Not Separate!

    "There is something in all of us that seeks the spiritual … 

     The spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging & participation. We all participate in the spiritual at all times, whether we know it or not. There’s no place to go to be separated from the spiritual, so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma & practice. 

    Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual — but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately, in seeking the spiritual we may become attached to the bridge rather than crossing over it."      Rachel Naomi Ramen MD

 

    More and more brave, intelligent adults are freeing themself from religious & secular orthodoxies, evolving & awakening into their authentic, mature, spiritually-independent Self. 

     “We write here in conversation with Rilke and each other, opening to a ‘wiser way’ than is more generally offered in our hectic, demanding societies, where individuality is so highly praised and our inevitable interconnectedness is so poorly understood. It might well enable you to ground your life in what the ancients knew as the ‘transcendentals’: ‘the true, the good, and the beautiful.’ Those are the collective attributes we find singly and learn to live socially. 
     Rilke suggests in one of his early poems that ‘you are the future.’ You! 
     Is it the ‘you’ of the divine one Rilke often addressed simply as ‘Lord’ but equally call ‘neighbor’ or ‘friend’? Is it the ‘you’ of the poet himself? Or the ‘you’ of the reader? Rilke refused, characteristically, to define whom he is addressing. For in the deepest things in life, the truest things of the heart, the most enduring things of the soul, these three are not different. Not distinct. Not separable. 
    You are the future.”
     Mark S. Burrows, Stephanie Dowrick. “You are the Future. Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke.” Monkfish, 2024.

    It's fascinating to frequently hear a wide variety of spiritual experiences in which the experiencers are completely surprised by their experience, that it was nothing at all what they expected. Indeed one may be at a complete loss to identify the source of a powerful, authoritative voice, that neither quite sounded as if it were God, nor themself. 
    And many decades later, the awe remains ... and probably there is no difference, no distinction, no separation between Self and God.

    We CAN pull up our big adult spiritual pants and
stop externalizing the Divine!

 

"Every Day, Think As You Wake Up, 
Today I Am Fortunate To Have Woken Up, 
I Am Alive, I Have A Precious Human Life, 
I Am Not Going To Waste It 
I Am Going To Use 
All My Energies To Develop Myself, 
To Expand My Heart Out To Others, 
To Achieve Enlightenment For 
The Benefit Of All Beings, 
I Am Going To Have Kind Thoughts Toward Others... 
I Am Going To Benefit Others
As Much As I Can."

H.H. The Dalai Lama

 

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles  www.buddhadoodles.com

"What are you going to do if you’re God?"

    "What are you going to do if you are God?"    

    Ridiculous idea?

    But why would you feel that way? 
    Seriously. Why?

    "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
    Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
    It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." Marianne Williamson

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance & everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998. 

    Alan Watts 65 years ago argued “Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions but very few people know what they are." Below, Alan Watts: "The Constitution of Nature." Philosophy: East and West. Program 28. 1960. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/constitution-of-nature 

    "The high civilizations of the world have produced three different views of the constitution of nature, of the physical universe. I call them respectively: nature as a construct, nature as a drama, and nature as an organism. 
    The first view, nature as a construct, has until very recently been characteristic of the Western world. The view of nature as a drama has been largely characteristic of India. And finally, of nature as an organism, has been characteristic of the Far East. I’d like to compare these three views and point out certain of their advantages, disadvantages, and the ways in which they complement each other.
    Our thinking about the world is strongly influenced by analogies that are almost hidden. They are so far back in the history of the thought of any given civilization or culture that they are taken as something more than analogies. They are taken almost as logical patterns. And they are basic to our grammar, to our common sense, and to our attitudes in ways that often go unsuspected. 

