Choosing Oneness

     We're easily impressed with quick comebacks from politicians and stand-up comedians. Sometimes we wish we too could instantly put bullies & other critics in their place. Contestants who do well on quiz shows like 'Jeopardy' impress us how quickly they can match a short description to a name on a broad range of topics. Most tests & exams nowadays are 'multiple choice,' where again, one performs such quick matches.
    Of the majority of adults who could match 'the most famous tower in Paris' with 'Eiffel tower,' what percentage could write an intelligent one-page essay on the Eiffel tower, or even Paris? Maybe 2%? The other 98% may respond that writing an essay would be 'too deep' or that they 'don't care.'
    Increasingly, depth of knowledge (never mind wisdom), is considered too time-consuming & too boring to acquire! Now even university graduates - including most of their profs - don't deserve to be called 'intellectual elites,' which is actually being 'weaponized' as a pejorative! We're drowning in quick & dirty clichés & sound bites, which are mostly inaccurate, false, and at times malicious.
    Many, like jet-ski enthusiasts, are drawn to skim the surface as fast as possible. “... our culture [is] so conditioned on unforgiving cynicism and distracted flight from presence.” Very few - like deep-sea divers - carefully investigate the still, silent depths of the ocean. AND when we do, "What emerges is that supreme gift of being: a deeper sense of belonging ..." (Maria Popova, in David Whyte's "Consolations.") This choice always awaits each of us.

    Before I quote a small portion of Whyte's wonderful mystical word paintings on 'joy,' I'll give them a bit of context. 

    A year or so ago, I was with my then 22-month old granddaughter as she sat making chalk drawings on the sidewalk with her little friend, almost the same age. This little girl's Mom, sitting beside her, & I recognized the treasure of being in & enjoying their wonderful magical new world. At this mostly pre-verbal stage, there's an obvious, an almost tangible, yet nonverbal communication between us - WHEN adults give ourselves permission to relax into it.

    Once I dreamt that my wife was talking to me as we sat at a table. While she was speaking, I saw her lips move, yet she made no sounds at all. Nevertheless, I 'heard' & understood everything, just as if she had actually produced audible sounds.

    “Joy is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of laughter. The sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was radically other than us. 

    To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source: the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face. I was here, and you were here, and together we made a world.”
    David Whyte. “Consolations. The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.” Canongate, 2019.

        "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
         Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet, William Shakespeare

     “Stay in your body and come home to your heart again & again & again.” Mirabai Starr

Mental Disciplines Joel & Michelle Levey WisdomAtWork.com

We CAN Experience the Light

"We are all walking in the dark

but with a handful of candles 

that is in our power to ignite.
With every choice we make,
I chase the darkness.
But, I choose to believe in the light."
Closing lines of the 2024 BBC miniseries “The Jetty”

 

     Daniel Schmidt (a Canadian!) is writing, producing & narrating a series of imho impressively wise, beautiful, powerful movies, designed to point us towards directly experiencing our true self.
    Here's my transcript to a small portion of  Daniel Schmidt's "Samadhi Movie, 2018 – Part 2 (It’s Not What You Think)" :

    “In this film when we use the word Samadhi we are pointing to the transcendent. To the highest Samadhi which has been named Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

    The actual word Samadhi means something like to realize the sameness or oneness in all things. It means Union. It is uniting all aspects of yourself. But do not mistake intellectual understanding for the actual realization of Samadhi. It is your stillness, your emptiness that unites all levels of the spiral of life.

    It is through the ancient teaching of Samadhi that humanity can begin to understand the common source of all religions and come into alignment once again with the spiral of life, Great Spirit, Dhamma or the Tao. The spiral is the bridge that extends from the microcosm to the macrocosm. From your DNA to the inner Lotus of energy that extends through the chakras, to the spiral arms of galaxies. Every level of soul is expressed through the spiral as ever-evolving branches, living, exploring. True Samadhi is realizing the emptiness of all levels of self. All sheaths of the soul. The spiral is the endless play of duality and the cycle of life & death.

    At times we forget our connection to the source. The lens we look through is very small and we identify with being a limited creature creeping upon the Earth, only to once again complete the journey back to the source; to the center that is everywhere.

    Chuang Tzu said, ‘When there is no more separation between this and that, it is called the still point of the Tao. At the still point in the center of the spiral one can see the infinite in all things.”

