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February 2004
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February 1st 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- A Tendency to Shine
If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind's clothing with more sooty knowledge.
No, I have something else in mind. Today I hold a flame in my left hand and a sword in my right. There will be no damage control today.
For God is in a mood to plunder your riches and fling you nakedly into such breathtaking poverty that all that will be left of you will be a tendency to shine.
So don't just sit around this flame choking on your mind. For this is no campfire song to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.
Jump now into the space between thoughts and exit this dream before I burn the damn place down.
Adyashanti -- My Secret is Silence
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 2nd 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- What You Are, You Can Only Be
You can only understand what you are not. What you are, you can only be. What you are can never be an object.
When there is no asking, there is prayer. When there is no meditator, there is meditation. When there is no lover, real love is.
The timeless non-state cannot be achieved because the mind cannot evolve towards it. The mind can only bring you to the threshold.
Awakening comes unexpectedly when you do not wait for it, when you live in not-knowing. Only then are you available. When understanding dissolves in being, there is sudden awakening.
Jean Klein
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 3rd 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- You Are the Truth
There are basically two known approaches to truth, the gradual and the direct. In the direct approach the premise is that you are the truth, there is nothing to achieve. Every step to achieve something is going away from it. The 'path,' which strictly speaking is not a path from somewhere to somewhere, is only to welcome, to be open to the truth, the I am.
When you have once glimpsed your real nature it solicits you. There is therefore nothing to do, only be attuned to it as often as invited. There is not a single element of volition in this attuning. It is not the mind which attunes to the I am but the I am which absorbs the mind.
In the gradual approach you are bound to the mind. The mind is under the illusion that if it changes, alters states, stops, etc., it will be absorbed in what is beyond it. This misconception leads to the most tragic state in which a truth-seeker can find himself: he has bound himself in his own web, a web of the most subtle duality.
Jean Klein
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 4th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- A New Awareness of Nature
Travelling through the creation, the virtuous man is led to the apprehension of a Master of the creation;... when he observes the beauty of this material sunlight, he grasps by analogy the beauty of the real sunlight;... look at an ear of corn, a bunch of grapes, at the growing grass,... at the springs of water, the rivers, and the sea, and suchlike sights, and how can the eye of reason fail to find in them, all that our education for true realities requires?
Gregory of Nyssa
There is a twofold meaning in every creature, a literal and a mystical, and the one is but the ground of the other.
John Smith
(Spiritual awakening is) the sense of being immersed in the oneness of nature, so that man feels all the individuality, all the peculiarity of natural things in himself. He dances with the motes of dust and radiates with the sun; he rises with the dawn, surges with the wave, is fragrant in the rose, rapt with the nightingale: he knows and is all being, all strength, all joy, all desire, all pain in all things, inseparably
Rudolf Otto
(In awareness) all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One.
Meister Eckhart
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 5th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Recognition
It was as if I had never realized how lovely the world was. I lay down on my back in the warm, dry moss and listened to the skylark singing as it mounted up from the fields near the sea into the dark clear sky. No other music gave me the same pleasure as that passionate joyous singing. It was a kind of leaping exultant ecstasy, a bright flame-like sound, rejoicing in itself.
And then a curious experience befell me. It was as if everything that had seemed to be external and around me were suddenly within me. The whole world seemed to be within me. It was within me that the trees waved their green branches, it was within me that the skylark was singing, it was within me that the hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool.
A cloud rose in the sky, and passed in a light shower that pattered on the leaves, and I felt its freshness dropping into my soul, and I felt in all my being the delicious fragrance of the earth and the grass and the plants and the rich brown soil. I could have sobbed for joy.
Forrest Reid
In this light (of awareness) my spirit saw through all things and into all creatures, and I recognized God in grass and plants.
Jakob Boehme
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 6th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- The Soul in All
I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun, To the dust I say: Remain. And to the sun: Roll on. I am the mist of morning. I am the breath of evening, I am the rustling of the grove, the singing wave of the sea.
I am the mast, the rudder, the steersman and the ship. I am the coral reef on which it founders. I am the tree of life and the parrot in its branches. Silence, thought, tongue and voice.
I am the breath of the flute, the spirit of man, I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal, The candle and the moth fluttering round it, The rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance.
I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres, The scale of creation, the rise and the fall. I am what is and what is not. I am -- O you who know, Jaluladdin, O say it -- I am the soul in all.
