Austerity, Desire and Loving Yourself

A visitor asked Nisargadatta: "What is austerity?"

I found his answer so simple and enlightening that I am sharing it here.

Nisargadatta: "Once you have gone through an experience, not to go through it again is austerity. To eschew the unnecessary is austerity. Not to anticipate pleasure or pain is austerity. ... Desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is the choices you make that are wrong.

To imagine that some little thing - food, sex, power, fame - will make you happy is to deceive yourself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.
...
You are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They happen to you. They are there because you find them interesting. Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that comes within its focus of awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil nor ugliness. It hopes, it trusts, it loves. 

You people do not know how much you miss by not knowing your own true self. You are neither the body nor the mind, neither the fuel not the fire. They appear and disappear according to their own laws.

That which you are, your true self, you love it, and whatever you do you do for your own happiness. 
To find it , to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely.

Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the Self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love your self absolutely. So not pretend you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them. Don't pretend to be what you are not, don't refuse to be what you are.
Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realization no virtue is genuine.

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being in the entire universe is included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realization can break it. Go for it resolutely. 

(Nisargadatta, I Am That, p. 211 ff.)

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How to Live in Peace with Yourself - Ramana - B4Peace

Ramana Maharshi, as he is known to the world, was born in 1879 as Venkataraman. He had a death experience with no apparent cause when he was 16. 
His own account of the event is as follows:

“One day I was alone in the first floor of my uncle’s house. I was in my usual state of health. But a sudden and unmistakable fear of death seized me. I felt I was going to die. Why I should have so felt cannot now be explained by anything else in the body. I did not however trouble myself to discover if the fear was well grounded. I did not care to consult doctors or elders or even friends. I felt I had to solve the problem myself then and there. … ‘Dying means, the legs become stiff; lips become taut; eyes get closed. Breath stops. So it came into experience due to intensity of the strength of feeling. To me too, the legs became stiff, lips became taut, eyes got closed and breath stopped. But with consciousness not lost, everything was breaking forth clearly. (The activity of the outer sense-organs having gone, the in-turned perception became available.)’

‘Even if this body dies, the I-consciousness will not go. The individuality-consciousness was clear. When the body is burnt and turned to ashes in the cremation ground, I will not become extinct. Because I am not the body.’

‘Now the body is inert. Insentient; I, on the other hand, am sentient. Therefore, death is to the inert body, ‘I’ am [the] indestructible conscious entity.'

‘When the body gives up its activities, and the activities of the senses are not there, the knowledge that obtains is not senses-born. That ‘flashing forth of I’ is aparoksha. [It is] self-effulgent. Not a matter of imagination.’

‘The thing that is there after death is the eternal, real entity.’

In this way, in one moment, new knowledge accrued to Venkataraman. Although these ideas were expressed sequentially, this experience was obtained by Venkataraman spontaneously as in a flash. Here is more on his death experience.

He later said that his separate identity as Venkataraman had been lost after his discovery of his true identity as the Self, thus he never called himself by any name. He received his full name Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in 1907 from Ganapati Sastri. From this time on he saw only the Self and knew that there is only in reality only the Self and all else is just appearance. The young boy left his home and made his way to the sacred mountain Arunachala, Tiruvannamalai.  He lived at the mountain for the rest of his life, from 1896 until 1950, first in temples and caves and later in Ramanasramam, the ashram which grew around him at the foothill of Arunchala  Here is a link to the complete story.

After his arrival on Arunachala he remained silent for the next 11 years and then began to answer questions put to him by his devotees, who had accompanied him in growing numbers over the years. The well-known ”Forty Verses on Reality” were written at the request of one devotee, who wanted a concise synopsis of Ramana’s teaching.

I present here Verse One:

"1. From our perception of the world there follows acceptance of a unique First Principle possessing various powers. Pictures of name and form, the person who sees, the screen on which he sees, and the light by which he sees: he himself is all of these."

This Verse One puts me in the driver's seat. I no longer can look around and ask whose fault it is or what this all means.

"Pictures of Name and Form" is a term that in the Hindu philosophy encompasses everything that we can in any way perceive, think of, intuit, sense or dream of. In other words, it encompasses everything in our field of perception, internally and externally; whether sleeping, dreaming or waking. The word “Pictures” points me to the role that images, and thus imagination has as an aspect of this power. This statement says that all this coming into appearance is a power of this First Principle.

The next power of this First Principle that is mentioned is the person who sees all this. Each of us is this particular power of the unique First Principle. We are the seeing power of the First Principle.

Then this unique First Principle possesses a power called the screen on which the person, as the seeing power, sees all of this. So beyond the first two basic elements of the world, which are all that is seen and the power that sees (powers one and two), we have now the third element, or power: the screen. The screen is a power of the unique First Principle.

We grow up believing that we see something because outside of us there exists an object that we perceive. Ramana tells us that from his point of perception he doesn't see any external objects at all, rather he perceives various powers of the one First Principle working together and complementing each other, and thus conjure up the world that we see. It is as if you take baking soda and vinegar and mix them together and observe the foam that is created. You will say: "There is foam." Another will say: "Yes, there is foam, but I recognize it as the reaction caused by the mixture of the two elements." Ramana is showing us what actually is happening when we say: "There is the world." We are seeing the interplay of various powers of the First Principle. They complement and potentiate each other.

The fourth power is the light by which the seeing power sees. So the seeing power, the person who sees, cannot see alone, but only in conjunction with the fourth power, the light by which he sees.

In this Verse One, Ramana brings our attention to the world first off (“pictures of name and form”), and leads us step by step onward. Look at the world, he says. See if you can perceive a unique First Principe at work. Here are the elements of Its powers that you can perceive: one, two, three and four. He is actually inviting us to ponder if there is anything he didn't consider in his description of that which we can directly perceive when we look at the world.

Finally, he gives the unique First Principle an identity:

It is all the "names and forms" - It is everything that we conventionally think of as "the world".

It is the person who sees, which is you and me.

It is that by which we see - Ramana calls it "the screen" and he gives me the sense of a plasma-like substance that forms itself into every shape that this First Principle conjures up. Another word for "screen" here might be "vehicle" or “carrier substance”.

It is the Light that is the energy that makes anything visible, It powers the projection of images (power one), It enlivens the person who sees (power two), It lets the screen shine and shape itself into the world (power three). And It is Its own validation as Inner Effulgence (power four).

I like to start at the Inner Effulgence, that I began to get a visceral sense of when I was at Arunachala mountain in India. I spent some time on the mountain in the first little ashram that sprang up around Ramana as a young man when he was hanging out in bliss in different caves on the mountain in silence. This little ashram is Skandashram up on Arunachala looking down on the large Siva Temple in the town of Tiruvannamalai. I went up there first thing every day to do yoga and then sit and enjoy. I even had the blessing to spend a night there when one time I reached the ashram too late in the evening to return down to town in the dark and the Hindu priest custodian let me stay on the floor inside. A very fine glow started to be noticeable inside me. I was smiling 24/7 - despite whatever things were uncomfortable (which for westerners in India is pretty often).

Putting my attention on the Inner Effulgence, I notice how It spreads into the "screen" - through Its essence everything shines out, glows and we can see the world. From there it spreads to the person, me in that case, or whomever is with me, and moves us like pneumatic machinery is moved by the gas that is pumped through it - only so very subtly, enlivening our DNA, molecular structure, etc. all the way up to our brain, nervous system, arms, legs, and speech. Then, in conjunction with our nervous systems (and finer, subtle energy centers and auras) the world of images, names and forms appears. I see this as the expression of the Love to Be that is the basic motive of the Inner Effulgence - once It leaves Its own Inner Sanctuary of just Being Bliss and becomes Consciousness - (dynamic manifest consciousness, as Nisargadatta calls it).

This short passage by Nisargadatta also sheds some light on this dynamic:

"The totality of the perceived is what you call matter. The totality of all perceivers is what you call the universal mind. The identity of the two, manifesting itself as perceptibility and perceiving, harmony and intelligence, loveliness and loving, reasserts itself eternally."

“He himself is all of these” are the last words of Verse One.

When I begin to enter into this quality of seeing the world around me, all others and also myself as integral parts of One Being, Peace is near.

Related articles

• It is named 'ego' (placelore.typepad.com)
• Q & A with Dr. Robert Saltzman #2 (nondualityamerica.wordpress.com)
• Imagine World Peace (professionsforpeace.com)
• Rainbow Luck (rarasaur.wordpress.com)
• Surrender to Peace (everydaygurus.com)

Inner Effulgence

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Into Thin Air

Artwork Images Copyright Dave Goldman

Into Thin Air

We interface into this world out of nothing

Like a hand into the glove

We fit inside it like we were made for it

Made of it and we are but

We come from somewhere else

That is not this world

It is thin

And this world is thick

It is light and this world is heavy

It is of nothing and here everywhere there is something

What a longing to be so thin thinner than the air

Or the breath or thoughts or even thinner than light

He vanished into thin air and he came out of it again

In the morning after waking up out of it

He is now in the thick of it again

Up from a deep deep well at the bottom of nothing

He came up up up up up until he was in it again

Like the hand in the glove

Only the glove is the whole world

And it feels really does feel like he is it

This thickness dense and full of always something

Nowhere empty but he knows empty so somewhere empty is also

He slides into the in-between of the everywhere-something

Letting himself become thin very very thin

Like the finest sheet of nano-film

To slip into the in-between of all of this

Thin fine finest very slight and subtle most subtle hardly noticed

And so so so smooth silky infinitely delicate

Any thought disrupts its space in-between thoughts

Here is the birthplace and the peaceful dwelling of his in-dweller

So peaceful untouched never been touched and so pure

Pure beingness without being this or that

My salvation my sustenance

My essence

How can I forget Thee?

12/2/12

Leonardo da Vinci

Eye for detail – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Photograph: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis

Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest

Every part is disposed to unite with the whole, that it may thereby escape from its own incompleteness.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything...

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

source: http://gocreate.com/quotamaze/qldv.shtml

Quench All Fears Completely

What can I know that is not of me – not connected to me as is my own nose? All that I know and all that I can know are variations of my own reality. What, then, is there to fear? Myself. Only the delusion that there be something apart from my reality causes me to fear. Once seen, this view of reality quenches all fears completely.

Here is my meditation of today. The first verse by Ramana from his “Forty Verses on Reality”:

1. From our perception of the world there follows acceptance of a unique First Principle possessing various powers. Pictures of name and form, the person who sees, the screen on which he sees, and the light by which he sees: he himself is all of these.

(for those interested in more: http://www.satramana.org/html/forty_verses_on_reality.htm

Krishnamurti: Passion Without Motive – What is Love Part Two

Krishnamurti: Passion Without Motive – What is Love Part Two

So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children—do you?—you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple.

But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity.

So if you eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower, which man always hungers after.

If you have not got love—not just in little drops but in abundance—if you are not filled with it, the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love?

Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, “I will practice love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practice being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others”?

Do you mean that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out the window. By practicing some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of nonviolence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building, or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love it.

Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will—improve society, feed the poor—you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind.

But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

So we reach the point: Can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader—come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive—passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can only come into being when there is total self-abandonment.

A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it—to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many.

Like a flower that has a perfume, you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes the trouble to breath it deeply and to look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and, therefore, it is sharing with everybody.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world, which is not innocent.

To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict.

You may ask, “If I find such love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.” When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore, no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time—which means going beyond sorrow—is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love.

But you don’t know how to come upon this extraordinary fount, so what do you do? If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no center at all. Then there is love.

(Freedom from the Known in Total Freedom –The Essential Krishnamurti p.131 ff.)

Krishnamurti: What is Love?

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What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love—every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love.

. . .

So to go into the question of what love is we must first free it from the encrustation of centuries, put away all ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love—not how to express it to another but what it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society, what my parents and friends, what every person and every book, has said about it because I want to find out for myself what it is.

Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind. There have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or another according to what I like or enjoy at the moment—so shouldn’t I, in order to understand it, free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices?  I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, “First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.”

. . .

The government says go and kill for the love of your country. Is that love? Religion says give up sex for the love of God. Is that love? Is love desire? Don’t say no. For most of us it is desire with pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through sexual attachment and fulfillment.

I am not against sex, but see what is involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self.

You say you love your wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don’t like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence.  

So what you are really saying is, “As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don’t I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don’t like you.”So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. 

But if you live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps—perhaps—you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas is you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other but from oneself.

This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another—in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt; and so long as there is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire.

Love is not the product of thought, which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active, present. It is not “I will love” or "I have loved.” If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect not disrespect.

Do you know what it really means to love somebody, to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing—don’t you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.

(excerpt from Freedom from the Known, in Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti, p.126 ff.)

image source: unknown

Behind the Words

Seeing

I am writing words and behind the words is what I wish to say.

This life we are living as awareness alive as itself.

Can I release my words, concepts, my hold on reality?

There is a seeing happening, I call it consciousness.

It is a flow, a swirling, a curling, a joining and separating ~

All within this movement and seeing is what it is.

The wall, the man, the jar, the cat, the rock, the clock

All seeing is what it is.

As it sees it becomes and yet it moves not.

Such a power in this Organ of Perception! 
It sees and in that is creating.

Now it sees thinking, dreaming, wishing, wanting, learning 
and So It Is.

Make it so, Number One, 
and the One is you, is me, is we.

We are the Seeing “I”, the Self is the Seeing Eye.

We are That.

Let’s start enjoying our Self!

Our time is come and it is NOW without end.

I greet each of You as my Self 
and Love is our language behind the words.

October 22, 2012

The Uniqueness of My Life and the Power of Non-Duality

The two come together: the uniqueness of my life and the power of non-duality.

The uniqueness of my life is the present moment. Leaving all residue of a previous movement of my life’s energy in the form of memory and conditioning, I find myself afresh in this NOW.

In a dark room I light a match and swirl my outstretched arm in front of me describing a large circle with the flame of the match. The fact is the burning wood of the match. It is at one single point of the circle at any given time. However, the eye sees a complete circle of fire. One could say that the circle is an illusion, created by the eye holding on to the impression of the path of the flame through space in the dark room.

The comment on my blog was written, sent and read by me days ago, however it is still alive in my perception because I am remembering it. When I let go of that memory, or clearly see it as a past movement of my energy, it is gone and my perception is free of it.

Afresh in the NOW my eyes take in with a sense of newness, never before seen, a unique view, a unique seeing. The seeing energy is pristine, free of the past and it feels its own movement of seeing with total clarity.

Non-duality is the power of absolute disintegration of all beliefs, concepts, ideas and all frames of reference. I get a taste of it every now and then and it is magnificent. Tuning in to and aligning with the vibration of non-duality anchors my existence in non-existence. Thus a field of vastness and emptiness is created, within which the energy of seeing comes into relation to the seen as an extension of itself. There is no interference by anything that is not itself.

The seeing light of consciousness takes in all that appears in its light. This light stems from the Inner Effulgence, which can also be called the Inner Sun. It is immobile and groundless. It exists out of Itself and is beyond all states and attributes. When all Its reflections and refractions are reduced to their essential substance, It is our true nature and It is no-thing.

The power of non-duality is the power of this one fact that reduces all forms (which make up what we call the “world”) to naught, from which they stem. When I attune myself more and more clearly to this felt sense of non-duality, all attachments, illusions and fondly cherished concepts of all kinds begin to dissolve under my feet. I am left in the formless, or rather, in that which IS before form, which is present while form is maintained and also after its dissolution. While my mind says that it gives up trying to follow, another part of me knows what I mean.

This felt sense of non-duality is the ground upon which I experience the uniqueness of my life, for out of nothing something appears for the first time, afresh out of the void, and it is untainted by anything that may have appeared “previously”. The overlay, or superimposition of old impressions, judgments, concepts and frames of reference onto what appears fresh is a function of my memory and the conditioned movements of my mind as it holds on to the “known” – the past.

Attuning myself to the power of non-duality coming together with the uniqueness of my life entails a vigilance towards the conditioned movement of my mind in order to ensure a radical departure from the old paradigm and create the space needed for the new paradigm to flower.

A relevant story: A newlywed came to his friend after the wedding night. “Can you imagine what happened? A cat snuck into the room and was yowling all night, so how could romance happen?” His friend said he would do him a favor, so he switched places with him that night.

The next morning the two meet and the groom asks how it went. “Wonderful! You are such a lucky man! Such a loving and affectionate wife you have!” “And the cat?” asked the groom. “Oh, that – off with his head!” replied the friend.

Please, dear cat friends, of which I am a great one – no harm was done to any living creature, and the story makes sense if you substitute the word “conditioned thinking” for “cat”, and the word “mastery of your life” for “wife”.

The Anatomy of Silence – Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti: Isn't it important for you to find out for yourself whether you are asking for the more, or whether you are trying to see exactly what is? The two are incompatible. If you can put aside the more, then we are concerned only with what is when the mind is silent.

What actually takes place when the mind is really quiet? That is the real question, isn't it – not what is transcendental or what lies beyond?

Questioner: What lies beyond is my question.

K: What lies beyond can be found only if the mind is still. There may be something or there may be nothing at all.

So the only thing that is important is for the mind to be still. Again, if you are concerned with what lies beyond, then you are not looking at what the state of actual stillness is. If stillness to you is only a door to that which lies beyond, then you are not concerned with that door, whereas what is important is the very door itself, the stillness itself.

Therefore you cannot ask what lies beyond. The only thing that is important is for the mind to be still. Then what takes place? That is all we are concerned with, not with what lies beyond.

Q: You are right. The silence has no importance to me except as a doorway.

K: How do you know it is a doorway and not the thing itself? The means is the end, they are not two separate things. Silence is the only fact, not what you discover through it. Let us remain with the fact and see what that fact is.

It is of great importance, perhaps of the greatest importance, that this silence be silence in itself and not something induced as a means to an end, not something induced through drugs, discipline, or the repetition of words.

Q: The silence comes of its own, without a motive and without a cause.

K: But you are using it as a means.

Q: No, I have known silence and I see that nothing happens.

K: That is the whole point. There is no other fact but silence which has not been invited, induced, sought after, but which is the natural outcome of observation and of understanding oneself and the world about one.

In this there has been no motive which has brought silence. If there is any shadow or suspicion of a motive, then that silence is directed and deliberate, so it is not silence at all.

If you can honestly say that that silence is free, then what actually takes place in that silence is our only concern. What is the quality and the texture of that silence? Is it superficial, passing, measurable  Are you aware of it after it is over, or during the silence? If you are aware that you have been silent, then it is only a memory, and therefore dead.

If you are aware of the silence while it is happening, then is it silence? If there is no observer – that is, no bundle of memories – then is it silence? Is it something intermittent that comes and goes according to your body chemistry? Does it come when you are alone, or with people, or when you are trying to meditate?

What we are trying to find out is the nature of this silence. Is it rich of poor? I don’t mean rich with experience, or poor because uneducated. Is it full or shallow? Is it innocent or put together?

A mind can look at a fact and not see the beauty, the depth, the quality of that fact. Is it possible to observe silence without the observer? When there is silence, there is silence and nothing else. Then in that silence what takes place? Is this what you are asking?

Q: Yes.

K: Is there an observation of silence by silence in silence?

Q: That’s a new question.

K: It is not a new question if you have been following. The whole brain, the mind, the feelings, the body, everything is quiet. Can this quietness, stillness, look at itself, not as an observer who is still?

Can the totality of this silence watch its own totality? 

The silence becomes aware of itself – in this there is no division between an observer and an observed. That is the main point. The silence does not use itself to discover something beyond itself. There is only that silence. Now see what happens.

(Excerpt from "Freedom, Love, and Action" J. Krishnamurti, p. 45 ff)

Svarupa

I Could Get Used to This…

Gaia

I had one of those exceptional dreams last night – the kind that when you “wake up” you realize that the dream was a real as where you are now.

And hearing the view recently that the dream quality of experience is how emotions manifest into a dimension of their own (some call it the 4^th dimension) – I let my senses linger with this particular dream vision/experience a few times during this day so as to let the quality solidify itself more deeply into the cells of my psycho-somatic organism.

Also, I was aware upon “waking” that the quality of this dream experience had begun to root itself into my being as a new quality of perception. I refer now to a passage in the Hathor’s “Aethos” message that sheds light on my experience, as I have been connecting more and more with the realm of the Aethos through their sound meditation in the last two days:

“It is important to realize that non-dual states of consciousness are relative to the perceiver. Thus, if you experience non-duality through your heart chakra, you may very well experience impersonal love—a deep sense of cosmic connection.

Indeed, in this state of union between non-duality and the heart, you become infatuated, and for all intents and purposes, you fall in love with the cosmos. And in that paradox of the heart, you become the Beloved, and everything you see and witness is the Beloved as well.

While this is a beautiful state of consciousness, it is not pure non-duality. As you move upward into the higher chakras experiences of non-duality change. When you reside in the crown chakra, non-duality is experienced in its pure form—pure consciousness aware of itself. There is no sense of a personal self in these higher dimensions of non-duality.

The paradox of creation is that it unfolds from the purest states of non-duality into the most polarized states of existence. Thus, in your consciousness are the two seemingly conflicting states of relative existence (i.e., your embodied life in time and space) and non-dual states of consciousness in which all polarities and conflicts disappear.

Our perspective, as mentioned earlier, is that non-dual states of consciousness are cantilevers to greater mastery of creation and not the end point or the goal of evolution.”

(full message: https://heartflow2012.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/the-aethos-and-non-dual-states-of-consciousness/)

Enough said. Now to the dream vision.

photo credit: http://www.angelichuman.com/

The Dream

Across from me sat two extraordinarily beautiful women with long blond hair. They were both smiling ecstatically to each other and just in general. One of them was kissing the other one repeatedly on the side of her head on her long fine hair and then up towards her forehead along the side of her face. In the dream the thought flashed “Are they lesbian?” but immediately it was clear that this was a show of affection and love that was much grander than their physical gender.

It was clear that one of the women was going to introduce me to the other one, whom I had not met yet. They both turned towards me and flooded me with their light like a dense shower of gold/white energy. Then the one I had not met before came closer and I drew her close with my hands on her waist, (however our upper bodies did not touch) and she brought her head close to the side of mine and we embraced such for some while (eternity) letting our light mingle and merge and surge together. She then spoke in a low voice in my ear: “I could get used to this!”

Then the words entered my consciousness, referring to all three of us: “We are angels.”

photo credit: http://wanderinggaia.com

The Message for Me

My sense of the underlying emotional reality of this experience is that this is the time and place for each of us to express that sense of “infatuation with the cosmos” and recall that effusive love for all experiences and the undying optimism that we all have felt at some point ~ maybe as a small child or in some particular situation. 

We are called upon to discard whatever might taint that expression - much as we discard the refuse we have swept up and don’t examine it again before we dump it into the Big Bin. This is to be in the pristine innocence that is our birthright and that grounds our alignment with the one Great Mystery that moves as the beating heart, the breath, the words and actions of each of us. 

The words “We are angels” is for me the expression that each of us, right here where we are on the ground of Gaia, our Mother Earth, is indeed a benevolent being of light as we have been told the angels are. We need only re-member our true nature and allow its active expression in our life day to day and moment to moment.

~ Om Tat Sat ~

photo credit: http://www.myangeliclife.com