    Why don’t we start with the Western view of the world as a construct. The physical world has historically, in the West, been looked upon as a created or manufactured article; the world of a creator external to the world. And this view has continued in many ways even after the rise of deism in the eighteenth century and the general tendency of the scientist to dispense with the hypothesis of the creator. The idea still remains that the world is a construct, analogous to a machine, and indeed obeying laws or plans in the same way as a machine obeys a blueprint, even though the law-giver and the planner himself seems to have disappeared.
    The basic metaphor, though, underlying this is not so much the machine as the work of clay: the pot or the modeled figure. For, as you know, it is said in the Book of Genesis that the lord god created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And so our language, our poetry, is full of allusions to the fact that we are really, after all, clay. 
    And because of this figure, it is fundamental to our common sense that the world is formed matter — the form being the shape of the pot, the matter being the clay. And thus we think of life as being basically something done to a medium. The medium is stuff: a kind of formless and of itself inert and unintelligent goo, which requires an external agency to give it form and intelligence and life.
    And naturally, because we have thought this way ((materialistically & dualistically)) for so long, it’s a terribly difficult idea to abandon—to get out of our heads the notion that, in the same way that tables are made of wood and houses of stone, so we tend to think that trees are made of wood and mountains of stone and people of flesh, and all of it eventually reducing itself to the primordial goo, the universal clay, the primal matter, the formless original water over which the spirit of god is said to have moved in the beginning of all time. 
    Now, beyond the idea of the world as a work of pottery lies the more sophisticated idea of the world as a mechanism in this Western view of the world as a construct. As soon as men began to understand mechanical principles, it became extraordinarily convenient to make analogies between various types of machinery and things to be found in the world. And it is really upon this analogy that the great achievements of Western technology have hitherto been based. And it’s really very difficult to think that we could have devised our technology, and that our practical sciences could have made such progress, without the idea of the analogy between the world and a constructed machine. 
    You see, one of the most fundamental things about a machine is that it is an assemblage of parts. And the successful measurement and description of nature depends upon the calculus, upon reducing it to parts. You know, the word “calculus” originally meant “pebbles,” and pebbles were one of the oldest methods of calculating: counting pebbles. In a funny kind of association of words, calculus is also calculating in the sense of having a calculating attitude; scheming. And scheming is associated with turning things to calculae, or stones. It is a sort of killing of the world, reducing it from the living to the dead, from the organism to the machine—but nevertheless it has had the most marvelous consequences so far as we’re concerned. And the cultures which thought of nature by analogy with drama and by analogy with an organism did not produce the technology that we in the West produced.  

    Let us contrast the other attitudes: the Indian attitude of the world as a drama. In Hindu thought, the world is not thought of as being made or constructed by god, but as being actually god himself playing a game. The idea of one single divine actor who is playing all the parts of all the creatures in the world, imagining himself to be them —assuming, as it were, myriads of masks, behind which there is simply one wearer of the mask. In "The Masks of God" Joseph Campbell contrasts the way in which the myth of the one who became two, the one that became many, has gone in two quite different directions. Beginning in ancient Sumeria (which constitutes, as it were, a sort of cultural watershed), it has flowed eastwards in one way and westwards in another. 

    To the East, the idea that the one (the godhead, in other words) split itself and dismembered itself into many parts quite voluntarily, and thus became the world as a play. 

    To the West, the theme of the one who became many is different, because (as he points out in the Book of Genesis) it is not the divine who becomes male and female, it is the creature. In the Upanishads—say the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—the divine Self is described as saying in the beginning of time, “Let me become two,” and he splits into male and female, and thus generates the world. But in the Book of Genesis it is not the godhead who splits, it is man, the creature, who is split into Adam and then into Eve. But thus, in the Eastern world, we have the dramatic view—in India in particular. And although it’s interesting to note that in, say, the writings of the great philosopher Shankara and others, you very often encounter the analogy of the potter or of pots as representing the world. The roles are reversed. Clay is used as the symbol for the divine reality. Just as pots are all made of clay, or as jewels are all made of gold, so all things in the world are of one divine substance, which is of the nature of the godhead, or Brahman. It’s interesting, the different use of the simile.
    And so, from the standpoint of the dramatic view of the universe, all the divisions & distinctions of the world are looked upon as being a kind of as-if. They are in play. They are not quite serious. 
    And this contrasts very sharply with what has been the characteristic ((dualistic)) Western view: that the distinctions in the world are the most important things about it, that they are deeply serious. The distinction of good and evil is an eternal distinction, as is the distinction between the creator and the creature. The world in this view is not a drama. It  is played not by actors, but by what we call real individuals, even real persons—although, funnily enough, as I suppose you know, the word “person” is originally persona: the megaphone mask worn by actors in classical Greek drama.