Rumi
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 7th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Mirror Against Mirror
Filled with God, within and without, as one goes to embrace Him, one becomes identified with him. God cannot be warded off even if one so wills. Self-hood is at an end. As desire runs after God, God hides Himself. In a moment's time, however, He shows HImself when all desires become quiescent.
By the mirror of knowledge and devotion, he (the seeker) is merged in Me, and has become one with Me .... as when a mirror is placed against a mirror, which mirror may be said to reflect what? .... He rejoices in Me even though he has become one with Me.
St Janeshwara
God made the universe and all the creatures contained therein as so many mirrors wherein He might reflect His own glory. He hath copied forth HImself in the creation; and in this outward world we may read the lovely characters of the Divine goodness, power and wisdom....
John Smith
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 8th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Those Golden Links
That which knits and unites God and the soul together best teaches it how to ascend and descend upon those golden links that unite, as it were, the world to God.
That Divine Wisdom, that contrived and beautified this glorious structure, can best explain her own arts, and carry up the soul back again in these reflected beams to Him who is the Fountain of them ... good men may easily find every creature pointing out to that Being whose image and superscription it bears.
They may climb up from those darker resemblances of the Divine wisdom and goodness, shining out in different degrees upon several creatures, till they sweetly repose themselves in the bosom of the Divinity. And while they are thus conversing with this material world ... they find God many times secretly flowing into their souls, and leading them silently out of the court of the temple into the Holy Place ...
True religion never finds itself out of the infinite sphere of the Divinity ... it beholds itself everywhere in the midst of that glorious unbounded Being who is indivisibly everywhere.
John Smith
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 9th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- You Are That
The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism.
What defines the unawakened self more than anything else is its total and absolute fascination with itself.
When awakening in the future is no longer satisfactory to you, you are ready.
At the moment of awakening, everything falls away -- everything. Suddenly the ground beneath you is gone, and you are alone. You are alone because you have realized that there is no other; there is only THAT, and YOU ARE THAT.
Adyashanti -- The Impact of Awakening
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 10th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Discovering Your "Nobodyness"
If you start playing the game of being an "enlightened somebody," the true teacher is going to call you on it. He or she is going to expose you, and that exposure is going to hurt. Because the ego will be there, standing in the light of Truth, exposed and humiliated.
Of course, the ego will cry "foul!" It will claim that the teacher made a mistake and begin to justify itself in an effort to put its protective clothing back on. It will begin to spin justifications with incredible subtlety and deceptiveness.
This is where real spiritual sadhana (practice) begins. This is where it allbecomes very "real" and the student discovers whether he or she truly wants to be free, or merely wants to remain as a false, separate, and self-justifying ego. This crossroad inevitably comes and is always challenging. It separates the true seeker from the false one.
The true seeker will be willing to bare the Grace of humility, whereas the false seeker will run from it. Thus begins the true path to enlightenment, granted only to those willing to be nobody. Discovering your "nobodyness" opens the door to awakening as beingness, and beyond that to the Source of all beingness.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 11th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Beyond Enlightenment
Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it's not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred.
I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it.
Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke.
I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 12th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Spiritual Consumerism
Many seekers do not take full responsibility for their own Liberation, but wait for one big, final spiritual experience which will catapult them fully into it.
It is this search for the final liberating experience which gives rise to a rampant form of spiritual consumerism in which seekers go from one teacher to another, shopping for enlightenment as if shopping for sweets in a candy store.
This spiritual promiscuity is rapidly turning the search for enlightenment into a cult of experience seekers. And, while many people indeed have powerful experiences, in most cases these do not lead to the profound transformation of the individual, which is the expression of enlightenment.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 13th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Nonduality
Enlightenment means the end of all division. It is not simply having an occasional experience of unity beyond all division, it is actually being undivided.
This is what nonduality truly means. It means there is just One Self, without a difference or gap between the profound revelation of Oneness and the way it is perceived and lived every moment of life.
Nonduality means that the inner revelation and the outer expression of the personality are one and the same.
So few seem to be interested in the greater implication contained within profound spiritual experiences, because it is the contemplation of these implications which quickly brings to awareness the inner divisions existing within most seekers.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 14th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Inner Violence
Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves. They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies.
They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind's idea of what it believes enlightenment to be.
No one ever became free through such violence. Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven.
But Freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of "a someone who is in control" is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 15th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Self-Doubt and Cynicism
There is nothing more insidiously destructive to the attainment of liberation than self-doubt and cynicism.
