I truly believe every single human should be taught the principles of this book from birth and should read this book as early as possible (so that probably means after puberty).
Ask yourself: âwhat will my next thought be?â
The Greatest Obstacle To Enlightenment
âBut I am not a beggar,â I can hear you say.
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
The word 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 with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.
The word 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 with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you.
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: âI think, therefore I am.â He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error, to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever- increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being âat oneâ and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is!
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly you usually donât use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
Freeing Yourself From Your Mind
This is what I mean by âwatching the thinker,â which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.
When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. Youâll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence your deeper self behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
Instead of âwatching the thinker,â you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.
Rising Above Thought
Why should we be addicted to thinking?
Because you are identified with it, which means that you derive your sense of self from the content and activity of your mind. Because you believe that you would cease to be if you stopped thinking. As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important.
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude.
Emotion: Bodyâs Reaction To Mind
Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. Emotion is the bodyâs reaction to your mind or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom
You sap that an emotion is the mindâs reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind saps ânoâ while the emotion saps âyes,â or the other way around. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.
Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered âspeechless,â sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.
Create No More Pain In The Present
Nobodyâs life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isnât it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?
The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering and free of the egoic mind.
The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful.
It is as it is. Observe how the mind labels it and how this labeling process, this continuous sitting in judgment, creates pain and unhappiness. By watching the mechanics of the mind, you step out of its resistance patterns, and you can then allow the present moment to be. This will give you a taste of the state of inner freedom from external conditions, the state of true inner peace. Then see what happens, and take action if necessary or possible.
Accept then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.
Dissolving The Pain-Body
As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. Its the emotional pain-body.
Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state. The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, âbecome you,â and live through you. It needs to get its âfoodâ through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isnât really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you donât face it, if you donât bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again. The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.
Ego Identification With The Pain-Body
You would rather be in pain be the pain-body than take a leap into the unknown and risk losing the familiar unhappy self.
Origin Of Fear
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap.
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
Egoâs Search For Wholeness
As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly.
End The Delusion Of Time
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. Its all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
Key To Spiritual Dimension Of Time
âWhat, at this moment, is lacking?â A powerful question that does not require an answer on the level of the mind. It is designed to take your attention deeply into the Now. A similar question in the Zen tradition is this: âIf not now, when?â
And Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: âPast and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.â
Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully âTime is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.â
Letting Go Of Psychological Time
Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life we may call this âclock timeâ but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with. In this way, there will be no build-up of âpsychological time,â which is identification with the past and continuous compulsive projection into the future.
Nonforgiveness necessarily implies a heavy burden of psychological time.
I cannot believe that I could ever reach a point where I am completely free of my problems.
You are right. You can never reach that point because you are at that point now. There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.
It is true that my present life situation is the result of things that happened in the past, but it is still my present situation, and being stuck in it is what makes me unhappy.
Forget about your life situation for a while and pay attention to your life.
What is the difference?
Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff. Your life is real.
All Problems Are Illusions Of The Mind
Ultimately, this is not about solving your problems. Itâs about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the âisnessâ of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with. Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.
If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasnât a problem. The mind didnât have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you donât. Either way, it is not a problem.
Joy Of Being
To alert you that you have allowed yourself to be taken over by psychological time, you can use a simple criterion. Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isnât, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. âHowâ is always more important than âwhat.â See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.
Ordinary Unconsciousness And Deep Unconsciousness
Ordinary unconsciousness means being identified with your thought processes and emotions, your reactions, desires, and aversions. It is most peopleâs normal state. In that state, you are run by the egoic mind, and you are unaware of Being.
The unease of ordinary unconsciousness turns into the pain of deep unconsciousness a state of more acute and more obvious suffering or unhappiness when things âgo wrong,â when the ego is threatened or there is a major challenge, threat, or loss, real or imagined, in your life situation or conflict in a relationship. It is an intensified version of ordinary unconsciousness, different from it not in kind but in degree.
In ordinary unconsciousness, habitual resistance to or denial of what is creates the unease and discontent that most people accept as normal living. When this resistance becomes intensified through some challenge or threat to the ego, it brings up intense negativity such as anger, acute fear, aggression, depression, and so on. Deep unconsciousness often means that the pain-body has been triggered and that you have become identified with it.
Freedom From Unhappiness
Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self.
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
Stress is caused by being âhereâ but wanting to be âthere,â or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. If you have to, you can move fast, work fast, or even run, without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present. As you move, work, run do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high energy of that moment. Now you are no longer stressed, no longer splitting yourself in two. Just moving, running, working and enjoying it. Or you can drop the whole thing and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind. It may say: âYou should be working. You are wasting time.â Observe the mind. Smile at it.
âOne day Iâll make it.â Is your goal taking up so much of your attention that you reduce the present moment to a means to an end? Is it taking the joy out of your doing? Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and nonfulfillment, donât you agree?
Are you a habitual âwaiterâ? How much of your life do you spend waiting? What I call âsmall-scale waitingâ is waiting in line at the post office, in a traffic jam, at the airport, or waiting for someone to arrive, to finish work, and so on. âLarge-scale waitingâ is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
Waiting is a state of mind.
How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
Inner Purpose Of Lifeâs Journey
When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but donât forget: the only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. Thatâs all there ever is.
âKindel teejuht, kes ei tea isegi tĂ€pselt kuhu ta lĂ€heb.â
The outer purpose belongs to the horizontal dimension of space and time; the inner purpose concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimension of the timeless Now. Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world?
It will matter to you as long as you havenât realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way around, which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to âgain the world and lose your soul,â as Jesus puts it. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to âfailâ sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better.
State Of Presence
Understanding presence is being present.
Christ: The Reality Of Your Divine Presence
Everything that exists has Being, has God-essence, has some degree of consciousness. Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness; otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form.
The individual life forms are obviously not very important in this game. In the sea, most life forms donât survive for more than a few minutes after being born. The human form turns to dust pretty quickly too, and when it is gone it is as if it had never been. Is that tragic or cruel? Only if you create a separate identity for each form, if you forget that its consciousness is God- essence expressing itself in form. But you donât truly know that until you realize your own God-essence as pure consciousness.
Finally, the pressure of suffering created by this apparent dysfunction forces consciousness to disidentify from form and awakens it from its dream of form: It regains self-consciousness, but it is at a far deeper level than when it lost it.
When we talk about watching the mind we are personalizing an event that is truly of cosmic significance: through you, consciousness is awakening out of its dream of identification with form and withdrawing from form.
The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.
Many misunderstandings and false beliefs about Christ will clear if you realize that there is no past or future in Christ. To say that Christ was or will be is a contradiction in terms. Jesus was. He was a man who lived two thousand years ago and realized divine presence, his true nature.
Jesus attempted to convey directly, not through discursive thought, the meaning of presence, of self-realization. He had gone beyond the consciousness dimension governed by time, into the realm of the timeless. The dimension of eternity had come into this world. Eternity, of course, does not mean endless time, but no time. Thus, the man Jesus became Christ, a vehicle for pure consciousness.
The âsecond comingâ of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness, not the arrival of some man or woman.
Never personalize Christ. Donât make Christ into a form identity. Avatars, divine mothers, enlightened masters, the very few that are real, are not special as persons.
Look Beyond Words
A word is no more than a means to an end. Itâs an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself.
If you had a strong aversion to the word God, which is a negative form of attachment, you may be denying not just the word but also the reality to which it points. You would be cutting yourself off from the possibility of experiencing that reality. All this is, of course, intrinsically connected with being identified with your mind.
If a word doesnt work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work. If you dont like the word sin, then call it unconsciousness or insanity. That may get you closer to the truth, the reality behind the word, than a long-misused word like sin, and leaves little room for guilt.
Transformation Through The Body
A long time after their fall from a state of grace and oneness into illusion, humans suddenly woke up in what seemed to be an animal body and they found this very disturbing. âDonât fool yourself. You are no more than an animal.â
Unconscious denial of their animal nature set in very quickly. The threat that they might be taken over by powerful instinctual drives and revert back to complete unconsciousness was indeed a very real one. Shame and taboos appeared around certain parts of the body and bodily functions, especially sexuality.
So they did what they had to do. They began to disassociate from their body. They now saw themselves as having a body, rather than just being it.
The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body or through an out-of- the-body experience. Although such an experience can be fascinating and can give you a glimpse of the state of liberation from the material form, in the end you will always have to return to the body, where the essential work of transformation takes place. Transformation is through the body, not away from it.
What you perceive as a dense physical structure called the body, which is subject to disease, old age, and death, is not ultimately real is not you. It is a misperception of your essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to the limitations of your mind, which, having lost touch with Being, creates the body as evidence of its illusory belief in separation and to justify its state of fear. But do not turn away from the body, for within that symbol of impermanence, limitation, and death that you perceive as the illusory creation of your mind is concealed the splendor of your essential and immortal reality. Do not turn your attention elsewhere in your search for the Truth, for it is nowhere else to be found but within your body.
If you keep your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now. You wonât lose yourself in the external world, and you wont lose yourself in your mind. Thoughts and emotions, fears and desires, may still be there to some extent, but they wonât take you over.
Presence is pure consciousness consciousness that has been reclaimed from the mind, from the world of form. The inner body is your link with the Unmanifested, and in its deepest aspect is the Unmanifested: the Source from which consciousness emanates as light emanates from the sun. Awareness of the inner body is consciousness remembering its origin and returning to the Source.
We could say, donât just think with your head, think with your whole body.
The Art Of Listening
Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give.
They pay more attention to that than to what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course, you cannot feel someone elseâs Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love.
Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.
Dreamless Sleep
But in dreamless sleep, you donât go into it consciously. Although the bodily functions are still operating, âyouâ no longer exist in that state. Can you imagine what it would be like to go into dreamless sleep with full consciousness? It is impossible to imagine it, because that state has no content.
The Unmanifested does not liberate you until you enter it consciously. Thats why Jesus did not say:. the truth will make you free, but rather: âYou will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.â This is not a conceptual truth. It is the truth of eternal life beyond form, which is known directly or not at all.
Portals
The Now can be seen as the main portal. It is an essential aspect of every other portal, including the inner body. You cannot be in your body without being intensely present in the Now.
Directly, you feel it as the radiance and power of your conscious presence no content, just presence. Indirectly, you are aware of the Unmanifested in and through the sensory realm. In other words, you feel the God-essence in every creature, every flower, every stone, and you realize: âAll that is, is holy.â This is why Jesus, speaking entirely from his essence or Christ identity, says in the Gospel of Thomas: âSplit a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.â
Itâs up to you to open a portal in your life that gives you conscious access to the Unmanifested. Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what is; these are all portals you can use but you only need to use one.
Surely love must also be one of those portals?
No, it isnât. As soon as one of the portals is open, love is present in you as the âfeeling-realizationâ of oneness. Love isnât a portal; itâs what comes through the portal into this world. As long as you are completely trapped in your form identity, there can be no love. Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter.
Silence
Look for it in the silence out of which the sounds come and into which they return. Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.
Space
Just as no sound can exist without silence, nothing can exist without nothing, without the empty space that enables it to be. Every physical object or body has come out of nothing, is surrounded by nothing, and will eventually return to nothing.
âForm is emptiness, emptiness is form,â states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.
âNothingâ can only become a portal into the Unmanifested for you if you donât try to grasp or understand it. We are not trying to understand it. There is nothing to understand.
Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same nothing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.
Nature Of Space And Time
If there were nothing but silence, it wouldnât exist for you; you wouldnât know what it is. Only when sound appears does silence come into being. Similarly, if there were only space without any objects in space, it wouldnât exist for you. Imagine yourself as a point of consciousness floating in the vastness of space no stars, no galaxies, just emptiness. Suddenly, space wouldnât be vast anymore; it would not be there at all. There would be no speed, no movement from here to there. At least two points of reference are needed for distance and space to come into being.
Nothing could be without space, yet space is nothing.
That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be, is not just out there in space it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension.
What you perceive externally as space and time are ultimately illusory, but they contain a core of truth. They are the two essential attributes of God, infinity and eternity, perceived as if they had an external existence outside you.
Hence, the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world. Just as you would not be conscious of space if there were no objects in space, the world is needed for the Unmanifested to be realized. You may have heard the Buddhist saying: âIf there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.â
Conscious Death
Every portal is a portal of death, the death of the false self.
Love/Hate Relationships
It may appear that if you could only eliminate the negative or destructive cycles, then all would be well and the relationship would flower beautifully but alas, this is not possible. The polarities are mutually interdependent. You cannot have one without the other. The positive already contains within itself the as yet unmanifested negative.
Addiction And The Search For Wholeness
Why should we become addicted to another person?
The reason why the romantic love relationship is such an intense and universally sought-after experience is that it seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state. There is a physical as well as a psychological dimension to this state.
The root of this physical urge is a spiritual one: the longing for an end to duality, a return to the state of wholeness. Sexual union is the closest you can get to this state on the physical level. This is why it is the most deeply satisfying experience the physical realm can offer. But sexual union is no more than a fleeting glimpse of wholeness, an instant of bliss.
All the other things that you derived your sense of self from before, now become relatively insignificant. You now have a single focal point that replaces them all, gives meaning to your life, and through which you define your identity: the person you are âin loveâ with. You are no longer a disconnected fragment in an uncaring universe, or so it seems. Your world now has a center: the loved one. The fact that the center is outside you and that, therefore, you still have an externally derived sense of self does not seem to matter at first. What matters is that the underlying feelings of incompleteness, of fear, lack and unfulfillment so characteristic of the egoic state are no longer there or are they? Have they dissolved, or do they continue to exist underneath the happy surface reality?
If in your relationships you experience both âloveâ and the opposite of love attack, emotional violence, and so on then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your âloveâ has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the egoâs substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation. But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego. The feelings of fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part of egoic consciousness but had been covered up by the âlove relationshipâ now resurface.
Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.
Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.
Enlightened Relationships
You think that you canât get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You âgetâ there by realizing that you are there already.
If you stop investing it with âselfness,â the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody elseâs unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will then either separate in love or move ever more deeply into the Now together into Being.
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special.
There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.
Whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the âmadnessâ in you and in your partner, be glad. What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is an opportunity for salvation.
Sanity consciousness can only come into this world through you. You do not need to wait for the world to become sane, or for somebody else to become conscious, before you can be enlightened. You may wait forever. Do not accuse each other of being unconscious.
To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means âbeing the knowingâ rather than âbeing the reactionâ and the judge.
Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present. Accusing, defending, attacking all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant. Giving space to others and to yourself is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.
If your partner is still identified with the mind and the pain-body while you are already free, this will represent a major challenge not to you but to your partner. It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and âenemiesâ to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends. The unenlightened partnerâs mind will be deeply frustrated because its fixed positions are not resisted, which means they will become shaky and weak, and there is even the âdangerâ that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self. The pain-body is demanding feedback and not getting it. The need for argument, drama, and conflict is not being met. But beware: Some people who are unresponsive, withdrawn, insensitive, or cut off from their feelings may think and try to convince others that they are enlightened, or at least that there is ânothing wrongâ with them and everything wrong with their partner. Men tend to do that more than women. They may see their female partners as irrational or emotional. But if you can feel your emotions, you are not far from the radiant inner body just underneath. If you are mainly in your head, the distance is much greater, and you need to bring consciousness into the emotional body before you can reach the inner body. If there isnât an emanation of love and joy, complete presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not enlightenment. Another indicator is how a person behaves in difficult or challenging situations or when things âgo wrong.â If your âenlightenmentâ is egoic self-delusion, then life will soon give you a challenge that will bring out your unconsciousness in whatever form as fear, anger, defensiveness, judgment, depression, and so on. If you are in a relationship, many of your challenges will come through your partner.