    Then, thirdly, there is the organic view characteristic of China. In this, there is no real thought of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world, but rather the world is thought of as being self-moving & self-creating. The word for nature in Chinese means “what is of itself so.” When, in the West, a child asks its mother, “Who made me?” and she replies, “Darling, god made you,” and the child asks, “But who made god?” she has to say, “Nobody made god.” And that is a great puzzle to the child who thinks of the world as a construct. And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that god makes himself; he exists of himself, because he is existence. 
    There is a certain sense in which the Chinese view is fundamentally almost anarchical—or, if you don’t like that word, you could call it democratic. A world which is self-governing—not even through a president, but self-governing in every way. ... which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we’re doing and how we move them (we don’t)."

    NOW, 65 years later, we have an EXCEPTIONALLY FINE summary of how we have evolved beyond rule by barbaric force to all individuals (potentially) living in attunement with the cosmos: 
    A few excerpts from Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/

    "The world was viewed as inert, mechanical, & mute. In such a cosmos, control becomes necessary—an external force imposed upon the otherwise unruly. 
    But if the universe is alive, conscious, & self-organizing — as mystics, complexity theorists, and post-materialist scientists increasingly affirm — then governance as enforcement becomes obsolete. A deeper model must emerge.

    Order does not require laws. It requires resonance. This is evident in the natural world: ecosystems, galaxies, human consciousness itself. There is structure, but it is not forced. There is hierarchy, but it is dynamic, fractal, and non-coercive. These systems organize through patterns of self-similarity, feedback, & relational intelligence. 
    Therefore, any model of governance that fails to reflect the actual metaphysical conditions of the universe is not only oppressive—it is inefficient. It is maladaptive. A politics of force is the symptom of a civilization that does not yet trust its own source. 
    If we accept that the cosmos is psyche — structured consciousness — then the political must become the art of attunement, not the science of enforcement.

    This is the paradox: Anarchy is not the breakdown of order, but the maturation of it.

    In the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called pirate utopias—from Madagascar’s Libertalia to the floating cities of the Caribbean—offered living examples of anarchic coherence. These were not lawless zones, but radically self-organised societies governed by codes of mutual agreement, shared spoils, elected leadership, and often racial and gender egalitarianism unthinkable in the empires they subverted.

    Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey resurrected these spaces as what he called Temporary Autonomous Zones. The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is a fleeting pocket of liberation—a territory of freedom in time & space, where hierarchical control is momentarily suspended and replaced by spontaneous, decentralised order. The TAZ is not a static utopia—rather, it is ephemeral, ecstatic, emergent, and arises in the cracks of empire—in festivals, secret societies, pirate enclaves, desert rituals, rave cultures, and sacred gatherings***. It resists capture because it is non-cartographic: a zone of resonance, not regulation. 
    (((*** On a week-long silent meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, 20 years ago or so, early on somebody had found a solid gold wrist watch and pinned it on the announcement board. It stayed there untouched for the entire week. 
    While entirely silent, with even eye contact generally avoided at such retreats, a remarkable sense of intimacy spontaneously arises between all participants by the end of the retreat, despite the fact that most participants had never met.  
    To really test this phenomenon, at the end of one such retreat, I once intentionally went over to two specific people to chat & get to know them. I picked them because at first glance, at the beginning of the retreat, I had judged them as the least attractive. Now, chatting with them at the end of the retreat, I couldn't believe what fine human beings they were. We are capable of INFINITELY more intelligent, wise, loving & effective way of relating to ourselves, others & the cosmos!)))

    In this sense, the TAZ is a model of anarchic advent—not a total revolution, but a sovereign moment. A glimpse of what becomes possible when we stop waiting for permission and begin to live from coherence now. 
    As Bey writes: “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere.” 
    In biology, we see similar nodes of coherence in swarms & flocks—patterns of grace and coordination emerging without a single commander. 
    This is not chaos. It is emergent order—a coherence that arises from within, not imposed from above. In complexity science, such systems are called self-organizing. Their intelligence is not centralized but embedded in every node. The mycelial network, the blockchain, the ant colony, the neural net: all are examples of distributed intelligence that outperforms hierarchy. 
    In an anarchic society, the leader is not the one with the most control, but the one with the most alignment—the one who is so attuned to the deeper frequency of the Real that others orient around them effortlessly, not out of obedience but recognition. 
    This is how the cosmos leads. Not with domination—but through radiance.

