An Inner Revolution

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

The enlightenment I speak of is not simply a realization, not simply the discovery of one's true nature. This discovery is just the beginning - the point of entry into an inner revolution. Realization does not guarantee this revolution; it simply makes it possible.

What is this inner revolution? To begin with, revolution is not static; it is alive, ongoing, and continuous. It cannot be grasped or made to fit into any conceptual model. Nor is there any path to this inner revolution, for it is neither predictable nor controllable and has a life all its own. This revolution is a breaking away from the old, repetitive, dead structures of thought and perception that humanity finds itself trapped in. Realization of the ultimate reality is a direct and sudden existential awakening to one's true nature that opens the door to the possibility of an inner revolution. Such a revolution requires an ongoing emptying out of the old structures of consciousness and the birth of a living and fluid intelligence. This intelligence restructures your entire being - body, mind, and perception. This intelligence cuts the mind free of its old structures that are rooted within the totality of human consciousness. If one cannot become free of the old conditioned structures of human consciousness, then one is still in a prison.

Having an awakening to one's true nature does not necessarily mean that there will be an ongoing revolution in the way one perceives, acts, and responds to life. The moment of awakening shows us what is ultimately true and real as well as revealing a deeper possibility in the way that life can be lived from an undivided and unconditioned state of being. But the moment of awakening does not guarantee this deeper possibility, as many who have experienced spiritual awakening can attest to. Awakening opens a door inside to a deep inner revolution, but in no way guarantees that it will take place. Whether it takes place or not depends on many factors, but none more important and vital than an earnest and unambiguous intention for truth above and beyond all else. This earnest intention toward truth is what all spiritual growth ultimately depends upon, especially when it transcends all personal preferences, agendas, and goals.

This inner revolution is the awakening of an intelligence not born of the mind but of an inner silence of mind, which alone has the ability to uproot all of the old structures of one's consciousness. Unless these structures are uprooted, there will be no creative thought, action, or response. Unless there is an inner revolution, nothing new and fresh can flower. Only the old, the repetitious, the conditioned will flower in the absence of this revolution. But our potential lies beyond the known, beyond the structures of the past, beyond anything that humanity has established. Our potential is something that can flower only when we are no longer caught within the influence and limitations of the known. Beyond the realm of the mind, beyond the limitations of humanity's conditioned consciousness, lies that which can be called the sacred. And it is from the sacred that a new and fluid consciousness is born that wipes away the old and brings to life the flowering of a living and undivided expression of being. Such an expression is neither personal nor impersonal, neither spiritual nor worldly, but rather the flow and flowering of existence beyond all notions of self.

So let us understand that reality transcends all of our notions about reality. Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita Vedanta, nor Buddhist. It is neither dualistic nor nondualistic, neither spiritual nor nonspiritual. We should come to know that there is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about reality. When we perceive from an undivided consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life. We will find it in our teacup, in the fall breeze, in the brushing of our teeth, in each and every moment of living and dying. Therefore we must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all - not once but continually. One must be willing to stand alone - in the unknown, with no reference to the known or the past or any of one's conditioning.

One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility. One must stand in that dark light, in that groundless embrace, unwavering and true to the reality beyond all self - not just for a moment, but forever without end. For then that which is sacred, undivided, and whole is born within consciousness and begins to express itself.

- Adyashanti

Consciousness

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

Just as a forest conflagration (itself a single body of flame) assumes innumerable forms, so does the formless, nondual Consciousness assume all forms that compose the universe.

Millennium blessing

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us to surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.
~Stephen Levine

The Eternal Ever-present One Life

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

There is an eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.... It is your very presence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence. This Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form in its innermost and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of 'feeling-realization' is enlightenment. The work "enlightenment" conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness of Being... It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
- Eckhart Tolle, from Practicing the Power of Now, posted to SufiMystic

The Unknown Self

xLes>en Googlec

Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.

- Alan Watts, posted to AlongTheWay

Break Blow Burn

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

Holy Sonnet XIV
Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
~John Donne

The Us of I

Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.

- Alan Watts

CREATIVITY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

from Rollo May's The Courage to Create. This excerpt from chapter 3, Creativity and the Unconscious, concerns breakthroughs from the unconscious to the conscious.