Why Women Are Closer To Enlightenment
Generally speaking, it is easier for a woman to feel and be in her body, so she is naturally closer to Being and potentially closer to enlightenment than a man.
It was often seen as a womb that gives birth to everything in creation and sustains and nourishes it during its life as form. In the Tao Te Ching, one of the most ancient and profound books ever written, the Tao, which could be translated as Being, is described as âinfinite, eternally present, the mother of the universe.â Naturally, women are closer to it than men since they virtually âembodyâ the Unmanifested.
When the mind took over and humans lost touch with the reality of their divine essence, they started to think of God as a male figure. Society became male dominated, and the female was made subordinate to the male.
What does remain true, however, is that the energy frequency of the mind appears to be essentially male. The mind resists, fights for control, uses, manipulates, attacks, tries to grasp and possess, and so on. This is why the traditional God is a patriarchal, controlling authority figure, an often angry man who you should live in fear of, as the Old Testament suggests. This God is a projection of the human mind.
To go beyond the mind and reconnect with the deeper reality of Being, very different qualities are needed: surrender, nonjudgment, an openness that allows life to be instead of resisting it, the capacity to hold all things in the loving embrace of your knowing. All these qualifies are much more closely related to the female principle. Whereas mind-energy is hard and rigid, Being-energy is soft and yielding and yet infinitely more powerful than mind. The mind runs our civilization, whereas Being is in charge of all life on our planet and beyond.
Dissolving The Collective Female Pain-Body
The pain-body usually has a collective as well as a personal aspect. The personal aspect is the accumulated residue of emotional pain suffered in oneâs own past. The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness, and so on. Everyoneâs personal pain-body also partakes of this collective pain-body.
Apart from her personal pain-body, every woman has her share in what could be described as the collective female pain-body unless she is fully conscious. This consists of accumulated pain suffered by women partly through male subjugation of the female, through slavery, exploitation, rape, childbirth, child loss, and so on, over thousands of years. The emotional or physical pain that for many women precedes and coincides with the menstrual flow is the pain- body in its collective aspect that awakens from its dormancy at that time, although it can be triggered at other times too.
The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.
So do not use the pain-body to give you an identity. Use it for enlightenment instead. Transmute it into consciousness. One of the best times for this is during menses. I believe that, in the years to come, many women will enter the fully conscious state during that time. Usually, it is a time of unconsciousness for many women, as they are taken over by the collective female pain-body. Once you have reached a certain level of consciousness, however, you can reverse this, so instead of becoming unconscious you become more conscious.
Give Up The Relationship With Yourself
As you approach adulthood, uncertainty about your sexuality followed by the realization that you are âdifferentâ from others may force you to disidentify from socially conditioned patterns of thought and behavior. This will automatically raise your level of consciousness above that of the unconscious majority, whose members unquestioningly take on board all inherited patterns. In that respect, being gay can be a help. Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not âfit inâ with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force. On the other hand, if you then develop a sense of identity based on your gayness, you have escaped one trap only to fall into another. You will play roles and games dictated by a mental image you have of yourself as gay. You will become unconscious. You will become unreal. Underneath your ego mask, you will become very unhappy. If this happens to you, being gay will have become a hindrance. But you always get another chance, of course. Acute unhappiness can be a great awakener.
If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.
Higher Good Beyond Good And Bad
Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.
Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? Do you have the total picture? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.
If you forgive every moment allow it to be as it is then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.
When a loved one has just died, or you feel your own death approaching, you cannot be happy. It is impossible. But you can be at peace. There may be sadness and tears, but provided that you have relinquished resistance, underneath the sadness you will feel a deep serenity, a stillness, a sacred presence.
âAccept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?â This was written 2,000 years ago by Marcus Aurelius, one of those exceedingly rare humans who possessed worldly power as well as wisdom.
Drama
Whenever two or more egos come together, drama of one kind or another ensues. But even if you live totally alone, you still create your own drama. When you feel sorry for yourself, thats drama. When you feel guilty or anxious, thats drama. When you let the past or future obscure the present, you are creating time, psychological time the stuff out of which drama is made. Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama. Most people are in love with their particular life drama.
