October 2005
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October 1st 2005
From Consciousness -- Self-Shining, Pure Intelligence
What you are in essence is self-shining, pure intelligence.
The very idea of shining implies a movement. Movement is energy. So, I call it "pure intelligence-energy'.
It is shining through your eyes. You cannot say what it is, and you canot negate it either. It is 'no thing': It cannot be objectified.
It ever expresses as that living, vibrant sense of presence, which translates through the mind as the thought 'I am'.
Bob Adamson -- Preface: "What's Wrong With Right Now"
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October 2nd 2005
From Consciousness -- The Vibrant Reality
The primary thought 'I am' is not the reality. It is the closest the mind or thought can ever get to reality, for reality to the mind is inconceivable. It is no thing.
Without the thought 'I am', is it stillness? Is it silence? Or is there a vibrancy about it, a livingness, a self-shining-ness?
All these expressions are mental concepts or pointers towards it, but the bottom line is that you know that you are.
You cannot negate that knowing that you are. It is not a dead, empty, silent stillness. It is not about keeping the mind silent, but seeing that what is prior to the mind is the very livingness itself. It is very subtle.
Bob Adamson -- Preface to "What's Wrong With Right Now"
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October 3rd 2005
From Consciousness -- The Uncaused Joy.
When you see that the subtle self-shining, intelligent energy that is prior to thought is what you really are, then the very subtleness expresses itself. That is the uncaused joy.
Nisargadatta Maharaj puts it beautifully. He puts it in the negative: 'There is nothing wrong any more'.
We think that we have to attain something and then stay there. Realize that you have never left it at any time.
It is effortless. You don't have to try or strive or grasp or hold. You are That.
Bob Adamson -- Preface to "What's Wrong With Right Now"
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October 4th 2005
From Consciousness -- Guidelines for Looking
What to look for -- no-thing, having no qualities, transparent like air or water, boundless, changeless, empty.
Where to look -- right where you are, at the Looker.
How to look -- trustingly like a child, and as if for the first time. Go by what you can see for yourself, not by what you think or have been told.
Remember that only you are in a position to see how it is where you are. You are the sole authority on what it's like being you.
Douglas Harding -- Toolkit for Testing the Incredible Hypothesis
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October 5th 2005
From Consciousness -- The Hypothesis
The question is: Who are you really? The hypothesis you are invited to test is: You are not what you look like, In other words, at 0 metres you are not what you are at, say, 3 metres. At 3 metres you are a thing, a person, but at 0 metres you are no-thing.
This central, formless (and timeless) awareness is what you really are. Looking out from this no-thing-ness you embrace and include everything.
This hypothesis can also be expressed in traditional religious language: at the heart of your human self abides God, the Self, Buddha-nature, Christ-consciousness, Universal Mind -- call it what you like. Nearer to you than your hands and feet, closer to you than your breathing, right at the very centre of all your layers, is the source of the universe.
This is who you really are. Awaken to this -- and consciously live from this truth -- and you will find peace and freedom, beauty and love, inspiration and guidance.
Richard Lang -- Seeing Who You Really Are
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October 6th 2005
From Consciousness -- Discovery, Not Achievement
What a stunning proposition we have here. If you put aside what others make of you (for them, you are an appearance, a 'thing') you will find you are utterly different -- you are boundless awareness containing all things.
Within you is the source of the world. You 'are' the source of the world. Surely it's worth seeing if it's true. And if it is, worth living in the light of this truth -- this wonderful, astonishing, miraculous truth.
Central to this hypothesis is the view that you don't have to change anything in your life to see who you really are, here and now. You are already that One.
It is, rather, a matter of waking up to what you already are. This is discovery, not achievement.
Richard Lang -- Seeing Who You Really Are
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October 7th 2005
From Consciousness -- The Treasure You Are
To discover the truth about who you are, you don't have to be practised in spiritual disciplines, or clever, or good. Even if you are depressed, it's okay. No matter what your personal history or circumstances, all you need do is pay attention to yourself right where you are.
Look within.
Be willing to attend to yourself afresh. Accept the evidence of your senses rather than the opinions of others. Then you will find the treasure at the heart of your own being. The treasure that 'is' your own being.
And then, in their own time, many good things will flow from this discovery -- gifts that will be special and unique to you.
Richard Lang -- Seeing Who You Really Are
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October 8th 2005
From Consciousness -- Transformed by Surrender
If you cannot take action -- if you're in prison, for example then you have two choices left: resistance or surrender. Bondage or inner freedom from external conditions. Suffering or inner peace.