Doubt is a movement of the conditioned mind that always claims that "it's not possible ... that freedom is not possible for me." Doubt always knows; it "knows" that nothing is possible. And in this knowing, doubt robs you of the possibility of anything truly new or transformative from happening.
Furthermore, doubt is always accompanied by a pervasive cynicism that unconsciously puts a negative spin on whatever it touches. Cynicism is a world view which protects the ego from scrutiny by maintaining a negative stance in relationship to what it does not know, does not want to know, or cannot know.
Many spiritual seekers have no idea how cynical and doubt-laden they actually are. It is this blindness and denial of the presence of doubt and cynicism that makes the birth of a profound trust impossible. A trust without which final liberation will always remain simply a dream.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 16th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Freedom From Fear
All fear comes from thought in the form of memory (past) or projection (future). Thought creates time: past, present, and future. So fear exists and comes from the perceived existence of time.
To be free of fear is to be free of time. Since time is a creation of thought, to be free of fear you must be free of thought. Consequently, it is important to awaken and experience your Self outside of thought, existing as eternity.
So question all notions of yourself that are creations of thought and of time -- of past, present, and future. Experience your eternalness, your holiness, your awakeness until you are convinced that you are never subject to the movement of thought, of fear, or of time.
To be free of fear is to be full of Love.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 17th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Only You
Maybe I can point you to the great Reality within you. Maybe you will awaken to the direct experience of Self-realization. Maybe you will catch the fire of transmission.
But there is one thing that no one can give you: the honesty and integrity that alone will bring you completely to the other shore. No one can give you the strength of character necessary for profound spiritual experience to become the catalyst for the evolutionary transformation called "enlightenment."
Only you can find that passion within that burns with an integrity that will not settle for anything less than the Truth.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 18th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- An Aware Mystery
Enlightenment has nothing to do with states of consciousness. Whether you are in ego consciousness or unity consciousness is not really the point.
I have met many people who have easy access to advanced states of consciousness. Though for some people this may come very easily, I also noticed that many of these people are no freer than anyone else. If you don't believe that the ego can exist in very advanced states of consciousness, think again.
The point isn't the state of consciousness, even very advanced ones, but an awake mystery that is the Source of all states of consciousness. It is even the Source of presence and beingness. It is beyond all perception and all experience. I call it "awakeness."
To find out that you are empty of emptiness is to die into an aware mystery, which is the Source of all existence. It just so happens that that mystery is in love with all of its manifestation and non-manifestation. You find your Self by stepping back out of yourself.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 19th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Ramana's Real Gift
Ramana Maharshi's gift to the world was not that he realized the Self.
Many people have had a deep realization of the Self. Ramana's real gift was that he embodied that realization so thoroughly.
It is one thing to realize the Self; it is something else altogether to embody that realization to the extent that there is no gap between inner revelation and its outer expression.
Many have glimpsed the realization of Oneness; few consistently express that realization through their humanness. It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 20th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Otherworldly Charisma
In speaking regularly with spiritual seekers, it dawned on me one day how addicted so many of them are to the power of charisma. They swap stories about how powerful this or that teacher is and compare experiences. They get a charge from it, many mistaking charisma for enlightenment.
Charisma attracts at all levels: political, sexual, spiritual, etc., and it feeds the ego's desire to feel special. The ego loves getting hits of power -- it's like a form of spiritual candy. The candy may be sweet but can you live on it? Does it make you free?
Freedom is not necessarily exciting; it's just free. Very peaceful and quiet, so very quiet. Of course, it is also filled with joy and wonder, but it is not what you imagine. It is much, much less.
Many mistake the intoxicating power of otherworldly charisma for enlightenment. More often than not it is simply otherworldly, and not necessarily free or enlightened.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 21st 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Grasping and Aversion
Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception, in the form of grasping; and, away from objects, in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.
This movement of grasping and aversion gives rise to a sense of a separate "me," and in turn the sense of "me" strengthens itself this way. It is this continuous loop of causation that tricks consciousness into a trance of identification.
Identification with what? Identification with the continuous loop of suffering. After all, who is suffering? The "me" is suffering. And "who" is this me? It is nothing more than a sense of self caused by identification with grasping and aversion.
You see, it's all a creation of the mind, an endless movie, a terrible dream. Don't try to change the dream, because trying to change it is just another movement in the dream. Look at the dream. Be aware of the dream. That awareness is It.
Become more interested in the awareness of the dream than in the dream itself. What is that awareness? Who is that awareness? Don't go spouting out an answer, just be the answer. Be It.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 22nd 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- The Yearning For Truth
In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Because, if feeling good is your goal, then as soon as you feel better you will lose interest in what is true.