    ... when beings are unshackled from repressive systems, and attuned to the inner source, they act in service to divine order.
    Christ was not a revolutionary against Rome—he was a vibrational insurgent, subverting the very metaphysics upon which empire rests. His leadership was anarchic in the truest sense: not the assumption of power, but the disruption of its necessity. 
    In this light, Jesus becomes the prototype of the Anarch—the figure who dissolves external rulership not by force, but by rendering it obsolete through the radical coherence of divine being.

    To live anarchically is to live from kairos, not chronos—from the sacred time of right alignment, not the mechanical tick of the clock. It is to act, as Christ did, from impulse, not from protocol—from the soul’s timing, not the calendar’s. To live from kairos is to become temporally sovereign. One ceases to move through time as sequence, and begins to modulate time as frequency—a vibratory reality shaped by alignment, not duration. When time is understood in this way, individuation is no longer a psychological journey within time—it is a re-tuning to time’s deeper structure.

    Individuated, anarchic beings are not merely free—they are temporally generative. Their presence carries the power to dislodge timelines, to open unexpected pathways, to bend probability. In this sense, they function like strange attractors in a chaotic system—subtle but catalytic forces around which reality reorganises itself. Not through force, but through the coherence of their inner architecture.

    They do not push history forward. They change the pattern altogether.

    In anarchy, freedom is not deferred—it is not something granted by the future, but something activated in the now through resonance with higher-order time. The anarchic subject becomes a temporal node—a being whose very presence rewires the causality of the world.

    This shift in time is not abstract—it is the scaffolding of a new civilization, one rooted not in deadlines and duties, but in destiny and divine attunement."
    Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/ I HIGHLY RECOMMEND READING this ENTIRE SUPERB ESSAY.

 

    "I am, by the sheer complexity of my structure, far more evolved than any system which I can imagine. ... you (too) are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos and you can’t figure you out." Alan Watts "The Process of Life" (https://www.thealpinereview.com/articles/alan-watts-the-process-of-life )

     We have a GREAT DEAL to learn. 

    “In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
    There is an infinite array of choices.
    One alone brings happiness -
    To love what is.” Dorothy Hunt

    "When you know you’re the ocean, you’re not afraid of the waves.” Tara Brach

    "Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present." Alan Watts

 

Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com

Oneness, Peace, Contentment, Happiness

    Everyone at some level is aware that right now, no matter how well we're doing, by whatever measure - loved & respected by family & friends, smart, well-educated, successful, healthy, attractive, financially-secure - our life as we know it & that of our loved ones, can radically change in an instant. Our fragility is partially because for many, happiness depends entirely on how well we can control our environment. But, again at some level we know that we have put our environment & ourselves into crisis. So our anxiety & stress appears to be because we cannot reliably control the basic, universal facts of life: constant change, aging, sickness & death.
    Much of this is based on the simplistic materialist model of reality - a left-hemisphere-dominant perspective - which imagines life AS IF life was nothing more than accidentally-assembled machinery, meaninglessly churning away, then inevitably breaking down, end of story. As a result, a frightening proportion of humanity are electing brutal primitive leaders who are obviously deaf, dumb & blind to essential human values of love, compassion, honesty, truth, empathy, compassion, nurturing each other. http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/09/balance.html

    BUT WHAT IF our anxiety and pervasive sense of 'lack' or 'something missing' were caused not as much by our inability to adequately control life / fear of death, but MOSTLY by the gnawing disconnect between how most of us perceive the world ("relative reality" "consensual reality") and our innate intuitive memory of "Ultimate Reality" which cannot be seen, nor adequately described. And because Ultimate Reality is far more complex than the reductionist model, many are not able to or not ready to deal with it.
    Nevertheless, throughout history, from all traditions, from every corner of the globe, shamans, mystics, saints, philosophers, poets & other deeply spiritual seekers of Truth have continued to point us toward Ultimate Reality in the only possible way - by directly experiencing it.