Your relationships will be changed profoundly by surrender. If you can never accept what is, by implication you won't be able to accept anybody the way they are. You will judge, criticize, label, reject, or attempt to change people.
Furthermore, if you continuously make the Now into a means to an end in the future, you will also make every person you encounter or relate with into a means to an end.
The relationship -- the human being -- is then of secondary importance to you, or of no importance at all. What you can get out of the relationship is primary -- be it material gain, a sense of power, physical pleasure, or some form of ego gratification.
Eckhart Tolle -- Practicing The Power of Now
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October 9th 2005
From Consciousness -- Letting Go
When you become involved in an argument or some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone close to you, start by observing how defensive you become as your own position is attacked, or feel the force of your own aggression as you attack the other person's position.
Observe the attachment to your views and opinions. Feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other person wrong. That's the energy of the egoic mind.
You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by feeling it as fully as possible. Then one day; in the middle of an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a choice, and you may decide to drop your own reaction -- just to see what happens. You surrender.
I don't mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying, "Okay, you are right," with a look on your face that says, "I am above all this childish unconsciousness." That's just displacing the resistance to another level, with the egoic mind still in charge, claiming superiority. I am speaking of letting go of the entire mental-emotional energy field inside you that was fighting for power.
Eckhart Tolle -- Practicing The Power of Now
From Consciousness -- Yield to Overcome
The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you have truly relinquished your identification with a mental position and so freed yourself from your mind.
If you suddenly feel very light, clear, and deeply at peace, that is an unmistakable sign that you have truly surrendered. Then observe what happens to the other person's mental position as you no longer energize it through resistance. When identification with mental positions is out of the way, true communication begins.
Nonresistance doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing. All it means is that any "doing" becomes nonreactive.
Remember the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial arts: Don't resist the opponent's force. Yield to overcome.
Eckhart Tolle -- Practicing The Power of Now
From Consciousness -- Free of Concepts
"Doing nothing" when you are in a state of intense presence is a very powerful transformer and healer of situations and people.
It is radically different from inactivity in the ordinary state of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, which stems from fear, inertia, or indecision. The real "doing nothing" implies inner nonresistance and intense alertness.
On the other hand, if action is required, you will no longer react from your conditioned mind, but you will respond to the situation out of your conscious presence.
In that state, your mind is free of concepts, including the concept of nonviolence. So who can predict what you will do?
Eckhart Tolle -- Practicing The Power of Now
From Consciousness -- The Only Place of True Power
The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength, whereas in truth resistance cuts you off from Being, the only place of true power. Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength.
What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in is purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness. So the ego exists in a continuous resistance mode and plays counterfeit roles to cover up your "weakness," which in truth is your power.
Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. "That's dangerous," says the ego. "You'll get hurt. You'll become vulnerable."
What the ego doesn't know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
Eckhart Tolle -- Practicing The Power of Now
From Consciousness -- Your Life in the Timeless Now.
Surrender is inner acceptance of what is without any reservations. We are talking about your life this instant -- not the conditions or circumstances of your life, not what I call your life situation.
Illness is part of your life situation. As such, it has a past and a future. Past and future form an uninterrupted continuum, unless thi redeeming power of the Now is activated through your conscious presence.
As you know, underneath the various conditions that make up your life situation, which exists in time, there is something deeper, more essential: your Life, your very Being in the timeless Now.
Eckhart Tolle -- Practicing The Power of Now
From Consciousness -- Lay Down the Burden
When the question, Who (am I)? is followed innocently, purely, all the way back to its source, there is a huge, astounding realization: there is no entity there at all! There is only the indefinable, boundless recognition of yourself as inseparable from anything else.
You are free. You are whole. You are endless. There is no bottom to you, no boundary to you. Any idea about yourself appears in you and will disappear back into you. You are awareness, and awareness is consciousness.
Let all self-definitions die in this moment. Let them all go, and see what remains. See what is never born and what does not die. Feel the relief of laying down the burden of defining yourself.
Experience the actual non-reality of the burden. Experience the joy that is here. Rest in the endless peace of your true nature before any thought of I arises.
Gangaji -- The Diamond in Your Pocket
From Consciousness -- Storytelling
Storytelling is the medium through which human beings express the infinite aspects of beingness.
There are the stories about physical beings that can be touched, measured, and weighed: subatomic, microscopic, mineral, vegetable, animal, insect, vertebrate, invertebrate, planetary, and cosmic.
There are stories about beings that can only be imagined, dreamed, and conjured.
Then there are emotional stories, the complex, overlapping, and ever-shifting winds of anger, fear, sadness, despair, joy, love, and bliss.
There are mental stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends, with explanations and justifications.
There are circumstantial stories, the interplay of the elements of fire, air, earth, and water with the physical, mental, and emotional influences of individuals, couples, families, tribes, societies, cultures, subcultures, nations, religions, classes, castes, planets, and beyond.
This inconceivable vastness of being is expressed through storytelling. Every culture, family, and person has a story with a past, present, future, hopes, fears, gods, demons, miracles, disasters, successes, failures, chaos, harmony, sublimity, and despair, from the highest caliber to the lowest.
Gangaji -- The Diamond in Your Pocket
From Consciousness -- Are the Stories True?
Generally, every conscious moment of your life is translated and then placed into a personal story through the physical, emotional, and mental layering of illness, recovery, prowess, weakness, sexuality, procreation, status, power, conquering, surrendering, possessing, and losing.
We are encoded with the cultures of Mesopotamia, ancient China, and the Holocaust of World War II. From the Sistine Chapel to the Mississippi Delta's juke joints, the story of beingness is told. History, remembered and forgotten, is the story.
What an extraordinary display! What exquisite and horrible beauty. The only element tragically missing in most stories is that which cannot be translated into the dimensions of physical, emotional, mental, or circumstantial. Yet this element is present in every physical, emotional, mental, or circumstantial event of any magnitude.
The truth of what any story brilliantly and imperfectly expresses is the truth of beingness itself. The truth of you.
Are the stories true? Yes and no: yes as an account of experience, no as the finality of being; yes as an aspect of the totality, no as the totality itself.
Gangaji -- The Diamond in Your Pocket
From Consciousness -- What's Your Story?
Do you tell yourself stories? Are they stories of what you have or don't have, what you need or don't need? Are they stories of your freedom, your bondage, your lack, your bounty, your grief, your joy? Are they stories of who you are, of who someone else is? Are they stories of what needs to change, of what needs to stay the same, of what is right and of what is wrong?
Are you willing to stop telling your personal story? Are you willing to tell the truth about whether you are willing or not willing?
Whatever you are telling yourself, however horrible or grand, is a story. As a story, as a distillation of experience, it may be the relative truth but it is not the final truth. Stories appear, change, and disappear.
Whether your story is about how good or bad you are, it appears and disappears. The final truth has nothing to do with emotions, biochemistry, or changes in circumstance. It is unchanging and unconditional.
Gangaji -- The Diamond in Your Pocket
From Consciousness -- Stop Telling Your Story
You can stop telling your story in less than an instant. Even if it is a good story, stop indulging the telling of it and immediately the truth can be experienced. You cannot experience the truth if you continue to tell your story, and you cannot continue to tell your story if you are experiencing the truth. It's obvious, isn't it?
Stop telling your story right now. Not later, when the story gets better or worse, but right now. When you stop telling your story right now, you stop postponing the realization of the truth that is beyond any story.
All effort, all difficulty, and all continued suffering are in the resistance to stopping. That resistance is fed by the hope that the story will give you what you are yearning for, the hope that if you can just fix the story, make the necessary changes, you will get what you want.
When you stop telling your story about me, him, her, them, or us, you can know in less than an instant the true depths of what it means to be who you are. Then whatever story appears or disappears, it doesn't touch who you are.
Gangaji -- The Diamond in Your Pocket
From Consciousness -- Waking Up in the Story
When you dream at night, your dream has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It seems real at the time, but when you wake up you know it was obviously a dream.
Similarly, you can wake up in the dream of your life. You can wake up before the story of you ends, as all stories will eventually end. Waking up in the story is called "lucid dreaming" or "dreaming clearly".
Normally, you wake up in the morning and pick up the story of who you are. You may do some meditation practice, but the real practice is the ongoing story of who you are. The energy and the emotion that the story generates gives birth to infinite permutations of frustration, delight, pain, or pleasure, all revolving around this practice of the story of "me".
Telling the personal story is the primary religion of most people on the planet. The personal story gets located in a body, a tribe, a nation, a religion, an "us." This is why the planet is constantly at war, and why you may be constantly at war with yourself.
If you can recognize what your story is, then the story is conscious rather than unconscious. You can see what the story is, and you can choose to stop following it as if it were reality.
Gangaji -- The Diamond in Your Pocket
From Consciousness -- It's Right Here!
The funny thing about the Truth, or enlightenment, or awakening, is that we miss it even though it's not hidden. It's not far away waiting for a moment when we deserve it. It is hard to find because it is right here.
This openness has always been here. If it had a voice, it would have been saying something like, "For Pete's sake, I wonder how long this image thing is going to go on!"
This imageless Self -- call it awakeness or awareness or openness, whatever word might trigger the remembrance for you -- is very quiet.
But don't believe me. Take the words inside. Discover for yourself. You are the authority. I'm just the messenger.
Adyashanti -- Emptiness Dancing
From Consciousness -- An Extension of Openness
The more you realize that you are openness, the more your physical body realizes there is nothing to protect. Then it can open itself.
On an emotional level, you can feel this as a sensation in your muscles and your bones. Then the body's deepest function starts to unfold, and it becomes an expression of the openness you are in physical form, an expression of truth instead of the protector of the me. It becomes an extension of openness itself.
The movement of your hand or your foot becomes an expression of openness; contact with an object feels like an extension of openness. You feel almost an infant-like fascination with movement and your senses and what is present in the world.
The difference is that when the spiritual awakening gets deep and matures, you have what the infant is missing: wisdom.
Adyashanti -- Emptiness Dancing
From Consciousness -- The Deepest, Deepest Wisdom
The infant, over time, identifies with the objects of its attention and the messages others give it about itself.
When the mature body-mind starts to be an extension of the openness, of its true nature, it rediscovers innocence, except now there is a deep wisdom that allows it to be fascinated without ever grasping or pushing anything away, which is unnecessary.
So the movement and the fascination are not infantile. They are childlike, but absolutely wise.
This openness holds the deepest, deepest wisdom. Then you are finally able to be fascinated without losing yourself in an identity and with no sense that you can be threatened.
Adyashanti -- Emptiness Dancing
From Consciousness -- Homecoming to Your Self,
The infant's whole world is about the body. This is as it should be, as it needs to be. But the innocent sage is not concerned about sustaining the body. It gets sustained, but not because of fear of not sustaining it.
That's why in the re-remembering, in the deepest homecoming to your Self, there is a freedom to actually be here, living this life without fear.
Another aspect of openness is intimacy. The quickest access to Truth, and also to beauty, is when you are totally intimate with all of experience, the inner and the outer, even if the experience isn't "good."
When you are being intimate with the whole of experience, the divided mind has to let go of whatever its project is at the moment. In this intimacy, one becomes very open and discovers a vastness.
Whether the qualities of the experience are unpleasant or beautiful, as soon as you are intimate with the whole of experience, there is openness.
Adyashanti -- Emptiness Dancing
From Consciousness -- Managed in the Unborn
When there is intimacy with all of the experience of the moment, awareness is not limited to what's happening in your emotional body, your physical body, your perceptions, or your thoughts.
There is just one whole perceiving itself, feeling itself, or thinking itself, and whatever is happening tends to resolve itself. When the whole perceives itself, it is very different than when the I is having an experience.
When we let go in this way, as Zen Master Bankei used to say, "Everything is perfectly managed in the Unborn."
He used the term Unborn for what I call Truth. When the whole perceives itself, there is the impression the Unborn is completely managing itself. It never holds on to experience. It just harmonizes itself and enjoys itself. And when you let go of your project or agenda, it can be seen that everything is perfectly managed in the Unborn.
Adyashanti -- Emptiness Dancing
From Consciousness -- Giving Yourself a Break
Sometimes you notice you have some project going on in your mind. You are trying to get rid of something or understand something, and you are thinking about it.
Consider giving yourself a break and stop thinking for a moment. Einstein did this. He would think about a problem, and then he would stop thinking about it, believing he had gone as far as he could go and had exhausted the rational thought process.
Now it's a trick to do this. Most people find the rational thought process takes them to an edge and, instead of stopping, they take a 90 degree right turn or left turn and start moving along the edge, thinking horizontally, pulling in more facts and experiences and memories. This is called a waste of time.
The only use of thought that has power is a rational process that goes right to the edge of thought, and then stops. It lets something else deliver whatever needs to be delivered, much like Einstein did when he took the thinking process to the end and then let it be delivered.
Then the Unborn perfectly manages everything just because it is being intimate with experience.
Adyashanti -- Emptiness Dancing
From Consciousness -- Illusion or Delusion?
Actually there are two realities: the physical reality, whatever that is actually 'out there', stimulating our senses, and the personal subjective reality that we each experience -- the reconstruction that appears in our minds. Both are 'real'.
For instance, when we see a drawing of a cube, what we actually see are twelve lines on a flat sheet of paper, yet our experience is of an object with depth. The depth may appear very real, but it is actually a creation of our brain.
The illusion arises when we confuse the subjective experience with the physical reality, the thing-in-itself. Traditional Indian spirituality speaks of this confusion as 'maya', often translated as 'illusion', a false 'perception' of the world.
Actually it is better interpreted as 'delusion', a false 'belief about' the world. We suffer a delusion when we believe the images in our minds 'are' the things-in-themselves. The tree we see is not the tree as it is. Both are 'real'.
Ramesh Balsekar -- Nuggets of Wisdom
From Consciousness -- Inexplicable
"Scientists are in the strange position of being daily confronted by the indisputable fact of their own consciousness, yet with no way of explaining it." -- Christian de Quincey
As the Lankavatara Sutra puts it, "Things are not what they seem to be, nor are they otherwise."
There is a small delay between an event in the physical world and our experience of that event. It takes the brain about a fifth of a second to process the sensory information and construct the relevant picture as reality, but the brain cleverly compensates for the delay.
Ramesh Balsekar -- Nuggets of Wisdom
From Consciousness -- Spiritual Seeking
Until the middle of the last century, comparatively few books were available that were devoted to human consciousness and spiritual development. There has been an explosion of such books over the last thirty years.
Not many of them, of course, are genuine emanations of the timeless spiritual wisdom. Indeed, it is necessary to have a cautious, critical approach when dealing with such books, especially in the so-called 'new age' arena.
But the fact remains that there has arisen over the past few years a genuine interest in spirituality, leading people to undertake personal experiential forays into the spiritual arena.
Indeed, this has made people wonder if there is a collective awakening in the offing!
Ramesh Balsekar -- Nuggets of Wisdom
From Consciousness -- Only Wisdom
There have been, in recent years, extraordinary changes in technology, and external circumstances have also changed a great deal over the world. But the fact remains, as always, that the maker of the problems is the ‘me’ in relationship with the 'other', always seeking something.
This basic fact of life has not changed over the years. The nature of the seeking might change, but we are always seeking.
Those human beings who are reasonably comfortable in life -- who do not have to worry about the basic needs of life -- still feel that something is missing. They are seeking the meaning of life, purpose in life; seeking satisfaction in a permanency we call the 'Ultimate', 'God' or by various other labels.
Basically what the human being is seeking is to end 'sorrow'. Deep down man knows that it is only wisdom -- not knowledge, not ideologies -- that can end the fundamental question of sorrow. Not the pain in the moment, not the physical, psychological or financial pain.
Ramesh Balsekar -- Nuggets of Wisdom
From Consciousness -- Cosmic Law
True self-knowing, ultimately must come down to the total acceptance that every happening in life -- not only natural happenings like floods and famine -- is a happening according to the Cosmic Law, and most importantly, that it has absolutely nothing to do with what seems like the doing of a human entity.
Ultimately, the basis of all sorrow -- not the pain in the moment -- is the enormous burden every human being carries of guilt and shame for one's own actions, and hatred and malice for the 'other'. Both are based on personal doing. This sorrow can end only with the total acceptance that nothing can happen in the world -- good or evil -- unless it is God's Will according to the Cosmic Law.
Only this self-knowledge can transform human sorrow into peace of mind. And, ultimately, what does this self-knowledge tell us? Just this: "Those wise ones attain constant peace of mind who are able to see that the Consciousness within themselves is the same Consciousness within all conscious beings -- the same Consciousness in which all events happen; in which all beings appear and disappear."
Ramesh Balsekar -- Nuggets of Wisdom
From Consciousness -- Absence of Hate
One may be able to live one's life in reasonable comfort while hating others, but certainly not if one cannot stop hating oneself.
The main reason why one hates oneself is that one cannot help doing things, which hurt others. But the fact of the matter really is that no one has the power to do anything, good or bad.
As the Buddha has said, everything happens (according to a Cosmic Law) and how one is affected by any happening is, again one's destiny according to the all-pervading Cosmic Law. The 'other' is really irrelevant.
With this understanding there cannot be hatred -- neither for oneself nor for the 'other'. And, truly, can love be anything other than the total absence of hate?
Ramesh Balsekar -- Nuggets of Wisdom
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