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May 2004
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May 1st 2004
From Consciousness -- We Are There Already
Let this truth go as deep in you as possible: that life is already here, arrived. You are standing on the goal. Don't ask about the path.
Osho
There is no question of going anywhere, arriving anywhere, or doing anything; you are there already.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Your duty is TO BE, and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth: the method is summarized in 'be still.'"
Sri Ramana Maharshi
We think that there is something hiding our reality and that it must be destroyed before the reality is gained. It is ridiculous. A day will dawn when you will yourself laugh at your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.
Sri Ramana Maharshi
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May 2nd 2004
From Consciousness -- What Was Never Lost
An individual who is seeking for realisation (of his or her true self) is not only going round searching for his spectacles without realising that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for.
Actually, what you are looking for is what is looking!
Wei Wu Wei (Terence Gray)
Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what it is that you have never lost.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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May 3rd 2004
From Consciousness -- A Process of Letting Go
There is nothing that is to be learned. it is more of a process of letting go ... you do not gain anything ... how can you gain what has always been and will always be Reality ....
Ganga Karmokar
Do not strive for spirituality. If you do, you will block it. It will be prevented from coming into your life. That is the most difficult thing for most people to learn, not to get in their own way. It is already yours. It has always been so. Relax, be still, and you will see what I mean. It has never left you.
Raymond Karczewski
In my spiritual quest I realized, it's not what I do but what I stop doing that matters. There was nothing to be changed but simply my attitude, which required no conscious efforts but simple awareness.
Jinendra
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May 4th 2004
From Consciousness -- The Lust for Enlightenment
We want money, or more sex or a bigger house or a better position, and finally we think we've gone beyond all that, because now we want enlightenment. It's just another ambition. It's no different from wanting any of the rest of it. It's just another egoic dream.
If you let go of that, things are as they are.
Arjuna
This Grace can never be the result of a long history of spiritual practices or sadhanas, or following strict rules of conduct or does and don'ts. That is usually what strengthens the lie of an individual wanting enlightenment.
Carlos Lopez
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May 5th 2004
From Consciousness -- No Other to Achieve or Let Go
One may seek a spiritual path or discipline, but such will only keep you time-bound and provide more sensation, thought, and experience. One may seek to achieve or let go, but this pursuit will always require an entity separate from everything else to achieve or let go of something.
When the understanding strikes like lightening, there is only the vivid awareness that Consciousness is all there is and that your body, mind and personality together is simply one manifestation of It among trillions of others.
In the light of this understanding it is seen that Consciousness does absolutely everything that is done and that there can never be anything else to achieve or let go of!
PSS
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May 6th 2004
From Consciousness -- Nature Needs You
You need nature as your teacher to help you reconnect with Being. But not only do you need nature, it also needs you.
You are not separate from nature. We are all part of the One Life that manifests itself in countless forms throughout the universe, forms that are all completely interconnected.
When you recognize the sacredness, the beauty, the incredible stillness and dignity in which a flower or a tree exists, you add something to the flower or the tree. Through your recognition, your awareness, nature too comes to know itself. It comes to know its own beauty and sacredness through you!
A great silent space holds all of nature in its embrace. It also holds you.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 7th 2004
From Consciousness -- Stillness Beyond Thought
Only when you are still inside do you have access to the realm of stillness that rocks, plants, and animals inhabit.
Only when your noisy mind subsides can you connect with nature at a deep level and go beyond the sense of separation created by excessive thinking.
Thinking is a stage in the evolution of life. Nature exists in innocent stillness that is prior to the arising of thought. The tree, the flower, the bird, the rock are unaware of their own beauty and sacredness.
When human beings become still, they go beyond thought. There is an added dimension of knowing, of awareness, in the stillness that is beyond thought.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 8th 2004
From Consciousness -- Exchanging Gifts With Nature
Nature can bring you to stillness. That is its gift to you.
When you perceive and join with nature in the field of stillness, that field becomes permeated with your awareness. That is your gift to nature.
Through you nature becomes aware of itself.
Nature has been waiting for you, as it were, for millions of years.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 9th 2004
From Consciousness -- Labelling Others
How quick we are to form an opinion of a person, to come to a conclusion about them. It is satisfying to the egoic mind to label another human being, to give them a conceptual identity, to pronounce righteous judgment upon them.
