Rumi - Be foolishly in love.

 

 A spirit that lives in this world
and does not wear the shirt of love,
such an existence is a deep disgrace.

Be foolishly in love,
because love is all there is.

There is no way into presence
except through a love exchange.

If someone asks, But what is love?
answer, Dissolving the will.

True freedom comes to those
who have escaped the questions
of freewill and fate.

Love is an emperor.
The two worlds play across him.
He barely notices their tumbling game.

Love and lover live in eternity.
Other desires are substitutes
for that way of being.

How long do you lay embracing a corpse?
Love rather the soul, which cannot be held.

Anything born in spring dies in the fall,
but love is not seasonal.

With wine pressed from grapes,
expect a hangover.

But this love path has no expectations.
You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount. Travel lighter.
Wings will be given.

Be clear like a mirror
reflecting nothing.

Be clean of pictures and the worry
that comes with images.

Gaze into what is not ashamed
or afraid of any truth.

Contain all human faces in your own
without any judgment of them.

Be pure emptiness.
What is inside that? you ask.
Silence is all I can say.

Lovers have some secrets
That they keep.

Robert Adams - The Confession of a Jñāni

For a Jñāni who has realized the identity of his inner being with the infinite Brahman there is no rebirth, no migration, and no liberation.
He is beyond all this. He is firmly established in his own Absolute Existence-Knowledge-Bliss true nature.
The further existence of his body and the world appears to the Jñāni as an illusion, which he cannot remove, but which no longer deceives him.
After the death of this body, as in life, he remains where and what he eternally is, the first principle of all beings and things:
formless,
nameless,
unsoiled,
timeless,
dimensionless and
utterly free.
Death cannot touch him, cravings cannot torture him, sins do not stain him; he is free from all desire and suffering.
He sees the infinite Self in all, and all in the infinite Self, which is his being.
The Jñāni confesses his experience thus:
“I am infinite, imperishable, Self-luminous, Self-existent, I am without beginning or end, I am birthless, deathless, without change or decay. I permeate and interpenetrate all things. In the myriad universes of thought and creation I Alone Am.”

http://robert-adams.info/

Göran Backlund - The awakened and the ignorant

The difference between the awakened and the one who isn’t, is that the former lacks the delusion of the latter. Of course, neither of them exist at all, other than as conceptual figments of the thinking mind – but from that perspective, they appear as thinking, acting, and autonomous characters of this dreamscape in which you’re either awake or you’re not.

To the ignorant, these figments are real – the awakened knows that they’re not. While he seems to know something that others don’t, it’s actually the other way around – the unawakened is precisely that because he’s bound by beliefs that are not only flat out depressing, but also completely untrue. Such beliefs generally involves a variety of delusions including, but not limited to: him being a human being walking around on planet earth, the certainty of free will, or that there’s some meaning or purpose to be found – all of which are misconstrued interpretations of this flow of phenomenality that we know as “life.”

The awakened is free from such ideas. He no longer believes that he’s a fragment, nor that he exists at all – for he has recognized that there is no planet earth, nor any free will, nor any “me” or “you” for that matter. They are nothing but conceptual abstractions – interpretations of the flow of phenomenality – and have no existence whatsoever independent of that.  They are pieces of the phenomenal world, which is what we call the manifested aspect of pure subjectivity, or Consciousness if you will, or the Tao, or any of the other countless names that has been given this-which-we-are.

more at: http://www.uncoveringlife.com/

Chuck Surface - The Great Mystery

 

This Great Mystery of Life,
At some point becomes,
The Great Matter of consideration.

You start seeking,
And enter the spiritual marketplace…
And a tsunami of chaos rolls over you,
Spinning you, submerged,
In a torrent of teachings.

No wonder people take refuge
In this teaching or that,
In Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Otherwise…
One could go mad.

So many teachings,
So many teachers.
So many diverse views and paths,
Expressed in so many different ways,
Even within a given tradition!

If you don't hold to your own Heart
As the ultimate Sat Guru,
If you don't have a sense of spiritual autonomy,
Even as a seeker,
All manner of dangers arise at every turn.

You may become enamoured of spiritual powers,
Or teachers, not yet liberated, who emanate shakti.
You may be lured by the diamond-like logic of advaita;
Or enamoured of the exotic glamours
Of this religion or that.

You read volumes of words,
Describing this view or that,
Expressed in countless ways,
Born of an originator's experience,
Interpreted through their own unique nature…

And expounded as “enlightenment” or “awakening”.

Who to believe, when all assert
With such certitude and authority,
The view they hold,
And how to come to it?!

After all too many years
I Ieft the spiritual marketplace,
And kicked the dust of it
Off my shoes.

It was all too much for me,
And in the end…
I Surrendered,
To being forever unenlightened.

I left enlightenment,
To those who knew what the word meant.
For myself…
I hadn't a clue.

It was enough to be Liberated from "i",
And for the locus of the Heart,
To be Illumined with Bliss.
Whatever… one… calls… that.

Broken, wounded, imperfect,
As is the nature of manifestation.
Perfect, flawless, Immaculate,
As is the nature of formless Pure Being.

The imperfect made immaculate,
Through Grace,
Like an evanescent cloud,
Illumined by the Sun.

One, an ever-changing Dream,
The other, before the arising of the Dream,
Both experienced neither as two…
Nor One.