    The ancient mantra, ‘om mani padme hum’ has a poetic meaning. One awakens or realizes the jewel within the lotus. Your true nature awakens within the soul, within the world AS the world.

    Using the hermetic principle, ‘As above so below, as below so above’, we can use analogies to begin to understand the relationship between mind and stillness, relative and absolute.

    A way to begin to grasp the non-conceptual nature of Samadhi is to use the analogy of the black hole. A black hole is traditionally described as a region of space with a massive gravitational field so powerful that no light or matter can escape. New theories postulate that all objects from the tiniest microscopic particles to macrocosmic formations like galaxies have a black hole or mysterious singularity at their center. In this analogy, we’re going to use this new definition of black hole as ‘the center that is everywhere.’

    In Zen there are many poems and koans that bring us face to face with the gateless gate. One must pass the gateless gate to realize Samadhi. An event horizon is a boundary in space-time beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer, which means that whatever is happening beyond the event horizon is unknowable to you. You could say that the event horizon of a black hole is analogous to the gateless gate. It is the threshold between the self and no self. There is no ‘me’ that passes the event horizon. In the center of a black hole is the one-dimensional singularity containing the mass of billions of Suns in an unimaginably small space. Effectively an infinite mass. Literally a universe in something infinitesimally smaller than a grain of sand. The singularity is something unfathomable beyond time & space. According to physics movement is impossible, the existence of things is impossible. Whatever it is, it does not belong to the world of perception, yet it cannot be described as merely stillness. It is beyond stillness & movement.

    When you realize the center that is everywhere & nowhere, duality breaks down, form & emptiness, time & the timeless. One could call it a dynamic stillness or a pregnant emptiness, within the center of absolute darkness.

    The Taoist teacher Lao Tse said, ‘Darkness within darkness the gateway to all understanding.’

    The writer and comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell describes a recurring symbol, part of the perennial philosophy which he calls the Axis Mundi; the central point or the highest mountain. The pole around which all revolves. The point where stillness & movement are together. From this Center a mighty flowering tree is realized. A Bodhi tree that joins all worlds. Just as a Sun gets sucked into a black hole, when you approach the great reality, your life starts to revolve around it and you begin to disappear. As you approach the immanent self, it can be terrifying to the ego structure. The guardians of the gate are there to test those on their journey. One must be willing to face one’s greatest fears and at the same time accept one’s inherent power. To bring light to the unconscious terrors and the hidden beauty within. If your mind is not moved, if there’s no self reacting, then all phenomena produced by the unconscious arises & passes away.

    This is the point in the spiritual journey where faith is most needed. What do we mean by faith? Faith is not the same as belief. Belief is accepting something on the level of mind to bring comfort and assurance. Belief is the mind’s way of labeling or controlling experience. Faith is actually the opposite.
    Faith is staying in the place of complete not knowing, accepting whatever arises from the unconscious. Faith is surrendering to the pull of the singularity, to the dissolving or dismantling of the self in order to pass the gateless gate.

    Belief and disbelief operate on the level of mind. They require a knowing, but if you enter into your own investigation examining all of the aspects of your own being ((self-inquiry)), finding out who is doing the investigating, if you’re willing to live by the principle ‘not my will but higher will be done,’ if you’re willing to travel beyond all-knowing then you may realize what (this film has) attempted to point towards. Only then will you taste for yourself the profound mystery & beauty of simply existing.

    There IS another possibility for life. There IS something sacred, unfathomable that can be discovered in the still depths of your being, beyond concepts, beyond dogmas, beyond conditioned activity and all preferences. It is not acquired by techniques, rituals or practices. There is no ‘how’ to get it. There’s no system. There’s no way to The Way. As they say in Zen, it is discovering your original face before you were born. It is not about adding more to yourself. It is becoming a light unto oneself; a light that dispels the illusion of the self.

    Life will always remain unfulfilled and the heart will always remain restless UNTIL it comes to rest in that mystery beyond name & form.”

