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.