     In this tradition, Rupert Spira offers very clear, concise pointers to help us directly experience Ultimate Reality in his excellent 40-minute video (at the bottom of this page). His excellent talk (from the video) about how our Essential Nature is Happiness, is partially transcribed here : 

    “Could it be that the entire, what we call the universe, is an appearance within Awareness or Consciousness? After all, that is what our experience tells us.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations of an infinite field of Consciousness, through the agency of which Consciousness knows itself as the world? Just as when we fall asleep at night we dream, we imagine an entire world within our own minds, and yet, we view that world from the perspective of a separate subject of experience within that world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like dreams, in the mind of Infinite Consciousness? Or to use religious language, each of our minds are like dreams in the mind of God, through which infinite consciousness or God’s infinite being seems to divide itself into two parts: a subject that knows and an object that is known, just as we do at night when we dream.
    Our own mind divides itself into two parts: a dreamed world and a separate dreamed character, from whose point of view that world is known. In other words, the dreamed character – the character in the dream – is the agency through which our mind knows itself as the dreamed world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations through which Infinite Consciousness knows itself as the world? After all, that is in line with our experience. Is there anyone here who is currently experiencing anything other than the knowing or consciousness of your experience?

    … if we investigate like honest scientists, relying only on the evidence of experience, this knowing or consciousness is all that is ever experienced. And it is possible to explain the whole of reality on the basis of consciousness alone, without recourse to an abstract world made of matter, which nobody has ever, or could ever come in contact with.
    What are the implications of this possibility? It implies that whatever or whoever seems to be outside of ourselves, in other words all others, all objects and the world, although they may be outside of our limited, finite minds, they are not outside of the infinite field of consciousness, out of which our finite minds are made. In other words, the implications of this possibility is that everyone & everything is a modulation of a single infinite indivisible whole, seemingly separate from ourselves, seemingly made out of something other than ourselves, but in reality, an integral part of the same infinite, indivisible whole.
    In other words, although experience seems to comprise a multiplicity & diversity of objects & selves, if we look through that appearance, trusting only the evidence of experience, we find no separate objects, people, entities, selves or things. We find only our Self, not our personal (small) self – a collection of thoughts and feelings, but our Self, that true and only Self of infinite, indivisible, self-aware Being – referred to as God in the religious traditions; referred to as Consciousness in gatherings such as this; and referred to as “I” in common parlance. 

    I’m not speaking of some extraordinary experience to which only a few enlightened sages have access. Everybody knows the experience to which I am referring. The common name for it is love. When you feel you love someone, or are in love, do you not feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that you are one with that apparent other? (Oneness, Unitive Experience, Unitive Consciousness) Is that not precisely what the experience of love is – the dissolution of the sense of separation between yourself & the other. In other words, love is not a relationship. It is the collapse of relationship. It is the absence of self & other. In other words, it is the recognition of our shared being. It is the recognition of Reality.
    Why is it that everybody loves the experience of love above all else? It is because each of us, all apparently finite minds long, above all else, to be divested of their seeming separation. All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, it’s limitations.
    The experience of beauty is exactly the same experience but in relation to an object rather than to a person or an animal. When you feel the experience of beauty whilst walking in a landscape or listening to a piece of music, do you not feel to a greater or lesser extent that you merge with the music or the landscape? Is there anyone here who has not had that experience? Is there anyone here who on listening to a piece of music or walking in the landscape has not felt themselves dissolve into the music or the landscape, who has not felt the sense of separation between themselves and the object dissolve? Isn’t that why we love to walk in Nature or to listen to music?
    All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, to be relieved of the apparent limitations that seem to confine us to a cluster of thoughts, images, feelings, sensations & perceptions, and returns us, as it were, to our Origin, our Source, or our Essence. 