“Be still and know that I am God.”
Psalm 46:10


“To realize the Self is to be still.”
Ramana Maharshi


“Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall
while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish
and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness,
Which is the way of the Tao.”
Lao Tzu


“The secret of the receptive
must be sought in stillness.”
Zhou Xuanjing


“The complete stillness of the brain is an extraordinary thing;
it is highly sensitive, vigorous, fully alive, aware
of every outward movement but utterly still.”
J. Krishnamurti

PLEASE watch the entire SUPERB 60-minute video
"Samadhi Movie, 2018 – Part 2 (It’s Not What You Think)"
After transcribing a portion of this movie, I noticed that Daniel Schmidt generously provides complete transcripts! https://awakentheworld.com/transcript/samadhi-2-its-not-what-you-think/

Resisting What is Most Precious

    “It is a common fate of all knowledge to begin as heresy and end as orthodoxy.” Thomas Huxley

    “We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes & hearts opened.” Adyashanti

 

    OK, here's a classic example of "people in positions of power & influence" resisting with all their might something that revolutionized all our lives for the better:
    “In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor at Vienna’s General Hospital, noticed something important about the women and children he treated in the maternity ward. They died. Distressingly often. Semmelweis wondered if all of the autopsies he and his fellow colleagues performed on cadavers were somehow contaminating the next group of children and mothers they attended. So he developed a handwashing solution of chlorine and lime for physicians to rinse with between seeing patients. It worked. Infections dropped to below 1 percent on his ward.
    But, among the other doctors, the reception was less kind. His colleagues mocked him, refusing to believe on principle that a gentleman’s hands could spread disease. Semmelweis himself could only offer up the vague concept of ‘cadaverous contamination’ to justify his protocol (this was several decades before the formal articulation of germ theory). The stress drove Semmelweis to a nervous breakdown. A bitter colleague had him committed to a lunatic asylum, where he was beaten by guards, and died of an infection that his very own handwashing technique would have prevented.
    But Semmelweis’s legacy lives on, and not just in the grudging adoption of surgical hygiene. He’s also shaped the cognitive sciences, where the Semmelweis reflex – the idea that we habitually & often violently reject new evidence or new knowledge because it runs to counter to our preexisting articles of faith – has become a standby on the list of common cognitive biases.
    Our cognitive biases hamper our ability to predict with any degree of certainty what’s going to happen next. That’s because the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face. We can’t wrap our head around it because it runs to counter to everything we hold to be self-evidently true.”
    Jamie Wheal. “Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind.” Harper Wave, 2021.

 

    Our current infatuation with dogmatic scientism (not legitimate science, but scientism as the latest 'opium of the people') blinds us to our own depth and ability to live a truly meaningful, peaceful life. As soon as we hear words like 'spirituality' or 'religion' or even 'depth' and "the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face."

    “Were one asked to characterize (spirituality) in the broadest & most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the (direct experience) that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” ​William James, (paraphrased)​ ​“The Varieties of Religious Experience”

    “The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.
    To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.” William James

    “Too often, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, & the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.” Richard Rohr

    “So much of our precious life force, our prana, our chi, our sacred energy, is spent on the Sisyphean task of pushing feelings away, trying to make them go 'somewhere else'... but where would they go? For even the Underworld is within us! So much creativity is released, so much relief is felt, when we break this age-old pattern of self-abandonment, go beyond our fearful conditioning, and try something totally new: staying close to feelings, not pushing them away, as they emerge in the freshness of the moment, looking for their true home – which is our own hearts. This is meditation: Breaking the cycle of fear.”
 Jeff Foster

    “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” Ram Dass 

    “That which is threatening to the ego is liberating for the heart.” Amaro Bhikkhu

"Once we have died to the false self,
we have a hope of getting out of our own way and
meeting the Holy One face to face.”
    Mirabai Starr. “Caravan of No Despair. A Memoir of Loss and Transformation.” Sounds True, 2015.

“When the mortal mind appears, buddhahood disappears.
When the mortal mind disappears, buddhahood appears.
When the mind appears, reality disappears.
When the mind disappears, reality appears.” Bodhidharma

    “May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”
    John O’Donohue, “Imagination as the Path of the Spirit John O'Donohue” 

 

Estas Tonne - Live in Ulm (2017) stream - 100 min

Awakening Patiently Awaits!