I've no idea how to qualify or quantify,
This Experience of… Being.
Such considerations are the doorway to hell.

What it is,
What it means,
Where it stands in relationship,
To this teaching or that…

I've no idea.

It's all…
A Great Mystery.

http://www.chucksurface.com/

~ Mooji - Fall inside yourself

I would not encourage anybody to try to study life, because you can never get it. No one can even begin to comprehend a moment of its magnificence, its mystery, its sheer glory.

You have to fall fully in Love with the very heart of existence and then its essence is miraculously revealed to you somehow – a kind of an intuitive knowing happens out of this love.

But to study life doesn’t work, because your attitude and even you, the student, is phenomenal. 

You have to first fall inside yourself until there is no longer ‘you’ and ‘life’—there is only Life. There is no ‘person’ living life. There is just Life expressing itself in, as and through this form called a person, watched simultaneously in pure consciousness.

How funny that the simplest of teachings seems to be the most difficult. This is like a circus of concepts. We fight, creating devils out of nowhere, in order to defend our identity—sheer ignorance.

Now I’ve said it and now I want to see it alive in you. I want to see it germinate inside your heart. It must flower, bear fruit and give shade. That’s it.

Satsang with Mooji

from Castaneda Tales of Power( Don Juan Matus)

photo:  Hemali Tanna

Let go!

“We are dealing with that immensity out there. To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn’t do anything for you. Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous. Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way. You are too heavy and self-important. Let go!”

Jac O’ Keeffe - Desire

Desire

All desire arises from an innate lack of contentment. While nothing that mind can imagine and want is of any real value, the personal ‘I’ will ensure that each day is peppered with efforts to fulfill desires. In fact when identified thought is running, there is interest in little else. It is the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfillment.

The state of craving for anything inhibits deeper experience. When mind is fixated on a desire, maturation is arrested. If you inquire into yourself, all you really desire is desirelessness. Desirelessness can be recognized as the moment of satisfaction when desire is fulfilled. There is calmness, perfection and a feeling of completeness. Desire for an object or experience is a compensation for the lack of fulfillment of the ultimate desire – desirelessness. There is no end to the cyclical nature of desire; however, the cycle falls away when it is seen to be a looped pattern of thinking. The perpetuation of desire is predicated on the fact that personal ‘I’ desires the very thing that cannot come by desire.

The smallest desire has the ability to ignite a long line of action as one objective idea feeds the next. To engage in desire is a lack of discrimination; let it be seen that acquiring objects, be it a car or a lover, can never bring you to the end of desire. In order for you to enjoy something it must first be objectified by mind as an independent form or formless experience. There is only movement in consciousness which we call life force or functioning and we give names to create an objectified world. Then if this apparent division into subject-object is taken to be true, the desires to have and to own, to acquire and enjoy, will follow. Thus the mind will make the body dance to its tunes.

 When a desire is fulfilled the personal ‘I’ is happy for a while. This happiness arises because of the absence of desire and has nothing to do with the properties of the object of desire. Original perfection is restored when desire is not running. If you imagine yourself to be separate from the world then the world will appear as separate from you, and you will experience desire and fear. As long as there is identification with the body, attractions and repulsions will operate. You cannot but see the world through the ideas you have about yourself. Managing desire has nothing to do with your relationships with objects of desire; it is your own misunderstanding that requires correction. Find out how the perception of objects arises in mind and do not follow thought patterns in ignorance.

There is no object which is of a different nature from the subject, and as there is only the subject, how can it be seen as an object? Let it be realized that there is only subject and then it is clear that there can be no division in such a vision. All experience rests on the reality of objects. If you investigate you will find that objects are unreal. Thus the effect of an unreal object is also non-existent and the experience of any effect is delusion. Let the end of desire and experience come into view through correct seeing. Understand that the world has no real existence and it will no longer be troublesome.

It can be said that desire is the memory of pleasure and that fear is the memory of pain. These are simply habits of mind. Once you know they are impermanent and not real, why bother with them? Pull attention away from the personal and impersonal, and all of this is just the flickering of energy. If you cannot, then there is a deeper understanding and a dropping of attachments that needs to take place. When mind turns to go outward, turn it inward instantly. It goes out due to the habit of looking for happiness in objects, but if you have seen that external objects are not the cause of happiness, then it is time to keep the direction of mind in check. In all whom search for truth there is a root desire to be free from misunderstanding, free from the personal. This pursuit continues for as long as you can be seduced by pleasure and goaded by pain, because desire continually agitates the mind. Desire is at the root of all misunderstanding. For as long as desire continues to hold your attention, the sense of good and bad, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, will inevitably continue.

http://www.jac-okeeffe.com/

Alan Watts - Knowing Who You Are...

..."You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and fabulous game, and that there is no separate 'you' to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real 'you' is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For 'you' is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained--though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Anyone who brags about knowing this doesn't understand it, for he is only using the theory as a trick to maintain his illusion of separateness, a gimmick in a game of spiritual one-upmanship. Moreover, such bragging is deeply offensive to those who do not understand, and who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because after all, in them the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game--the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster. This is why Hindus do not shake hands on meeting, but put their palms together and bow in a gesture of reverence, honoring the Godhead in the stranger."

~Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are...