I wish to begin our exploration of this topic by relating an incident from my own experience. When I was graduate student doing research on The Meaning of Anxiety, I studied anxiety in a group of unmarried mothers-i.e., pregnant young women in their late teens and early twenties in a shelter home in New York City. I had a good sound hypothesis on anxiety, approved by my professors and approved by me-that the predisposition toward anxiety in individuals would be proportionate to the degree to which they had been rejected by their mothers. In psychoanalysis and psychology this had been a generally accepted hypothesis. I assumed the anxiety of people like these young women would be cued off by the anxiety-creating situation of being unwed and pregnant, and I could then study more openly the original source of their anxiety-namely the maternal rejection.
Now I discovered that half the young women fitted my hypothesis beautifully. But the other half did not fit it at all. This latter group included young women from Harlem and the Lower East Side who had been radically rejected by their mothers. One of them, whom I shall call Helen, was from a family of twelve children whose mother drove them out of the house on the first day of summer to stay with their father, the caretaker of a barge that went up and down the Hudson River. Helen was pregnant by her father. At the time she was in the shelter, he was in Sing Sing on a charge of rape of Helen’s older sister. Like the other young women of this group, Helen would say to me, “We have troubles, but we don’t worry.”
This was a very curious thing to me and I had a hard time believing the data. But the facts seemed clear. As far as I could tell by the Rorschach, TAT, and other test I used, these radically rejected young women did not carry any unusual degree of anxiety. Forced out of the house by their mothers, they simply made their friends among other youngsters on the street. Hence, there was not the predisposition to anxiety we would have expected according to what we know in psychology.
How could this be? Had the rejected young women who had not experienced anxiety become hardened, apathetic, so that they did not feel the rejection? The answer to that seemed clearly no. Were they psychopathic or sociopathic types, who also don’t experience anxiety? Again, no. I felt myself caught by an insoluble problem.
Late one day, putting aside my books and papers in the little office I used in that shelter house, I walked down the street toward the subway. I was tired. I tried to put the whole troublesome business out of my mind. About fifty feet away from the entrance to the Eighth Street station, it suddenly struck me “out of the blue,” as the not-unfitting expression goes, that those young women who didn’t fit my hypothesis were all from the proletarian class. And as quickly as that idea struck me, other ideas poured out. I think I had not taken another step on the sidewalk, when a whole new hypothesis broke loose in my mind. I realized my entire theory would have to be changed. I saw at that instant that it is not rejection by the mother that is the original trauma which is the source of anxiety; it is rather rejection that is lied about.
The proletarian mothers rejected their children, but they never made any bones about it. The children knew they were rejected; they went out on the streets and found other companions. There was never any subterfuge about their situation. They know their world-bad or good-and they could orient themselves to it. But the middle-class young women were always lied to in their families. They were rejected by mothers who pretended they loved them. This was really the source of their anxiety, not the sheer rejection. I saw, in that instantaneous way that characterizes insights from these deeper sources, that anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence. I was convinced there, on the street-and later thought and experience only convinced me the more-that this is a better, more accurate, and more elegant theory, than my first.

Why did you come to the Master?

xLes>en Googlec

Because my life was going nowhere, giving me nothing.
So where's it going now?
No where
And what's it giving you now?
Nothing.
So, what's the difference?
Now I'm going nowhere because there's nowhere to go;
I'm getting nothing because there's nothing to desire.

- Anthony de Mello, S.J.

To Look at Any Thing

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:
To look at this green and say,
"I have seen spring in these
Woods," will not do - you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.

~ John Moffitt ~

The Teacher

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

The teacher does not talk to individuals. He is Consciousness
talking about Consciousness to Consciousness.

No truth remains as truth the moment it is given expression.
It then becomes only a concept! Is it any wonder, then, that
you find yourself bogged down in a mire of ideas and
concepts from which you find it impossible to extricate yourself?