    We are FAR FAR MORE than the sad stories we keep telling ourselves. Only after we become sufficiently dissatisfied with "ordinary unhappiness" do we become serious about waking up to who / what we truly are. Awakening is far less exotic & difficult than we assume, and nicely described by Lisa Natoli below, transcribed from the excellent documentary video "Awakening Mind" (link at the bottom of this page).
    We CAN wake up from our sad "story of me"! This is how Lisa Natoli experienced it :

    “I really just love to teach people how ordinary the experience is to wake up to your true nature and know peace, joy & happiness. Many people think it’s an impossible or out-of-reach goal to know the Self. My purpose as a teacher, just because of my own awakening, has really been to make it very practical, very down to earth. I love to teach people how it’s available to everyone.
    Awakening is the recognition of your true nature. It’s the realization of what you really are, which is Consciousness. Consciousness is just one word for many words that people use for Awareness, Life, Love, God, Light, Buddha-nature, Christ-consciousness … It’s like waking up to the recognition that I’m not this body, that I am that which never dies, and that which is never born.
    That was a very difficult idea for me. I’ve been on a spiritual path since 1992. I started with ‘A Course in Miracles’ – I studied it religiously. I was so committed to knowing the self, knowing God, waking up. I couldn’t get it because I was under the belief that Awakening was something mystical, that something would happen and it would be like Jesus or Buddha or all of these enlightened Masters and it wasn’t happening for me. I couldn’t understand. Why when I’m so committed, and having deep moments of peace, happiness & joy, and yet I’m still struggling?
    The thing that changed for me, it was in October 2018, I started to realize the simplicity of our true nature, which is Awareness. So for someone who’s listening to me right now, the Awareness that’s hearing this voice – that’s what we are. And it doesn’t have a location, it doesn’t have a gender, it doesn’t have a color, it doesn’t have a body, and it’s totally unlimited. At first the mind doesn’t know what to do with that, because it’s that Awareness of our experience that is our true nature. It’s without labels, it’s without patterns, it’s without conditioning, it’s that part of each and every one of us that is just aware. We wake up to the realization that I am the Awareness of this experience, right now as I’m here. And it’s so ordinary that we miss it. We think it can’t be that simple. 

    And after October 2018, I began to just entertain the idea, because it doesn’t fit into our thought system. It doesn’t fit in a box because we’re so used to thinking it’s going to look a certain way and it’s always going to be in the future.
    After that there was a period of really starting to live from the Awareness. And that was life-changing. That changed everything. To begin to see when the person Lisa was showing up, when the habits were showing up, the conditioning, the beliefs, the preferences, the likes, the dislikes. Those all belonged to the person – and they’re not good or bad. But when I began to really stay as the Awareness where I could see all that activity, I could see what Lisa was doing. I could see what was happening. And that’s what an Awakening is. It really is that simple.
    And again there are many different ways one can wake up: just in stillness with the eyes closed and being aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations arising, that’s an amazing way to do it. The way I did it was begin to be awake to what I am not. So I was sick with physical symptoms for over 6 years, and I was the sickness – I am sick, I am in pain, these are my physical symptoms, this is when it started, this is what I’m doing to heal it. I didn’t suspect a thing.
    So the Awakening for me was to begin to be awake to those patterns, to be awake to when the thought ‘I am sick’ arises, and so to stay as the Awareness of the thought ‘I am sick’ arising. That which is aware, of the thought ‘I’m in pain’ that arises, is my true nature. So now there’s a distance. You’re no longer so identified with (the story of me) ‘I’m sick, I’m in pain, this hurts, I don’t like this, why is this happening, this shouldn’t be happening, this is how it started, this is how I think it started.’ Awakening can happen many different ways, it can happen very spontaneously for some, or be gradual. For me Awakening was a very gradual thing, where there was a distance between the experience of the body and the awareness of the body. And the more that I stayed as the Awareness of the experience, where I no longer identified myself as someone who is sick, I started to more & more abide as the Awareness, as Consciousness, as Love. And all of that (story) just started to disappear. It was no longer my experience. There was no longer identification with that which was happening. 

    When the world is so full of conflict, and without hope, how does one cope?
    My answer to that is, do not cope. It’s the coping that’s the problem. Everyone is coping with the world problems and what it looks like is addiction, social media, etc we’re doing things because we’re trying to cope with the suffering, we’re trying to manage how we feel and bring ourselves out of the discomfort, so we see just a lot of destruction in the world. So coping is actually the one thing you don’t want to do. You do not want to cope, because coping will keep the personal-self identity, makes you feel like you’re out of discomfort but you’re not. So the thing to do is to be aware of the discomfort, and the conflicts, and how you feel, and the thoughts that are coming up about your own life or the world’s, or your relationships, and stay in the discomfort. That’s the opposite of what we’ve been taught in the world, because we’re taught to do things to get out of the discomfort so we can feel better. To solve it, you go and you start eating, drinking, smoking, watch TV, binge on your devices, whatever people do to cope and manage, because they don’t want to feel these emotions, they don’t want to be with them, so we push them down. That’s never worked!
    So start welcoming the feeling. Welcome the discomfort. Welcome everything without trying to change anything. That’s the key. You’re not trying to change your overeating, or whatever you’re doing excessively, whatever the addiction is, you’re not doing any of this to change the thing that you’re using as the mechanism for coping. But what happens is that when you stand as Presence in the discomfort, things do fall away, and things do change.

