May 1, 2012

"The unexpected and unpredictable is real" (N.M.) because it escapes the illusory web of cognition.

Love your neighbor, but fertilize your hedge.

Everything in which we move and have our being consists of consciousness, or, closer still, in being, consciousness takes on myriad forms, and among them moves the misidentified "I."

"Meditation will help you find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings.  When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share.  The rest will be done for you." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Meditation begins as a sport-fishing extravaganza, but it matures into a baitless hook in still, clear water--and the fish swim by undisturbed.  There at the intersection of being and awareness the faintest glimmer, the slightest vibration initiates the Big Bang of everything known and to be known in this moment forever.

April 26, 2012

For most of us, instinct run amok has hijacked our better nature.  Greed, especially, is a flame before which we are moths.  We ever flutter towards it, and the closer we get the more we are burned.  As Nisargadatta noted, "the state of craving for anything blocks all deeper experience."  To become content and at peace, we must first recognize the other "content," the noun, the "substance" of our sensory and cognitive experience.  Our body-mind, self-identified as "I," is not who or what we really are.  Manifestation, including our misidentified personal selves, is just a speck in the eye of the Unmanifest, and only when that eye turns its gaze upon itself will we experience true contentment and peace. 

April 25, 2012

Ultimately, we segregated and solipsistic, multi-racial and poly-ethnic human beings must transcend our divisions, come together and cooperate to survive.  This would be a huge leap in social evolution and, I fear, will require some massive cataclysm for impetus, just as on an individual scale oftentimes something traumatic moves us toward enlightenment.  The better way sees us waking up en mass to the wisdom of the sages--not the religionists--the genuine sages whose message is oftentimes mined from the distortions of religion.  Religion may be the last and deepest divide of all and, if not breached, will squelch the last hope for world unity and peace and human survival.  Can we separate the wheat from the chaff in time to save our own asses?  For those who want a head start: the Beatitudes, the Eightfold Path, Advaita Vedanta, each along the lines of bhakti, karma and jnana yoga, respectively.

"I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the picture on the cinema screen to be but light....There is only light and the light is all.  Everything else is but a picture made of light.  The picture is in the light and the light is in the picture.  Life and death, self and not-self, abandon all these ideas.  They are of no use to you." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

April 20, 2012

What we are is beyond eternal and infinite, because these are concepts and we are prior to conceptualization--or any other sifting of the primordial One.  What we are precedes emotion but resonates love.  We are always already free and pure and fecund and redolent, empty and brimming at once.  This is the open secret veiled deeply beneath layers of conditioning, foremost among them our mistaken identification with a separate and personal self.

"Be free of name and form and of the desires and fears they create, then what remains?" - Nisargadatta Maharaj

What has been, what is, what will be, all abide in this present moment.  My father is dying.  I am born.  A full-throated bird chirps from the bushes behind me.  These are not separate events but for the limiting and qualifying nature of mind, which invented time and imposed space upon the inviolate unfolding Noumenon.

"You may call it God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme Reality, but these are names given by the mind.  It is the nameless, contentless, effortless state, beyond being and not-being." - NM

"To perceive it does not need the senses; to know it does not need the mind." - NM

"All is a play in consciousness.  All divisions are illusory." - NM

On the other hand, today's paper brought me news of a 17 year-old mother who, irritated by the incessant bawling of her 7 week-old infant, poured scalding water over its head, face and body until the "skin bubbled."  The child is currently in a medically induced coma and, should it survive, faces a lifetime of torturous surgeries, not to mention the mental anguish and emotional scars.  Short of the Holocaust, that about sums up human depravity for me.  Is this just a play in consciousness?  How can searing pain be called illusory?  It can't.  Upon the level most of us live, such acts violate every shred of compassion and justice.  Even realized sages would affirm this, but from a place of greater context.  They recognize the snake eating its own tail, and more, that the snake is in fact a mirage born of a twisted length of rope.  Therein lies our elemental confusion and with it the potential for depraved behavior. 

April 12, 2012

Free will vs. determinism?  Windmills.

April 10, 2012

"If you trust me, believe when I tell you that you are the pure awareness that illumines consciousness and its infinite content.  Realize this and live accordingly.  If you do not believe me, go within, inquiring 'What am I?' or, focus your mind on 'I am', which is pure and simple being." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

I am not so trusting.  Most of us act with the promise of firsthand experience, so for us it is suggested we follow the path of self-inquiry.  At first, distractions of the usual illusory sort weigh heavily.  The mind is a wild mash of heavy seas.  Two half hours per day may be all we can manage for many years, if that.  With persistence, however, focus upon the barest sense of 'I am' slowly becomes the default, "always on" state to which we return from distraction like a rubber band snaps to its original shape.  This 'I am' is shapeless, without content, without edge or border or center.  Abiding here requires effortlessness and complete surrender of any personal sense of self.  From there it's just a matter of ripening.

April 9, 2012

Skin, sense, mind only apparently separate us from the One.  Realization, like gravity, is constant and active regardless of cognizance, while awakening is of a moment.  Liberation arises from dissolution of "I am," when the  totality of the known dissolves into the immensity of the unknown.

"Deal with the causes of obscuration, not with the sun." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

"It's good to be the king!" - Mel Brooks

April 5, 2012

"All you can do is shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind." - NM

This is key.  Keep it there on the sense of "I am," detached and unaffected, as your true nature inexorably pulls the rug from under any sense of anything.  "I am" slowly fades until it bleaches white as the paper on which it is written.  Burn the paper.  Pulverize the ash.

"You are the Self, here and now.  Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realize that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature." - NM
  

April 4, 2012

"Turn within.  'I am' you know.  Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously.  There is no simpler and easier way." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Enlightenment is our default state.  "I am"  is like morning dew, evaporating from the moment the sun of our attention illumines it, then gone.

April 2, 2012

"I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of your attention." - Nisrgadatta Maharaj

Attention must be goaded in the right direction, like Ramakrishna's elephant, given impetus through  concentration on the naked sense of "I am" or, closer still, "am."  In time this obliterates attachment to sense or thought and, stroke by stroke, strips the painting of the body-mind to bare canvas.  Focused concentration opens into wide lens release without center or boundary.  Personal self dissolves into everything.  Everything dematerializes into emptiness, but this is a very special emptiness beyond conceptualization.  It resonates potential and shines as noumenon.  Once we get out of our own way, we instinctively recognize all of this as though emerging from a dream.