Every human being has been conditioned to think and behave in certain ways -- conditioned genetically as well as by their childhood experiences and their cultural environment.
That is not who they are, but that is who they appear to be. When you pronounce judgment upon someone, you confuse those conditioned mind patterns with who they are.
To do that is in itself a deeply conditioned and unconscious pattern. You give them a conceptual identity, and that false identity becomes a prison not only for the other person but also for yourself.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 10th 2004
From Consciousness -- Letting Go of Judgment
To let go of judgment does not mean that you don't see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don't construct an identity out of it for that person.
That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind. The ego then no longer runs your relationships.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 11th 2004
From Consciousness -- Egoic Desire and Fear
As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear.
In relationships you then either want or fear something from the other person.
What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they.
What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.
How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 12th 2004
From Consciousness -- The Attentiveness Key
When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention -- instead of using it as a means to an end -- you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end being self-enhancement at the cost of others.
When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters.
When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them -- your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past -- and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear.
Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 13th 2004
From Consciousness -- Receiving Noble Guests
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
The ego doesn't like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.
When you receive whoever comes into the space of Now as a noble guest, when you allow each person to be as they are, they begin to change.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 14th 2004
From Consciousness -- Knowing and Knowing About
To know another human being in their essence, you don't really need to know anything about them -- their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual.
Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness.
Knowing about is helpful for practical purposes. On that level, we cannot do without it. When it is the predominant modality in relationships, however, it becomes very limiting, even destructive.
Thoughts and concepts create an artificial barrier, a separation between human beings. Your interactions are then not rooted in Being, but become mind-based. Without the conceptual barriers, love is naturally present in all human interactions.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 15th 2004
From Consciousness -- True Meditation
True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not fixated on objects of perception.
When you first start to meditate you notice that awareness is always focused on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects.
True meditation has no direction, goals, or method. All methods aim at achieving a certain state of mind. All states are limited, impermanent and conditioned.
Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial consciousness.
Adyashanti (Steven Gray)
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May 16th 2004
From Consciousness -- Your Natural Condition
In true meditation all objects are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to manipulate or suppress any object of awareness.
In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness (consciousness) is the source in which all objects arise and subside.
As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the minds compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide.
An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.
Adyashanti (Steven Gray)
May 17th 2004
From Consciousness -- The Freeing of Awareness
Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside.
Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects. Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes.
As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive contractions and identifications, and returns to its natural non-state of Presence.
The simple yet profound question, "Who Am I ?," can then reveal one’s self not to be the endless tyranny of the ego-personality, but objectless Freedom of Being -- Primordial Consciousness in which all states and all objects come and go as manifestations of the Eternal Unborn Self that YOU ARE.
Adyashanti (Steven Gray)
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May 18th 2004
From Consciousness -- Struggling With Ourselvew
Most people are in a constant state of struggle with themselves. Tremendously burdened by the past and in constant anticipation of the future, most human beings are rarely able to be fully present for more than very brief moments.
This constant state of struggle manifests as a compulsive and addictive relationship to the movement of thought, emotion, and time.
There is great reluctance to stop struggling because in the absence of struggle you suddenly begin to lose your boundaries and definitions of who you are. For many people this causes fear to arise as they experience the loss of their familiar sense of self.
Struggling is how the ego-personality maintains its existence. When you cease to struggle, identification with the personality begins to break down and you become aware of your emptiness and lack of boundaries.
Adyashanti (Steven Gray)
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May 19th 2004
From Consciousness -- The End of Struggle
The most difficult thing for spiritual seekers to do is to stop struggling, striving, seeking and searching. Why? Because in the absence of struggle you don’t know who you are: you lose your boundaries; you lose your separateness; you lose your specialness; you lose the dream you have lived all your life.
Eventually you lose everything that your mind has created and awaken to who you truly are -- the fullness of freedom, unbound by any identifications, identities, or boundaries.
As long as you remain identified with the personality, you will always be seeking security to the exclusion of the Truth, and will remain in a constant state of struggle.
It is only when your love and desire for Truth outweighs the personality’s compulsive need for security, that you can begin to stop struggling and be swept up into the arms of an ever unfolding revelation of the Truth and Freedom of Being.
Adyashanti (Steven Gray)
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May 20th 2004
From Consciousness -- Security Or Freedom.
Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion.
Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the Freedom you want. There is no security in Freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of it. This is, of course, why it is so free; there’s nothing there to grab hold of.
The Unknown is more vast, more open, more peaceful, and more freeing than you ever imagined it would be. If you don’t experience it that way, it means you’re not resting there; you’re still trying to know. That will cause you to suffer because you’re choosing security over Freedom.
Adyashanti (Steven Gray)
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May 21st 2004
From Consciousness -- Comfortable Wth Stillness
Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words -- the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into your close relationships.
No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together.
When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 22nd 2004
From Consciousness -- True Listening
True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship.
When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship.
But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person's attention is taken up by their thinking.
At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 23rd 2004
From Consciousness -- Joined in One Consciousness
True listening goes far beyond auditory perception. It is the arising of alert attention, a space of presence in which the words are being received. The words now become secondary. They may be meaningful or they may not make sense.
Far more important than what you are listening to is the act of listening itself, the space of conscious presence that arises as you listen.
That space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking.
And now the other person is no longer "other." In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 24th 2004
From Consciousness -- The Ego's Need for Conflict
Do you experience frequent and repetitive drama in your close relationships? Do relatively insignificant disagreements often trigger violent arguments and emotional pain?
At the root of such experiences lie the basic egoic patterns: the need to be right and, of course, for someone else to be wrong; that is to say, identification with mental positions.
There is also the ego's need to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between "me" and the "other" without which it cannot survive.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 25th 2004
From Consciousness -- The Pain-Body
(We all experience) the accumulated emotional pain from the past that you and each human being carries within, both from your personal past as well as the collective pain of humanity that goes back a long, long time.
This "pain-body" is an energy field within you that sporadically takes you over because it needs to experience more emotional pain for it to feed on and replenish itself.
It will try to control your thinking and make it deeply negative. It loves your negative thoughts, since it resonates with their frequency and so can feed on them. This "pain-body" will also provoke negative emotional reactions in people close to you, especially your partner, in order to feed on the ensuing drama and emotional pain.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 26th 2004
From Consciousness -- Freedom from the Pain-Body
How can you free yourself from this deep-seated unconscious identification with pain (the pain-body) that creates so much misery in your life?
Become aware of it. Realize that it is not who you are, and recognize it for what it is: past pain. Witness it as it happens in your partner or in yourself.
When your unconscious identification with it is broken, when you are able to observe it within yourself, you don't feed it anymore, and it will gradually lose its energy charge.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
May 27th 2004
From Consciousness -- Love and Beauty Never Leave Us
Human interaction can be hell. Or it can be a great spiritual practice.
When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature.
The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 28th 2004
From Consciousness -- Pulsating Energy Fields.
When you appreciate an object for what it is, when you acknowledge its being without mental projection, you cannot not feel grateful for its existence.
You may also sense that it is not really inanimate, that it only appears so to the senses. Physicists will confirm that on a molecular level it is indeed a pulsating energy field.
What is your relationship with the world of objects, the countless things that surround you and that you handle every day? The chair you sit on, the pen, the car, the cup?
Are they to you merely a means to an end, or do you occasionally acknowledge their existence, their being, no matter how briefly, by noticing them and giving them your attention?
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 29th 2004
From Consciousness -- The World Comes Alive
When you get attached to objects, when you are using them to enhance your worth in your own eyes and in the eyes of others, concern about things can easily take over your whole life.
When there is self-identification with things, you don't appreciate them for what they are because you are looking for yourself in them.
Through selfless appreciation of the realm of things, the world around you will come alive in ways that you cannot even begin to comprehend with the mind.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 30th 2004
From Consciousness -- Something More Real
Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention? Or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role?
What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repairman, the "customer"?
A moment of attention is enough. As you look at them or listen to them, there is an alert stillness -- perhaps only two or three seconds, perhaps longer. That is enough for something more real to emerge than the roles we usually play and identify with.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
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May 31st 2004
From Consciousness -- Meeting Yourself
All (our perceived) roles are part of the conditioned consciousness that is the human mind. That which emerges through the act of attention (to the "I am" rather that to the "I am this or that.") is the unconditioned -- who you are in your essence, underneath your name and form.
You are no longer acting out a script; you become real.
When that dimension emerges from within you, it also draws it forth from within the other person.
Ultimately, of course, there is no other, and you are always meeting yourself.
Eckhart Tolle -- Stillness Speaks
