknowable way.
What is. Not what would, could or should be.
~

The apparent solution to all concern is an awakening, enlightenment. Yet it is the very projection of this 'other way/state' that turns the present perfection into imperfection that must be escaped.

You can check out Ta-Wan's other musings here.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Derek Walcott - Love After Love



The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986



Monday, September 16, 2013

Mystic meandering - Cosmic Love




I have conversed with the Universe,
contemplated and cogitated,
ascended and descended,
polarized, conceptualized and spiritualized;
dis-membered and re-membered -
and still, I find no -
 “plan.”

Only vastness and immensity,
beyond theory, framework and perception.
The Greatest, Grandest Mystery
in an ever unfolding nebula,
procreating itself in billowy clouds
and golden streams of stardust
in an endless infinity.

A golden thread weaves through space
without beginning or end, through
the Silence beyond creation, through
Sound beyond sound, and
Light beyond light…

Matchlessly weaving its Eternal vibration
through timelessness,
into time and times beyond time,
with one theme braided into its
unending spiral
through dimensions,
distortions, and
dysfunctions

~ Love~

From this divine, mysterious weave
we dance the dance of duality,
complete in our light and our dark
 within a vast Cosmic Love
of Divine Embrace…

Mystic Meandering
Winter Solstice 1999
Revised Sept 2013

Nirvani Teasley - Little Wonders/Seeker(ghazal)


Little Wonders

Some days
My heart is so full,
This little body
Can’t contain it.
I weep
A rushing river.
It’s a wonder
That love like that
Could ever
Be contained.


http://thecosmicpoet.com/

 Seeker(ghazal)

I seek night and day, for just a glimpse of that bliss,
To refresh my depleted soul, to end its weariness with that bliss.

I call near and far, with only echoes for my friends.
My spirit mellows, fatigued of unconsciousness of that bliss.

I shed tears, hollowed out spheres wanting to be filled with what?
It evades me, time and again, the insatiable kiss of that bliss.

I touched its flighty wings once and screamed ecstatic silence.
I fell delirious into its open arms and still I was dismissed by that bliss.

To have tasted of the rapture, but never keep is Jennifer’s madness.
And in death, with only a whisper on lips of the awareness of that bliss.



St. John of the Cross - "Transcending all knowledge"




Juan de la Cruz “I came into the unknown
and stayed there unknowing
rising beyond all science.

I did not know the door
but when I found the way,
unknowing where I was,
I learned enormous things,
but what I felt I cannot say,
for I remained unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

It was the perfect realm
of holiness and peace.
In deepest solitude
I found the narrow way:
a secret giving such release
that I was stunned and stammering,
rising beyond all science.

I was so far inside,
so dazed and far away
my senses were released
from feelings of my own.
My mind had found a surer way:
a knowledge of unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

And he who does arrive
collapses as in sleep,
for all he knew before
now seems a lowly thing,
and so his knowledge grows so deep
that he remains unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

The higher he ascends
the darker is the wood;
it is the shadowy cloud
that clarified the night,
and so the one who understood
remains always unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

This knowledge by unknowing
is such a soaring force
that scholars argue long
but never leave the ground.
Their knowledge always fails the source:
to understand unknowing,
rising beyond all science.

This knowledge is supreme
crossing a blazing height;
though formal reason tries
it crumbles in the dark,
but one who would control the night
by knowledge of unknowing
will rise beyond all science.

And if you wish to hear:
the highest science leads
to an ecstatic feeling
of the most holy Being;
and from his mercy comes his deed:
to let us stay unknowing,
rising beyond all science.” 


Sunday, September 15, 2013

Sitara Alaknanda Shakti - Master of the Heart

picture Matilde Berk

 This poem pays great homage to my spiritual journey…

 ...it marks the return back to myself.  Before I left the States, I had the picture perfect life: A high-paying job in Hollywood, a beautiful 2 floors loft and a fancy car to show off in.  But something was missing. 
 I was not entirely unhappy, as my spiritual practice was strong enough to ground me.  Still, a sense of restlessness was growing.
 

My Divine Self was knocking incessantly and when I finally answered, my soul reclaimed its power and took flight. 

I finally chose me and it was the most rewarding experience of my life.  ~In bliss, Sitara~


I was living separately
The Madman came and took me
He propelled me to such elevating heights
And dropped me to such bottomless depths
Then Genuine of the Soul
Spoke to me so loudly
My senses started to blur
And I could no longer be just a body
Before it all, there was the One Word
Before me, there is the One Word
I bow at the feet of the Only
And I follow It resolutely
I forsake the here and there
And find myself dwelling in the Great Void
So when I look into your eyes
I can honestly say I in the I
No longer an exodus from my own kind
The Master of the Heart finally came for me
Together we proclaim unity
Together we are the Divine's infinite potentiality
~


This post is reblogged from this great blog: http://womenspiritualpoetry.blogspot.gr/ 

Stephen Levine - There is none

image source  Michael Anderson

Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,
but there is none.
We think of centering as only a continual narrowing
of focus until we touch the pearl
but in practice it is often a continual expansion
of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness
indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Of course I play the fool when I dare allow
consciousness to describe itself!  Isn't that the birth
of the ego, the "I am this" that closed behind us
when we entered the body?


Anadi - The teaching of spiritual wholeness




Introduction

A spiritual teaching that is not a reflection of pure truth can either oversimplify that which is complex in nature, due to not being able to see or grasp this complexity, or can complicate that which is fundamentally simple, due to not being able to see or grasp that simplicity.  The ongoing evolution of this teaching is based on complete devotion to represent the truth as it is, with absolute honesty and penetrating intelligence; when it is complex, to show that complexity in its deepest, most secret detail; when it is simple, to show that naked simplicity free from the faults of the mind.   
To follow this teaching is a journey into the unknown.  One does not have the false security of following a perception of reality or concept of the spiritual path which is already set.  This teaching is a constant revelation, an unfoldment of truth into the future, yet more complete understanding.  Anadi is not a teacher who expounds  past knowledge, whether of other traditions or his own; he is an open door for the truth to move through him into this dimension.  His constant inquiry into the nature of reality is not a function of mind but of pure intelligence and love. 
Anadi describes the inner world and each step on the path with unbelievable precision and practicality.  Nothing here is abstract or theoretical; everything is just to the point, absolutely concrete and experiential.
Where others remain silent in the face of not having the tools to describe the realms beyond the mind, other than using clichés or empty poetry, is where this teaching begins. 


http://anaditeaching.com/index.asp