     So for me again that was a game-changer, because my whole life was ‘this shouldn’t be happening, I have to do something.’ And I had evidence from the past, where I had maybe lost weight, I had been on a diet and I lost weight, but then I gained it all back again, because I hadn’t gotten to the cause of the problem. I was dealing with the effect. But as soon as I started getting to the cause, which is the personal-self identity, which is the problem, and I just let myself welcome the overweight body, welcome the sickness, welcome the alcoholism, welcome the cigarette smoking, welcome all of those things without trying to change them, one by one things just started falling away. And the paradox is, I didn’t need them to fall away. I wasn’t trying to make them fall away. I would have been happy even if nothing changed. Because the mind will get in there – ‘Oh, we’re doing this technique now so I can lose weight,’ or ‘I’m doing this technique now so I can have a better life.’ So you just want to be aware, ‘Oh that’s the pattern, that’s the personal-self identity.’ This is why I think a teacher is important, because a teacher can really highlight the roadblocks for a moment. You just need a teacher for a moment, to just guide you, who can really shine a light on the path and can see, ‘Oh, I see what’s happening here, no judgment.’ It just makes things much easier and faster. So that would be my answer, ‘Don’t cope.’ 

    What does one need to Awaken?
    I think someone who’s interested in these matters, who’s interested in waking up, who’s hearing what’s being said in this documentary, to simply really begin where you are. This is always going to be the spot. It’s not later. Just know that what is in your heart is all that’s needed.
    The personal-self identity (self-talk, small self, ego, ordinary mind, left hemisphere dominance) makes it way more complicated. It just thinks ‘I have to do something, I have to go somewhere, I have to pick up another spiritual practice, I have to read something.’
    My experience really came from this place of stillness. It’s like that because that call for Awakening is from the Self. It’s coming from the Self. It’s coming from Consciousness. It’s calling us back, because we tend to look outside of ourself for happiness, peace & joy. It’s been calling us back forever. Every single thing in life is trying to get our attention, for us to turn our attention from the external to within. And you later discover there is no external and there is no within (- it's all One).
    But that’s the starting place, when you really can say, ‘I want this.’ ‘I don’t know how to get there, I don’t know the journey, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, I’m scared.’

     Most people when they hear these ideas, there’s a tremendous amount of fear that comes up, because somewhere deep inside, each and every one of us, we know this is going to change our lives. We know it is probably going to dismantle certain elements of how we live, it could change our relationships, it could change our job, but, that call from the Self is so deep, ‘Yes, let’s go!’ So to me, that’s how someone begins.
    If someone is hearing this and they’re listening, and they say, ‘I want to know the Self. I want to experience peace, joy & happiness. I want to stop struggling. Yes, yes, take me there. Show me. Tell me.’ It really does begin right here in this moment with that desire.
    For me, it began with that one word, ‘Welcome.’ Welcome everything. Just welcome everything exactly as it is. That’s how it happened for me. Many different people explain it in different ways. They say, ‘All paths lead to God.’ ‘All paths lead to the mountain top.’ Whenever someone is feeling that in their heart, and they’re feeling that call, to me that’s all that’s needed.”
    “The Simplicity of Awakening: An Interview with Lisa Natoli” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoV7pw6wiog

    For the important CONTEXT, I HIGHLY recommend watching this 67-minute high-quality FREE documentary video "Awakening Mind" Part 1, “Know Thyself” (2023) https://triality.nl/index.php/2024/04/10/awakening-mind-part-1-know-thyself-2023-complete-hd-film/

 

Fear and Confusion turn Peaceful

    At times we become weary from the heaviness of life, and need to get away, if only for an hour or so. Pleasant, healthy getaways include playing with little children or puppies, walking or jogging outdoors, gardening, listening to or playing music, joking or watching comedy, reading a book just for fun, playing games with family and friends, etc. Most of us don't 'play' like this nearly enough. 

