The Seer

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Knowing God is not simply performing religious duties or thinking about God. It requires a shift of consciousness, a reversal of the natural mode of thinking, or, better yet, a conversion of attention:

“For whoever would enter God’s ground,” says Meister Eckhart, “His inmost part, must first enter his own ground, his inmost part, for none can know God who does not first know himself. He must enter into his deepest and into God’s inmost part, and must enter in to his first and his highest, for there everything comes together that God can perform.”

Here, Eckhart is referring to truly mystical intuition, the insight of immediate consciousness, ultimately the perfection and goal of all human experience. For Eckhart, as for Paul, Augustine and Luther, no merely human act can reveal our unity with God. The perfection of enlightenment is the accomplishment only of God’s grace, which supplants and completes the feeble reach of our spiritual powers.

He therefore concludes, “To know what the soul (our true nature) is requires supernatural understanding. When the powers go out from the soul into works, we know nothing of that, or at least we know a tiny bit about it, but our knowledge is small. What we are in our essence, nobody knows. What we can know of it must be supernatural: it must be by grace. Therein God works His mercy. Amen.”

From: Eckhart’s Way, by Richard Woods pp 62

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The practical difference this discovery makes to your relationships is immense and cumulative. In fact, what it comes to is that you aren’t ‘related’ in any way to anyone: you are that one.

In contrast to the self-regarding and sentimental and very choosy love (so-called) much cultivated on Earth, this is the true love of Heaven, and it is love of all. Here, undiscriminating love is one’s very Nature.

When I really attend, when I’m honest with myself, I find it impossible to wash my hands of the wickedest or stupidest or most contemptible or saddest creature in the world.

It is not a case of, “There, but for the grace of God, go I” but of “There go I — into the prison cell, into the psychiatric ward, on to the scaffold, no less than happier places” — for the simply but truly devastating reason that Who I really, really am is what you and all others really, realy are.

From: Open to the Source, by Douglas Harding. Copyright 2005 by Richard Lang (Editor). Reprinted by permission. www.headless.org

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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 of preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.

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

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“It is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are.” - Blase Pascal

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There once was a Scots house-painter named Jock who was very interested in saving a penny where he could, so he sometimes thinned down his paint to make it go a wee bit further.

As it happened, he got away with this for some time, but one day, the Church of Scotland decided to do a big restoration job on the outside of one of their biggest buildings.

Jock put in a quote, and, because his price was so low, he got the job.

So he set about erecting the scaffolding, buying the paint and, yes, I am sorry to say, thinning it down with turpentine.

Well, Jock was up on the scaffolding, painting away, the job nearly completed, when suddenly a huge black cloud rolled in, there was a tremendous clap of thunder, then the sky opened up and the rain poured down washing the thinned paint from all over the church.

Jock was so startled by the thunderclap that he fell from the scaffolding and landed among some bushes. He lay there not moving for some minutes watching the rain wash away the thinned and useless paint.

Jock was no fool. He knew this was a judgment from the Almighty, so he crawled onto his knees and cried: “Oh, God, forgive me; what should I do?”

And from the depths of the great black cloud, a stern voice boomed out … (you’re going to love this!)

“Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!”

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As an awakened Presence living upon this earth, you are silent, present, loving, accepting, and allowing. You are compassionate. You are utterly without fear or judgment.

You are free of all the traumas and limitations of the past and you are free of all anxiety about the future. You are peaceful, still, and calm. You are clear and strong. You are empowered from within.

You are responsive and spontaneous. You are grateful and generous, and you live in constant awareness of the extraordinary abundance of this world.

You exist in Oneness and you feel the living Presence of God in all things present. You walk lightly upon the earth and your life is a demonstration of integrity and grace.

But, when you are caught in the world of the mind, and you are functioning as an ego upon this earth, you have become something less than the awakened Presence I have just described.

From: Journey into Now, pp 51. by Leonard Jacobson

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Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. For most people it is not an event but a process they undergo.

Even those rare beings who experience a sudden, dramatic, and seemingly irreversible awakening will still go through a process in which the new state of consciousness gradually flows into and transforms everything they do and so becomes integrated into their lives.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn’t a tidy sequence of logical steps that leads toward it, although the mind would love that.

You don’t have to become worthy first. It may come to the sinner before it comes to the saint, but not necessarily. That’s why Jesus associated with all kinds of people, not just the respectable ones….

Awakened doing is the alignment of your outer purpose — what you do — with your inner purpose — awakening and staying awake.

Through awakened doing, you become one with the outgoing purpose of the universe. Consciousness flows through you into this world. It flows into your thoughts and inspires them. It flows into what you do and guides and empowers it.

Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.

From the book, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle

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It is said, that in Benares, India, a seeker after truth happened to meet Siddharta Gautama after his enlightenment and was immediately struck by the great depth of his life and conversation.

“Are you a guru?” the seeker asked.

“No.” Siddharta replied.

“Then, are you a master?”

“No, I am not a master.” Siddharta said quietly.

“You must be a saint, then.” said the seeker wonderingly.

“No.” said the Buddha, smiling serenely, “I am simply … awake.”

Buddhist Traditional Story

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Today I awoke, finally I see the Self has re-turned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing…
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha’s.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought ? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand life times.
Ten thousand life times but today I am home.
Ten thousand life times but today I am home.
This is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt, how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.

From the book, My Secret is Silence, by Adyashanti

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A woman whose husband worked a lot of overtime was constantly embarrassed by his habit of dozing off to sleep in church. She had pleaded with him not to do this, threatened him and even starched his underwear, but all to no avail.

One day, a friend commented on the strong smell of Gorgonzola cheese and this gave her an idea. The following Sunday morning while her husband was struggling with his collar and cuffs, she went to the kitchen and, with a knowing smile, slipped a small piece of this cheese into her handbag.

A short time later in church, as the intimations were being read, the woman watched from the corner of her eye the onset of her husband’s usual drowsiness.

Sure enough, she saw his eyelids gradually closed, his head nodded forward till his chin rested on his chest and soon she could tell by his heavy breathing that he was fast asleep.

“Well,” she thought, “this ought to do it.” And when she was certain that no one was looking her way, she quietly opened her handbag, took out the piece of Gorgonzola and furtively brushed it across her husband’s moustache.

The effect was instantaneous. The poor man leaped to his feet with arms threshing wildly and opening his eyes he cried, “Ethel! Get your feet off the pillow!”