    In the non-dual traditions there are these two essential pathways.
First of all the inward-facing pathway through which we investigate what we call “I,” which culminates in the recognition that the “I” that we essentially are, the Awareness that we essentially are, is without limits & is inherently peaceful.
    And then there is the outward-facing pathway in which our entire experience is realigned with this new understanding in which we not only understand but feel that everyone & everything is a modulation of our own essential infinite self-aware Being.”
    Rupert Spira, “Your Nature is Happiness” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfQSbc42Uc4 - below

Love Itself - in Form and the Formless

     “A number of years ago, at a retreat in Ithaca, New York, Leonard told me that he was going to retire from music. Then a few years later, he came out of retirement, and he came out with a CD that he called Ten New Songs … The whole album is dedicated to, 'Our Teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi.'
     The works of Leonard Cohen, are known all over the world, of course. But what isn't known is that they are peppered with inside allusions to the teachings of Sasaki Roshi. The fifth cut on the Ten New Songs is called "Love Itself" and it's Leonard's version of the teisho, or Zen talk, of Sasaki Roshi. Unless somebody pointed it out, you wouldn't realize that.
     Sasaki Roshi has only one talk: There is zero. But zero is inherently unstable because it consists of all of the positive and negative in the universe. Therefore, inevitably it breaks apart into expansion and contraction. Expansion only knows how to expand. Contraction only knows how to contract. In between, they create a vibration called space, and that vibration is further nurtured and matured in the cleft between them, and then it evolves into a feeling thinking self that either knows it just came from zero, in which case we call it an enlightened self, or it doesn't. If it knows where it just came from, it knows to give the positive that it received from father back to father, and the negative that it received from mother back to the mother. Therefore, it disappears. There's nothing in between father and mother anymore. And they come back together to create a new state of zero. Oh, you don't understand? Okay, well, I'll try to say a little more. Then he says exactly the same thing again. And then, I see you still don't understand. Well, let me see if I can say some more. But you see, each time he says it, he lives it. He could say it forever. He lives that cycle and if you sense that he's living that cycle, you could listen, you could hear him say it forever.
     You're going to see in this song, there's a refrain. It imitates the style of Sasaki Roshi, but there's more to it. Sasaki Roshi talks about this little room of space where father and mother vibrate, and that's — They come into contrast, you reunite, come into contrast, reunite. He always describes it as like a private little room where there's only the two sides of the Source.
     Many of you have experienced that there are different flavors of Flow, different flavors of impermanence. I look upon the expansion and contraction as the fundamental flavors. When a wave comes up on the shore, the top of the wave is expanding, the bottom of the wave is contracting, and in the cleft as they're sheared apart is born all this foam. There's wavy Flow, there's vibratory Flow, which is analogous to the foam, but underlying it all is this expansion and contraction.
     Often, the most prominent experience of Flow, or change, or impermanence, is a kind of scintillating misty bubbly kind of Flow and it's very blissful, often. And your whole body and mind and the external world can dissolve into it, and it's like trillions of little motes of dust sort of just shimmering. Some of you have had that experience. Because it's blissful, there is the danger of being attached to it. But if you don't become attached to that, then it all sort of flatlines into zero. All the little vibrations go back to the Source. Father and mother come together, and there is shalom bimromav, the peace of heaven.
     If having that champagne bubbly experience of Flow is like being made love to, in a sense, what's beyond that is the Gone. And what's beyond the Gone? Well, after Gone, there's no place to go but to come back, to self and world, but to see it in a different way, for having had that experience. And to do this over and over and over again until there is no fundamental separation between the experience of the Source and ordinary experience. They're on a continuum. There's not a duality between the deepest transcendent empty timeless spaceless cessation, there's not a duality between that and any ordinary experience. They're on a continuum. That's living nirvana. There's nothing in between one's humanity and that which is beyond the human. And that would pretty much describe the world of a master.
     There is the formless, there is the form, and then there is them not being fundamentally separate. In the end, if you want to experience what Sasaki Roshi calls true love, hontō no ai, use that expression. It says everybody wants true love, but they don't realize that true love is zero. True love is what happens if you're willing to let go of the most celestial form of love other than true love, so you'd have to even let go of the massage of the spirit.
     Understanding this, you are in a position to completely understand Leonard's song called 'Love Itself.'"
     Shinzen Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSv5ELuujjs&list=PLngmRO3nU7wLESfjzlpE3STD4YqFvq5pE&index=32&t=4s

 

Leonard Cohen - 'Love Itself'

 

 

Can We Change Now?

