Taken

First, you must let your heart
be broken open
in a way you have never
felt before,
cannot imagine.

You will
not know if what you are
feeling
is anguish or joy,
something predestined
or merely old wounds
flowing once more,
reminders of all that is
unfinished in your life.

Something will flood into
your chest
like air sweetened by
desert honeysuckle,
love that is too
strong.

You will stand there,
very still,
not seeing what this is.
Later, you will not remember
any of this
until the next time
when you will say,
yes, yes, I have known this before,
it has come again,
just as your eyes fold under
once more
Dorothy Walters
Kundalini Awakening

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to sit still.

~T. S. Elliot, Ash Wednesday

Self-enquiry

is the direct path to Self-realization or enlightenment. The only way to make the mind cease its outward activities is to turn it inward. By steady and continuous investigation into the nature of the mind, the mind itself gets transformed into That to which it owes its own existence.
Ramesh S. Balsekar

Fighting the ego,

. . ., is precisely what the ego wants. You cannot fight the mind. You cannot suppress the ego. Fighting, resisting, controlling it is an impossible action. What is really needed is a . . . feminine action. That is to yield, to allow things to be as they are.

Knowing that the intrusion of the mind is a natural process, that it
has to happen, that understanding itself will return one to the
witnessing.
Ramesh S. Balsekar

THAT LIVES IN US

If you put your hands on this oar with me,
they will never harm another, and they will come to find
they hold everything you want.

If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer
lift anything to your
mouth that might wound your precious land –
that sacred earth that is your body.

If you put your soul against this oar with me,
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm
that lives in us.

Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give.

Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and the future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.

Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.

~ Rumi ~

(Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky)

Sometimes I go about pitying myself,

and all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky.
Chippewa
English version by Robert Bly and Frances Densmore

"The non-scientist's relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century's revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know."
- John Updike
thanks to Andrew Sullivan & Jessica Palmer

The Dream, The Dreamer, and Consciousness

Our existence is trapped between desire and fear in the context of time. The core of our problem, then lies in thought, which is the creator of time. Human beings actually have no more independence or autonomy in living their lives than do the characters in a dream. Neither do they have anything to do with the creation of the dream or anything in it. They are simply being lived along with everything else in this living dream of the manifested universe. The entire dream is unreal. Only the dreamer is real, and that is Consciousness itself.
~Balsekar

"What is the root of pain? Ignorance of yourself. What is the root
of desire? The urge to find yourself. All creation toils for its
self and will not rest until it returns to it."
Sri Nisargadatta

Charles Darwin 12 February 1809 - 19 April 1882

What a book a devil's chaplain might write
on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low,
and horribly cruel work of nature!
~Charles Darwin

How Far This Has Come

	You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it's evolution Well, you know We all want to change the world

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.
Jelaluddin Rumi

When I am in that darkness
I do not remember anything
about anything human,
or anything which
has a form.

Nevertheless,
I see all
and I see nothing.

Angela of Foligno

Causality

"Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts
itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire
universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing;
nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When
the source and the ground of everything is the only cause of
everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The
universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are
infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle
fundamentally and totally free."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Is there Enlightenment, Realization or Awakening?

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Your own true nature is an "expression of the One Life" - the Aliveness - Consciousness - Awareness. It cannot be anything other than that - as this would be Dualistic.

Your own essential nature - Aliveness - Life itself - is not personal. There is not a separate entity there which is 'you'. It is pure Life itself. NonDual.

We have a sense of self when the conceptual self-image builds up - and it is just that - a mental image. It is not who or what we actually are.

That self image becomes a reference point. But it is a 'cherry picked', modified and edited version of your characteristics, your foibles, your personality, your attributes, your history, your good points, your faults, your tragic qualities, etc. Just a mental image - not 'you'.

It is insubstantial and has no existence other than the content of thought. The apparent 'me' actually does not exist and when looked for cannot be found.

The 'me' is an abstraction. The actuality of what you are is what exists in the immediacy of the moment - which is Presence - Awareness / Aliveness.

All the rest is a mental construct - an abstraction. What that means is that 'the one who you think you are' is a mental abstraction and is 'not it'

So then comes the 'desire' to become enlightened, or to awaken, or become self realized.

But your essential nature, which is present and aware right now as you read this, is an expression of the One Life. It is completely NonDual and completely untouched by the travails of life.

Your essential nature does not need to become enlightened, or to wake up, or to become self realized. It does not need to 'learn' how to become 'more Present', become more compassionate, be able to 'surrender' or 'go 'deeper'. It is already 100% Present and the concept of 'surrender' does not arise.

Who then 'wants' to be come 'Enlightened'? Who wants to 'Wake up'? It is the one who feels incomplete, unsatisfied, unhappy. Who is the one who suffers? It is the Self Image, the Reference Point, the Ego, the one who we think we are. The one who we believe is us.

It is entirely a case of mistaken identity. We are not who we think we are and we want to fix that one up.

Our real nature does not need 'fixing up'.

Our true nature does not need to become 'enlightened'.

Our true nature was never asleep and does not need to 'wake up'

Our true nature does not need to become 'realized' as it is already fully Real.

The reference point, the Ego, has no existence beyond the content of thoughts, has no aliveness of its own and has no awareness whatsoever in its own right. No wonder it feels incomplete and miserable! No wonder it suffers.

Who is the one that is the "I" in "When I awoke" or "I am enlightened", or "I am self-realized"? The only 'one' there that regards itself as a separate entity is the Ego itself - the reference point.

In fact there is no one there at all. The reference point, the so-called ego, does not exist beyond the content of thought. It has no substantial nature at all.

Our essential nature is Aliveness / Presence Awareness /Consciousness - but that is entirely non-personal - there is no separate entity at all. No Self, as the Buddha puts it.

So there are three good reasons to discard the old concepts of enlightenment, awakening and self realization.

1. Firstly there is no separate 'me' there to 'achieve' enlightenment, an awakening or self-realization.
2. Secondly, our true nature does not need enlightening, waking up, or self-realization.
3. Thirdly - 'enlightenment', 'waking up' and 'self realization' are actually concepts - more than that - they are abstractions.

Far better to look into the matter of mistaken identity - just that and only that.

There-in lies the end of suffering and the end of seeking.

from The End of Seeking

- Written by Mike Graham, 19 Jan 2008, last edited 29 Apr 2008