Annette Nibley - You Are Love

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.

http://www.whatneverchanges.com/ 

St John Of The Cross - Verses on the Ecstasy of Deep Contemplation

I entered where there is no knowing,
and unknowing I remained,
all knowledge there transcending.

I
Where no knowing is I entered,
yet when I my own self saw there
without knowing where I rested
great things I understood there,
yet cannot say what I felt there,
since I rested in unknowing,
all knowledge there transcending.
II
Of peace and of holy good
there was perfect knowing,
in profoundest solitude
the only true way seeing,
yet so secret is the thing
that I was left here stammering,
all knowledge there transcending.
III
I was left there so absorbed,
so entranced, and so removed,
that my senses were abroad,
robbed of all sensation proved,
and my spirit then was moved
with an unknown knowing,
all knowledge there transcending.

IV
He who reaches there in truth
from himself is parted though,
and all that before he knew
seems to him but base below,
his knowledge increases so
that knowledge has an ending,
all knowledge there transcending.
V
The higher he climbs however
the less he’ll ever understand,
because the cloud grows darker
that lit the night on every hand:
whoever visits this dark land
rests forever in unknowing,
all knowledge there transcending.
VI
This knowledge of unknowing
is of so profound a power
that no wise men arguing
will ever supersede its hour:
their wisdom cannot reach the tower
where knowing has an ending,
all knowledge there transcending.

VII
It is of such true excellence
this highest understanding,
no science, no human sense,
has it in its grasping,
yet he who, by self-conquering
grasps knowing in unknowing,
goes evermore transcending.
VIII
And in the deepest sense,
this highest knowledge lies,
of the divine essence,
if you would be wise:
his mercy so it does comprise,
each one leaving in unknowing,
all knowledge there transcending.

Billy Doyle - Yoga in the Kashmir Tradition

An excerpt from our latest publication - 'Yoga in the Kashmir Tradition: The Art of Listening' 

by Billy Doyle.

Advaita asks us to question what is real, to question the common-sense view that we are separate entities, each body-mind being distinct from other body-minds and from the world. It asks: What is our essential nature? The body and mind are always changing. Is there not something that is beyond the flux of time? Is there not something beyond the mind? To recognise change there must be something in us that is changeless. What is changeless in me? Is it not the sense of presence, the sense of knowing? I know myself, I know the world, but the real question is: 

Who is the knower?
We don't cease to be when there is no thought; we still know that we are, but we generally only know ourselves in relation to objects, such as thoughts, images, memory. In other words, I am a woman, I am a doctor, I'm young, a person of worth. We don't know ourselves without the adornment of a string of characteristics.

It is this identification with an I-image, which is no more than a projection of the mind, that veils our true reality. Taking myself to be a limited separate entity in a universe invites fear and desire. In fact, fear and desire are the very essence of this separate personal entity. It is from this state of insecurity that we begin to look for happiness, for security. In the beginning this search is usually directed towards material objects, acquiring knowledge, enhancing our self-image, or towards relationships. Only when we realise from our failures that nothing in the world will completely satisfy our longing, do we begin to ask deeper questions.

This is the beginning of a more conscious spiritual search. We begin to realise what we are not: not a body, not a personality, not a series of images, not any kind of object. Our real nature is prior to any image, any thought. The body is in awareness, the mind is in awareness, the world too exists in awareness. Thus, awareness is prior to all manifestation.

We begin to give precedence to awareness and not to what we're aware of. We begin to feel ourselves as awareness, a witness to the passing show. Like the screen in the film show, the images are always changing, but the screen is unaffected. A feeling of space opens up between what I am and what I'm aware of. I begin to feel my autonomy, that I'm free of all things. I'm no longer locked in space and time, rather space and time are in me.

~ Billy Doyle | Read more: http://bit.ly/1rsytBH

Namdev - There is only the One

"He is the One in many,
countless are His shapes and forms.
He pervades all that exists;
wherever I look, He is there.
But very few perceive this reality,
for Maya ever enchants us
with her multiple reflections
of color and alluring beauty.

Everything is Gobind [Krishna],
Gobind is everything.
Nothing that exists
is without Gobind:
the one thread strings
innumerable beads --
Prabhu [the Lord] Himself is the thread,
the threader, the threaded.

River and waves,
foam and bubbles
have all their being
within water itself.
This play of things
is the sport of Parbhama [Reality].
The One cannot be thought
different from the other.

Hope is a lie
and desire a mere dream --
yet both are construed
as actual reality.
But when my guru
gave me his holy wisdom,
I awoke from my dream
and my heart yielded.

Namdeva says,
Behold Hari's [God's] creation;
ponder upon it
with all your heart,
and you will see
that in every pore,
in every living thing,
there is only the one Murari [Krishna]."

Namdev (1270 - 1350)
from _Songs and Saints from the Adi Granth_
Translated by Nirmal Dass

Adyashanti - Love

Love is a tremendous caring that arises in the wake of transcending the personal self. 

In the wake of this transcendence, something amazing arises. 

A deep love and caring arises from within emptiness, from nowhere. 

This love and caring seeks only the Truth in every moment and in all circumstances. 

True love is something far greater than anything that could be called personal. 

True love is a non-personal miracle. It is the nature of reality itself. 

It is the natural and spontaneous expression of the undivided Self. 

True love is not something that can be created. 

A love greater than oneself, by its very nature, is something that we can’t manufacture. 

The me cannot manufacture it, even if it wants to. 

This Love arises from the Self – from realization of the Self. 

 Listen and feel into the intuition of oneness within. 

The feeling of oneness is love; the experience of oneness is realization of your true nature. 

Love only seems other than you or bigger than you 

when you are trapped in the perspective of a personal me. 

This non-personal love actually is you because you, as you truly are, 

have never been that which is personal. 

In one sense, it’s simply a matter of how deep enlightenment has gone, how thorough it is. 

We can’t really love the whole until we have a deep realization that we are the whole. 

Otherwise, the vastness of that love is always going to be experienced as a threat to the me. 

Love cares not for the me, it cares only for that which is true, undivided, and whole. 

When the me dissolves, when it surrenders itself to a unity far greater than anything the mind can comprehend, that is Love.

 http://www.adyashanti.org/

Vicki Woodyard - Crossroads

A curtain fell between us.
Maya wove her spell.
I felt the chasm open
as I fell into hell.

Sorrow fell like feathers
into my lonely head.
And I approached the
shuttle to weave the words
I said.

Nothing stands between us
but the river and its flow.
The strands of time are woven
as above and so below.

Green waters move along
as threads that weave
a love so fine
Afloat in love each hour
brings one note and it
is Thine.

I am at a crossroads. Bigger Than The Sky is out and seemingly, the future ahead is simply more of the same. A quiet life, the occasional kirtan, weekly Tai Chi and entirely too much time on my hands. Yet time is merely a measurement and one you will never be able to hold in your hands or put in your pocket for a rainy day. When I was writing oneliners, here is one I liked. “The plane was so crowded that every time we hit an air pocket, I put something in it.”

I just like the act of writing. It comes so easily to me. As I lay in bed this morning lazily, I pondered the fact that essence never changes. I am who I was as a child; so is everyone else. The persona is built up but persona never touches essence. It is our essence that is bigger than the sky. It is essence that carried my friend Peter through his accident and illness. It is essence that enables me to type these words fresh off the fingers, as it were.

Pondering is part of my essence. I have never understood the enthusiasm people have for engaging in activities. I don’t decorate for holidays or enjoy doing anything with my hands except strike the keys. I do admit to having a need for order in my world. Otherwise, I feel threatened by the chaos. I have Virgo rising, which makes me a neat freak. I would say it is impossible for me to appear messy. People would remark on it when I was small. Virgo explains it.

Dutiful is a word that might describe me as a personality, too. I dislike being late or running out of things in the pantry. This is personality forcing me into a certain mold. Joan Rivers: “My body is falling so fast, I sleep in a Jello mold.” (I didn’t write that; it just popped into my head.)

This quality made me a great caregiver, for I had no trouble covering all of the bases. But I also knew that it was a useless endeavor, for my essence knew the future. I had a dream right before Bob was diagnosed with his cancer. It showed us on different sides of a river. I was walking along picking up shells, quite happily doing my thing. Interpretation: I would have many years without him. 

Nevertheless, it has been only recently that the grief has abated to any great extent. It happened when a shaman gave me a healing. After spending an hour with him, my deep grief had lifted suddenly to an amazing degree. He gave me a word of guidance: Be grateful. And I am. And I keep on writing like there is no tomorrow. If there was, I would have put it in my pocket.

Bigger than the sky-A radical Awakening

https://www.facebook.com/vicki.woodyard 

Kabir - Bhakti

"The bhakti path [path of love]
winds in a delicate way.
On this path
there is no asking
and not asking.
The ego simply disappears
the moment you touch him.
The joy of looking for him
is so immense
that you just dive in,
and coast around
like a fish in the water.
If anyone needs a head,
the lover leaps up to offer his.
Kabir's poems touch
on the secrets of this bhakti."

Dorothy Hunt - Stepping Out the Door

Are you afraid of horror shows?
Step out of the theater.
A door opens into the clear light.

Does your drama weep bitter tears?
Let the drama slide down around your ankles
like a slip. Lift your foot and walk on.

The mind is yelling "spiritual by-pass!"
but the mind lives in time
and cannot see the door to the Timeless

right inside the horror,
right inside the bitter tears,
right inside the confusion or the pain.

Do you think your mind will figure out
this Mystery so it can control it?
What great laughter erupts in heaven!

When you discover the secret door
that leads straight to peace,
it by-passes nothing and claims nothing.

The theater exit may seem hidden
by your fascination with the show,
but when you are exhausted by the stories,

you begin to see the cracks of light
that enter the theater of the mind
and invite you into the Heart's mystery.

 http://www.dorothyhunt.org/index.htm

Naomi Shihab Nye - Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth
What you held in you hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night the plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Read more about Naomi Shihab Nye here

Kabir - That which you are

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
what is this river you want to cross?

There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or resting?

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no towrope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time no bank, no ford!
And there is no body, and no mind!

Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.

Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.

The Kabir Book: Forty Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Translation by Robert Bly.
Beacon Press, Boston, 1993.

Richard Wehrman - Towards each other

Art Mahmoud Farschian

 For years
I thought God
would show up
in a flash and dazzle -
decking me out
in gold and silks,
gifting me with palace and jewels,
where I would live out
a kingly life of ease.
But these days,
though God looms large
on my horizon -
it is often misty and hard to see.
Our movement
towards each other
comes tightly measured -
in single steps,
in difficult and long lived days.
And our final greeting
may be less
a joyous celebration
full of gold and glitter -
than each,
falling exhausted,
into the others
arms.

from Light was Everywhere

 

http://www.richardwehrman.com/ 

MysticSaint. (Singapore) Sadiq Alam - Becoming less and less

Mysticism is becoming less and less,
until one becomes nothing.
Only then one reach the Ultimate Nothingness.

And that becoming nothing is
called by many names in many traditions.

Sufis call it Fana, Buddha called it Nirvana
Hindus call it Merging of soul with Ultimate Soul.

No matter what you call,
It’s the same acknowledgement
and journey into the Oneness of the One.

source text http://www.techofheart.co/

Adyashanti - Truth

 

Art Parablev

 
Truth is only discovered in the moment.
There is no truth that can be carried over
to the next moment, the next day, the next year.
Memory never contains truth, only what is past, dead, gone.

Truth comes into the non-seeking mind fresh and alive.
It is not something you can carry with you, accumulate, or hold onto.

Truth leaps into view when the mind is quiet, not asserting itself.
You cannot contain or domesticate truth, for if you do, it dies instantly.

Truth prowls the unknown waiting for a gap in the mind's activity.
When that gap is there, the truth leaps out of the unknown into the known.

Instantly you comprehend it and sense its sacredness.
The timeless has broken through like a flash of lightning
and illuminated the moment with its presence.

Truth comes to an innocent mind as a blessing and a sacrament.
Truth is a holy thing because it liberates thought from itself
and illumines the human heart from the inside out.

 http://www.adyashanti.org/

Magdi Em Be - Intimacy

Art Intao

Since the un-awakened mind is worldly and operates in the field of form and duality, it is unable to comprehend total 'intimacy': the total 'intimacy' of the perceived object and the perceiver, the total intimacy of phenomena and consciousness.
It is in the death or dissolution of the dualistic mind that total intimacy is revealed. There is no other way.

Once total intimacy is revealed, and once the realization of this intimacy has matured and uprooted all the vasanas of separation, then one can talk metaphorically and poetically ... lovingly expressing the divine.

The mind and the external world are a dream and the characters in the dream are dream characters that are made out of the dreamer ... YOU: Aware awake consciousness, universal and vibrantly alive.
YOU, as consciousness, are not a dream. YOU are Reality, pure consciousness dreaming all dreams. The one and only Reality. Right here, right now, YOU ... aware awake consciousness, read these words, that are made out of yourself.

Once you come to this deep understanding, you will dream sweet dreams, bathed in peace and happiness.

YOU, as consciousness can choose that path. You, as a dream character chooses nothing.
The dream character is imagined, dreamt by consciousness. Only consciousness is Real.

Once YOU, consciousness, release the dream character from its imagined choices, you return to the true chooser, the true creator.
But if you continue to feed the dream character with independent choosing capability, you remain entangled in the dream, hoping the dream character will deliver freedom and happiness.

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Jean Klein - Duality ends

“It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous.
If we make an effort to change, we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle.
This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other.
Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biological, emotional and psychological nature has undergone.
There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices.
In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp.
When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness.
In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends.
You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.”

~ Jean Klein, 'I Am' 

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