     "'Is the universe a friendly place or not?' ... If we believe that the universe is unfriendly ... peace will be elusive at best." Joan Borysenko. “Fire in the Soul. A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism.” Warner Books, 1993. 

     In the interim, ever more human beings keep ravaging our fellow humans, animals & Nature. We continue to prioritize short-term gain & profit over sustainable peace. We are not merely unfriendly, but openly hostile. Can we change sufficiently before we destroy our planet & ourselves along with it?

      "Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry asleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all mystics – Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.”
     Anthony de Mello. “Awareness. The Perils and Opportunities of Reality.” Doubleday, 1992.

     “If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.” Gregory Bateson

     "The non-dual understanding (direct path or Advaita Vedanta) addresses two essential questions: one, ‘How may we be free of suffering and find the lasting peace & happiness for which all people long above all else?’, and two, ‘What is the nature of reality?’
     In relation to the first question, the non-dual approach suggests that happiness is our essential nature, or simply that we are happiness itself. We might then ask, if happiness is our essential nature, why is it not experienced all the time? And the reason is simply this, that whilst all people have a sense of being or knowing their self, not all people know their self clearly. It is this absence of clear self-knowledge that is responsible for the feeling of lack that accompanies most people’s lives and drives them to seek fulfillment in objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships.
     ... chances are that the search for happiness in objective experience has failed you sufficiently often to make you doubt that it can ever be truly found there. The non-dual understanding suggests not. In fact, it suggests that in order to find lasting peace and happiness one must know the nature of oneself as one essentially is. As such, self-knowledge is considered to be not only the means by which peace and happiness may be found but the very experience of happiness itself. It is for this reason that the non-dual teaching starts with an investigation into the essential nature of our self, and you can find a video giving an ‘Introduction to Self-Inquiry’ in this section of the website.
     This clear knowledge of oneself is also the basis of the second aspect of the non-dual understanding, namely, the recognition that reality is an infinite, indivisible whole, made of pure consciousness, from which all separate objects and selves borrow their apparently independent existence. Everything we know or experience is mediated through the mind, and therefore, the mind’s knowledge of anything can only ever be as good as its knowledge of itself. In order to know what anything truly is – that is, what reality truly is – the mind must first know its own essential nature. Therefore, the investigation into the nature of the mind must be the highest endeavor upon which any mind can embark, and the knowledge of its essence or nature the highest knowledge.
     Thus, whether we approach non-duality as a means of finding lasting peace and happiness or, more philosophically, as an answer to the ultimate question about the nature of reality, we begin with an investigation into the nature of our self. This understanding is found at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions, and is expressed in the particular language of the time and place in which it arose. For instance, in Christianity it is said, ‘I and my Father are one’. That is, the essence of our self and the ultimate reality of the universe are the same. In the Sufi tradition, ‘Whosoever knows their self knows their Lord’. That is, whoever knows the essential nature of their self knows the ultimate reality of the universe. And in Buddhism, ‘Samsara & Nirvana are one’, meaning the nature of the world and the essence of the mind are identical.
     Indeed, the words ‘Know Thyself’, carved above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi, indicate that at the very foundation of Western civilization lies the non-dual understanding that our knowledge of our self is not only the means by which lasting peace & happiness may be found within an individual, but is also the basis for peace amongst individuals, communities & nations, and must, as such, be the foundation of any truly civilized society." Rupert Spira https://rupertspira.com/non-duality/introduction-to-non-duality

 

Love, Peace and Happiness

     “Seeking and resistance veil our true nature, aware presence, and therefore veil the love, peace and happiness that is inherent within it or rather that is it.”

       Rupert Spira. “Presence, Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience.” Non-duality Press, Salisbury, UK, 2011. 

     Greed (craving), aversion (hatred) & delusion (ignorance) are, in Buddhism, considered to be the "three poisons" - the basic mental states that cloud the mind, manifest in unwholesome actions, and cause suffering.