    At the same time, almost all of us have an understandable, visceral fear of death. We're so afraid of the dreaded "D" word, that we expend a lot of energy avoiding / ignoring / neglecting / delaying even things we associate with it: proper nutrition, proper health-care, exercise, meaningful discussions about sickness & death, meditation, meaningful spirituality, wills & estate planning. Many of us mistakenly assume that opening our minds & hearts to the deepest, most meaningful aspects of life will somehow "make us soft," threatening our ability to earn a living or even to survive. Fear of death confines many of us to the shallows of life's profoundly vast & deep ocean.

    “We look like (we're) rich from the outside, but mentally we have problems. (We're) all about 'face.' We don’t know how to talk (sincerely - from our true Self). We can’t ask for help. So many people are alone with their problems, and stuck, and their hearts aren’t touching. … It’s not that people lack friends. Facebook, Instagram— scroll around and you find (people) bursting with mugging, partying companionship. It just isn’t real, that’s all. There’s a real me and a masked me (and a) lonely gap in between ...” https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-incredibly-true-story-of-renting-a-friend-in-tokyo?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

     “Our hearts do not need logic. They can love and forgive and accept that which our minds cannot comprehend. Hearts understand in ways minds cannot.” Lois Wilson “When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story” 2010 TV Movie – Prime Video

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

    “the only thing really needed is to descend alone ... down into the silent depths of yourself to listen, and wait, and learn.” Peter Kingsley “A Book of Life.” Catafalque Press, 2021.

    "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity." Albert Einstein

    “It is perhaps the ultimate paradox: At the heart of our loneliness, at the core of our longing for life, we find an exquisite aloneness, a Oneness with all creation, our true salvation.
    We find God in the forsaken pit of the psyche; we find the Divine in the abyss.
    We find astonishing light in the darkness of ourselves.
    This is the true enlightenment. To be alone and to be found, to be lost and to be saved, all before the moment even begins.” Jeff Foster

“In the beginning, mind is like a torrent rushing down a gorge.
In the middle, it flows gently like the river Ganges.
In the end, it’s like a stream returning to the sea.”
    Tilopa, 10th century Indian sage, on the progress of meditation over the stages of its practice

“If you look for the truth outside yourself,
it gets farther and farther away.
Today, walking alone,
I meet her/him everywhere I step.
S/he is the same as me, yet I am not her.
Only if you understand it in this way
will you merge with the way things are.” Tung Shan 

 

    Amoda Maa's pointers to help you find your true Self:

    “True healing is what happens when consciousness recognizes its own wholeness amid what appears to be broken or wounded.”

    “Moving from the stillness & silence of being gives you the freedom to start wherever you are, without having to change, fix, or improve anything. … simply but utterly present in what you do, work becomes spiritual practice.”

    “The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”

    “If you truly want to enter the ‘kingdom of heaven’ and be free of suffering, you must put down the burden of all acquisitions and be fully here, in this moment, without a story. This freedom is available to you here and now if you are willing to die, in this moment, as empty awareness.”

    “When the dream of separation becomes unbearable, and you have the courage to honestly say you have had enough of suffering, then awareness has the possibility to turn back in on itself and recognize the deeper dimension of formlessness that exists prior to all forms.”

    “All forms are transient, even the most spiritual ones, and without an anchor in the deepest dimension of beingness that does not come and go, the vicissitudes of the world will threaten to wipe out the satisfaction, joy, and fulfillment derived from external manifestations.
    Your true purpose and fulfillment have nothing to do with what you imagine yourself to be, but everything to do with what you do with who you are beneath and beyond all forms. The invitation is to stop asking, ‘How can I manifest my dream of a better life?’ or ‘How can I do something special / important / unique / spiritual in the world?’ and to turn your attention to the primary purpose of your life: awakening out of the dream of separation. Your true purpose is an inner, not an outer one. Without staying true to this, you will keep on chasing dreams.
    If you are on a path of spiritual inquiry, your commitment to realizing your inner purpose prior to finding your outer purpose is likely, over time, to unravel all agendas and expectations of what you should be doing, what you will be doing, and even of what you want to be doing. This unravelling allows the revelation and release of an essential quality of beingness that wants to express itself through you as you. Not as a future dream, but as a present moment reality. This quality of beingness exists prior to conditioning, and is experienced as a subtle felt-sense (such as clarity, playfulness, devotion, or harmony) when you are still and silent inside.”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017. HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED WISE, VALUABLE BOOK

Amoda Maa "Falling Open in a World Falling Apart"