This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that if this desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience Truth, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is Real, while corrupting one's deepest integrity.
In my experience, everyone will say they want to discover the Truth, right up until they realize that the Truth will rob them of their deepest held ideas, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. The freedom of enlightenment means much more than the experience of love and peace. It means discovering a Truth that will turn your view of self and life upside-down.
For one who is truly ready, this will be unimaginably liberating. But for one who is still clinging in any way, this will be extremely challenging indeed. How does one know if they are ready? One is ready when they are willing to be absolutely consumed, when they are willing to be fuel for a fire without end.
Adyashanti
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 23rd 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- The Seed Pearl
The spiritual marriage may also be compared to water falling from the sky into a river or fountain, where the waters are united, and it would no longer be possible to divide them, or to separate the water of the river from that which has fallen from the heavens.
St Teresa of Avila
When one begins to apply this magic, it is as if, in the middle of one's being, there were a non-being. When in the course of time the work is finished, and beyond the body there is another body, it is as if, in the middle of the non-being, there were a being.
Only after a completed work of a hundred days, there develops by itself in the middle of the Light, a point of the true Light-pole. Suddenly there develops the seed pearl. It is as if man and woman embraced and a conception took place.
The Secret of the Golden Flower
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 24th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- One with the One.
He who is in the sun, and the fire, and in the heart of man is One. He who knows this is one with the One.
Svetasvatara Upanishad
I and my Father are one.
The Gospel according to John
When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female ... then shall you enter the Kingdom.
The Gospel according to Thomas
When the I am myself goes, the I am all comes. When the I am all goes, the I am comes. When even I am goes, Reality alone is and in it every I am is preserved and glorified.
Nisargadatta Maharaj -- I Am That
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 25th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- When Spirit Cleaves to Spirit
And when That is seen in its immanence and transcendence then the ties that have bound the heart are unloosened, the doubts of the mind vanish, and the law of karma works no more.
Mundaka Upanishad
I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant: for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself: Living in bondage, I have set myself free: I have broken away from the clutch of all narrowness. Kabir says: 'I have attained the unattainable, and my heart is coloured with the colour of love.'
Kabir
No other love is like unto the ecstasy of the moment when spirit cleaves to spirit and becomes one -- one love.
The Zohar
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 26th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- The Beginning of Freedom
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly -- you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The Instrument has taken you over. It's almost as if you were possessed without it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself.
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity -- the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter -- beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace -- arise from beyond the mind.
You begin to awaken.
Eckhart Tolle
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 27th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- Free of Egoic Delusion
The world as it appears to us now is largely a reflection of the egoic mind. Fear being an unavoidable consequence of egoic delusion, it is a world dominated by fear. Just as the images in a dream are symbols of inner states and feelings, so our collective reality is largely a symbolic expression of fear and of the heavy layers of negativity that have accumulated in the collective human psyche.
We are not separate from our world, so when the majority of humans become free of egoic delusion, this inner change will affect all of creation. You will literally inhabit a new world. It is a shift in planetary consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 28th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- The Malignant Element
The 'direct method': (suggested by some spiritual teachers, to) Destroy the ego by seeking its identity, does raise a valid question -- who is asked to destroy the ego?
Perhaps the explanation is that what is to be destroyed is not the ego itself but the malignant element in the ego ... the sense of personal doership, volition.
When the ego finally, totally realizes that it is not in charge of life, but merely represents the body as a separate entity, a separate, uniquely programmed instrument through which the Primal Energy functions and brings about whatever is to be brought about in the moment, according to a Cosmic Law -- then the ego realizes its impotency and remains placid and inactive. The ego realizes its passive role as a mere witness of all that is happening in the moment.
That is self-realization.
Ramesh Balsekar
--- Anthologist and Mentor - Peter Stafford Sumner
February 29th 2004
From the OmniRead Treasuries -- You and I ... One Fire
Glorious is the moment we sit in the palace, you and I Two forms, two faces, but a single soul, you and I The flowers will blaze and bird cries shower us with immortality The moment we enter the garden, you and I ... What a miracle, you and I, one love, one lover, one Fire In this world and the next. in an ecstasy without end.
Rumi
I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go ... I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.
Song of Songs
The image of the Beloved suddenly lifted its head from the heart. Like the moon from the horizon, like a flower from a branch.
Rumi