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life. Nobody can even have an argument with you, no matter how hard he or she tries. You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person. An argument implies identification with your mind and a mental position, as well as resistance and reaction to the other personâs position. The result is that the polar opposites become mutually energized. These are the mechanics of unconsciousness. You can still make your point clearly and firmly, but there will be no reactive force behind it, no defense or attack. So it wonât turn into drama.
Impermanence And The Cycles Of Life
Through allowing the âisnessâ of all things, a deeper dimension underneath the play of opposites reveals itself to you as an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good and bad.
On the level of form, there is birth and death, creation and destruction, growth and dissolution, of seemingly separate forms. This is reflected everywhere: in the life cycle of a star or a planet, a physical body, a tree, a flower; in the rise and fall of nations, political systems, civilizations; and in the inevitable cycles of gain and loss in the life of an individual.
There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer. It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle bad, except in the mindâs judgment. Growth is usually considered positive, but nothing can grow forever.
The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody âfailsâ sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.
Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything. A cycle can last for anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large cycles and small cycles within these large ones.
As long as a condition is judged as âgoodâ by your mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same condition that made you happy, then makes you unhappy. The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow.
The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha a Pali word meaning âsufferingâ or âunsatisfactoriness.â It is inseparable from its opposite. This means that your happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.
Relinquishing Negativity
Couldnât a negative emotion also contain an important message? For example, if I often feel depressed, it may be a signal that there is something wrong with my life, and it may force me to look at my life situation and make some changes. So I need to listen to what the emotion is telling me and not just dismiss it as negative.
Lets say that you are sitting quietly at home. Suddenly, there is the penetrating sound of a car alarm from across the street. Irritation arises. What is the purpose of the irritation? None whatsoever. Why did you create it? You didnât. The mind did. It was totally automatic, totally unconscious. Why did the mind create it? Because it holds the unconscious belief that its resistance, which you experience as negativity or unhappiness in some form, will somehow dissolve the undesirable condition. This, of course, is a delusion. The resistance that it creates, the irritation or anger in this case, is far more disturbing than the original cause that it is attempting to dissolve.
Do you know the story of Banzan? Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in the pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. âGive me the best piece of meat you have,â said the customer. And the butcher replied, âEvery piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best.â Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened.
Nature Of Compassion
As long as you are unaware of Being, the reality of other humans will elude you, because you have not found your own. Your mind will like or dislike their form, which is not just their body but includes their mind as well. True relationship becomes possible only when there is an awareness of Being. Coming from Being, you will perceive another personâs body and mind as just a screen, as it were, behind which you can feel their true reality, as you feel yours.
Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures. But there are two sides to compassion, two sides to this bond. On the one hand, since you are still here as a physical body, you share the vulnerability and mortality of your physical form with every other human and with every living being. Next time you say âI have nothing in common with this person,â remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now two years or seventy years, it doesnt make much difference both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that sense, there is total equality between you and every other creature.
But true compassion, as I have just described it, is as yet rare. To have deep empathy for the suffering of another being certainly requires a high degree of consciousness but represents only one side of compassion. It is not complete. True compassion goes beyond empathy or sympathy. It does not happen until sadness merges with joy, the joy of Being beyond form, the joy of eternal life.
Death
We believe in death and thatâs why the body dies. The body does not die because you believe in death. The body exists, or seems to, because you believe in death. Body and death are part of the same illusion, created by the egoic mode of consciousness, which has no awareness of the Source of life and sees itself as separate and constantly under threat.
But your true nature is concealed somewhere within that illusion, not outside it, so the body is still the only point of access to it.
Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment the observing consciousness cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear.
You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival.
Your primary task is not to seek salvation through creating a better world, but to awaken out of identification with form. You are then no longer bound to this world, this level of reality. You can feel your roots in the Unmanifested and so are free of attachment to the manifested world. You can still enjoy the passing pleasures of this world, but there is no fear of loss anymore, so you donât need to cling to them.
If you feel called upon to alleviate suffering in the world, that is a very noble thing to do, but remember not to focus exclusively on the outer; otherwise, you will encounter frustration and despair. Without a profound change in human consciousness, the worldâs suffering is a bottomless pit. So donât let your compassion become one-sided. Empathy with someone elseâs pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the ultimate illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.
Stay alert and very, very present. The causal level needs to remain your primary focus, the teaching of enlightenment your main purpose, and peace your most precious gift to the world.
Surrender: Acceptance Of The Now
To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action.
Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.
Inner resistance is to say ânoâ to what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things âgo wrong,â which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap.
You donât need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You accept the âisnessâ of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration.
Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of âI canât be bothered anymoreâ or âI just donât care anymore.â If you look at it closely, you will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all but masked resistance.
Start by acknowledging that there is resistance. Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises. Observe how your mind creates it, how it labels the situation, yourself, or others. Look at the thought process involved. Feel the energy of the emotion. By witnessing the resistance, you will see that it serves no purpose. By focusing all your attention on the Now, the unconscious resistance is made conscious, and that is the end of it. You cannot be conscious and unhappy, conscious and in negativity. Negativity, unhappiness, or suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance, and resistance is always unconscious.
Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive?
But surrender doesnât mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say ânoâ firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say ânoâ to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive âno,â a high-quality âno,â a ânoâ that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.
Let me illustrate how surrender can work in relationships. 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 personâs 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. Thatâs 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 donât mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying âOkay, you are right,â with a look on your face that says, âI am above all this childish unconsciousness.â Thatâs 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. 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 personâs mental position as you no longer energize it through resistance. When identification with mental positions is out of the way, true communication begins.
Nonresistance doesnât necessarily mean doing nothing. All it means is that any âdoingâ becomes nonreactive. Remember the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial arts: donât resist the opponents force. Yield to overcome.
Illness is not the problem. You are the problem as long as the egoic mind is in control. When you are ill or disabled, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do not blame yourself either. All that is resistance. If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything âbadâ that happens in your life use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment. Are you seriously ill and feeling angry now about what I have just said? Then that is a clear sign that the illness has become part of your sense of self and that you are now protecting your identity as well as protecting the illness. The condition that is labeled âillnessâ has nothing to do with who you truly are.
I do not mean to say that you will become happy in such a situation. You will not. But fear and pain will become transmuted into an inner peace and serenity that come from a very deep place from the Unmanifested itself. It is âthe peace of God, which passes all understanding.â Compared to that, happiness is quite a shallow thing. With this radiant peace comes the realization not on the level of mind but within the depth of your Being that you are indestructible, immortal. This is not a belief. It is absolute certainty that needs no external evidence or proof from some secondary source.
Your first chance is to surrender each moment to the reality of that moment. Knowing that what is cannot be undone because it already is you say yes to what is or accept what isnât. Then you do what you have to do, whatever the situation requires. If you abide in this state of acceptance, you create no more negativity, no more suffering, no more unhappiness.
Your second chance at surrender: If you cannot accept what is outside, then accept what is inside. If you cannot accept the external condition, accept the internal condition. This means: Do not resist the pain. Allow it to be there. Surrender to the grief, despair, fear, loneliness, or whatever form the suffering takes. Witness it without labeling it mentally. Embrace it. Then see how the miracle of surrender transmutes deep suffering into deep peace. This is your crucifixion. Let it become your resurrection and ascension.
The Way Of The Cross
There are many accounts of people who say they have found God through their deep suffering, and there is the Christian expression âthe way of the cross, â which I suppose points to the same thing. Strictly speaking, they did not find God through their suffering, because suffering implies resistance. They found God through surrender, through total acceptance of what is, into which they were forced by their intense suffering.
I donât call it finding God, because how can you find that which was never lost, the very life that you are? The word God is limiting not only because of thousands of years of misperception and misuse, but also because it implies an entity other than you. God is Being itself, not a being. There can be no subject-object relationship here, no duality, no you and God. God-realization is the most natural thing there is.
Power To Choose
Choice implies consciousness a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind.
This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great.
The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.
Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.