~Ramesh S Balsekar

Makeing Deep Sense

xLes>en Googlec

In the twenty-first century, for those of us who are spiritually inclined, it is difficult to find a path, practice, or way that makes deep sense. It's challenging to find a truly contemporary spiritual orientation that doesn't compel us either to embrace ancient belief structures that just no longer seem appropriate or to subscribe to New Age spiritual notions that seem to be based upon far-fetched or irrational suppositions about the nature of reality, God, or the cosmos. We as postmodern seekers are in a unique predicament, but it's a predicament that couldn't be more thrilling because it is so pregnant with creative potential. I'm speaking about all of us who want to catalyze a revolution in consciousness and culture that will truly make it possible to create something new from the ground up. In order to do this, I believe we need to not only free ourselves from the burden of having to bridge the gap between the mythical past and rational present but we also need to, together, formulate an entirely new context for our individual and collective spiritual development that is completely appropriate for our own time and twenty-first-century circumstances. I believe such a perspective would have to be based upon the most important historical, cultural, and spiritual discovery of the last three hundred years: evolution.
~andrewcohen.org

e.e.cummings

xLes>en Googlec

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

In Silence

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”
~Thomas Merton

Daily

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Jesus said to them:

xLes>en Googlec

“When you make the two one,

And when you make the inside like the outside

And the outside like the inside,

Then will you enter the Kingdom.”

Gospel of Thomas

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

xLes>en Googlec

Papaji,how does an awakened being like yourself see the world?
As my own Self. When you see your hands, feet, body, mind, senses, intellect, you know they are part of you. You say, 'My "I" includes all these'. In the same way you must see the world as yourself, not as different from who you are. Right now you regard your hands, your feet, your nails and your hair as not being any different from you. See the world in the same way.
- Excerpt from interview with Papaji, by Jeff Greewald

Rich reading here . . . . .

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi

Each Night

xLes>en Googlec

Images,

dream news,
fragments,
flash
then fade.
These darkened walls.

Here, I say.
Climb into
this story.
Be remembered!

Naomi Shihab Nye

BLOGGER FROM SYRIA

A dissident who goes by the name of Amarji , passionate, poetic and worth a look.

I just survived another round of dubiously curt and polite investigation by the Military Security Directorate. This promises to be the last such session with this particular Directorate. But it seems obvious now that other security branches will be jumping into the fray soon.

As I returned home today and tried to organize my thoughts, I found it difficult to make sense of this while development. What do these people want anyway? Who is making the decision to investigate? Is all this taking place on the personal behest of each branch leader in an attempt to prove to themselves, and their superiors, that they are doing their job and that they remain on top of things? Or is there some kind of coordination taking place between the various branches, something that did not use to happen before? If so, what is the purpose of this coordination in my case? Is the clicking ticking on me. . .

The people at the political security apparatus contacted me today and promised to resolve my “travel restrictions” situation soon. They said the whole issue was related to the fact that they were trying to find some legal/official framework to allow for the Tharwa Project to be operated from Damascus. . .

The heretic’s dream: a safe place where he can practice and preach his heresy, undisturbed, unmolested. . .

In the dead of night, the Heretic is busy working behind his desk, his wife and kids fast asleep, and his senses numb all but to one thought. Well, a question really, an oft recurring question these days: am I sealing my fate, or is my fate sealing me? Or, to wax even more philosophic:

How can one feel trapped by choices he seems to be making of his own volition. . .

Our leaders say that they are confused, that they don’t really understand what the Americans really want from all these pressures they are exerting against them. Well, I don’ think I can be put it any more eloquently than the new UAE ruler did: “change or be changed.” That’s what the Americans want, their real intentions and reasons are beside the point. . .

I didn’t come back to Damascus in ’94 because I was homesick or for some nationalistic reason. I came back because at the very last moment I stopped my hand from lunging a dagger into my heart, I came back because I had a mother and a father and I needed to be cuddled once again and saved from myself, I came back to write and commit suicide in other less dramatic ways, perhaps. . .

MARCH READING LIST

Allies at War
America, Europe, and the crisis over Iraq
Philip Gordon, Jeremy Shapiro

The Courage to Create
"WE ARE living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born..."
Rollo May

Everyday Grace
Having Hope, Finding Forgiveness, and Making Miracles
Marianne Williamson

Opening the Hand of Thought
Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice
Kosho Uchiyama

Collapse
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond