December 18, 2012

"Go back to that state of pure being where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated by 'this I am' and 'that I am'.  Your burden is of false identifications - abandon them all....I used to sit for hours together with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind, and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state.  In it all disappeared - myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me.  Only peace remained and unfathomable silence." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

When we diligently follow the instructions of these sages, we ripen, we dawn, we blossom in recognition of our own Buddha-nature: "impersonal, devoid of mass, unfixed and capable of endless transformation..." (Yasutani-roshi).  In it all the fetters of our conditioned lives snap and we are free.  We realize the Absolute and witness everything as a dynamic flow between emptiness and form.  Form is just illusion and emptiness just a name we slap onto what we cannot define, what we can only feel.  In the end manifestation and the unmanifest, realization and potential, rise and fall like swells on the surface of an ocean and all is just as it is, unnamed, unstained, complete and perfect.   

December 5, 2012

"There are those...who simply cannot believe in the reality of such a world.  No matter how often they are taught that the relative world of distinction and opposites to which they cling is illusory, the product of their mistaken views, they cannot but believe otherwise.  To such people the world can only seem inherently evil, full of sin and strife and suffering, of killing and being killed, and in their despair they long to escape from it." - Yasutani-roshi

So we flee the illusory maelstrom and in doing so make "enlightenment" a goal, an attainment, an objective, yet another object born of mind.  The dog chases its tail unto exhaustion. It is then that the question "Who am I?" begins to truly resonate.  "I" can never be an object, only an undifferentiated timeless and space-less witness of everything our presumptive minds dream up. Abide as this witness and you will truly escape by accepting and merging with all that is. 

November 27, 2012

"If you could but keep in mind what you do not know, it would reveal to you its secrets." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

This is not cryptic. "What you do not know" is what we're left with after a thorough jnani housecleaning of "not this, not this."  It is consciousness without content.  It requires skillful and continuous abidance.  Once we abide there as our preeminent, primary mode of orientation and navigation, all else slips away.  The personal self melts like candle-wax beneath a flame. Reality is global and free and ultimately unqualified.    

August 3, 2012

"The real meaning is unexplainable, but experienceable....Don't concern yourself overmuch with formulations.  Pure being cannot be described." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Mind grapples with itself endlessly, creating its own tether hooks and hooking itself again and again. This is the life most of us lead, oblivious to the great peace upon which everything floats.  Pure being is an experience of emptiness prior to space and of presence absent time.

July 26, 2012

Now it is time to sit quiet
Face to face with Thee,
And to sing dedication of life
In this silent and overflowing leisure. - Tagore

July 21, 2012

"Freedom unlimited and conscious." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

July 10, 2012

Is a gnani subject to emotion?

"Take anger.  I may be furious, pacing the room up and down.  At the same time I know what I am, a center of wisdom and love, an atom of pure existence.  All subsides and the mind merges into silence...Anger came and dissolved on my remembering myself." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

With a gnani, there is no "there" there.  It's like what a scientist spouted when asked what the latest discovery of the Higgs-boson-god-particle thingamajig at the heart of everything with mass means.  He seemed stumped at first, but then perked up with "now we can move on to whatever is next!"  The Heart dances ever on just out of reach of the mind.

"I have no shape, nor name.  It is attachment to a name and shape that breeds fear." - N.M.

Money is not the root of all evil.  Well before money is attachment to name and shape.  Would that we could have some early education along these lines.  Attachment places a wet kiss upon the glass of a hall of mirrors.

"...for when a thing touches Nothing, it becomes nothing.  It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it, disappears." - N.M.

This is to fall out of time and space, out of all fabrications born of the body-mind, all of it drawn out like air from a vacuum.