Authentic transcendence

~Mooji

Sometimes I meet beings who say they have realised the Self. They believe or claim that they know and understand the Truth. They say they sense it, feel it and are convinced it is what they are and so on. However, it is often sensed here that the mind takes delivery for this understanding and purchases further life as the egoic ‘achiever’ of ultimate Truth. Consequently, the realisation does not get baptised in the Heart and a real chance of freedom gradually fades away. 

Therefore, such beings can retain their sense of personhood, unknowingly. Some even edit my words to fit in with their personal inclinations, projections and spiritual fantasies, but I want to burn all of this to the ground so that they attain true freedom.

What we speak about here is authentic transcendence, you see? One has to overcome the hypnosis of personal conditioning. They have to be free from the psychological influence of the mind. I don’t mean that you should ‘stop’ your mind but rather, focus on the witness of mind. Therefore, it has to be an authentic transcendence, not a Hollywood awakening.

Sometimes I say I don’t want or feel for your company. You indulge too much mental and psychological noise. There are too many relationships going on inside your mind. Your representations of yourself mentally, emotionally, psychically are not authentic expressions of the Self. Such a localised identity is not enough at this level of understanding, insight or, we could say, Self-knowledge.

So what has to happen?
You have to be That.
How are you going to be That?

The ‘you’ who you take yourself to be cannot be That. Being That is not a verb, an action you will take. It is an awakening, a recognition so profound that it changes your mind’s orientation immediately and irreversibly. As real understanding takes over, it will be a life changing experience. It is as though I am telling you to do something ‘you’, as ego, cannot do.

Your mind cannot do it, but it is required of you to recognise, acknowledge and be That which you are. You have to be open to expose what is not in service to your true nature. It is the highest aspect of my work, guidance or teaching and it is more like an energetic correspondence, not only a verbal one. 

Let the untrue be exposed and thoroughly burned. Sometimes the way into that completeness, that recognition, is that whatever is untrue is rejected as it is recognised as false, either by you or by me. 

And you may be thinking, ‘Oh my god, I really thought I was getting somewhere! This is so discouraging’… and so your world feels like it is turned upside down. Do not be disheartened, instead keep an attitude of gratitude. 

It is your good fortune that your ‘world’ is being crushed. I myself don’t have a world. Let yours be upside down so that what is true in you can reveal itself and begin unfolding in its authentic expression as true life and being. 

Grace is helping you in every way. Trust it. Say, “Yes, I am here, remove this sense of separation, this arrogance of separateness and merge me in you, oh God, oh Universe Being, Self, Truth, Life. Don’t give me any technique. Absorb me. Replace me with You.” And finally: Trust your master.

[Monte Sahaja, 4th of August 2013]

Karma and Karmic Traces

~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche 

The culture in which we live conditions us, but we carry the seeds of conditioning with us wherever we go. Everything that bothers us is actually in our mind. We blame our unhappiness on the environment, our situation, and believe that if we could change our circumstances we would be happy. But the situation in which we find ourselves is only the secondary cause of our suffering. The primary cause is innate ignorance and the resulting desire for things to be other than they are.

Perhaps we decide to escape the stresses of the city by moving to the ocean or the mountains. Or we may leave the isolation and difficulties of the country for the excitement of the city. The change can be nice because the secondary causes are altered and contentment may be found. But only for a short while. The root of our discontent moves with us to our new home, and from it grow new dissatisfactions. Soon we are once again caught up in the turmoil of hope and fear.

Or we may think that if we just had more money, or a better partner, or a better body or job or education, we would be happy. But we know this is not true. The rich are not free from suffering, a new partner will dissatisfy us in some way, the body will age, the new job will grow less interesting, and so on. When we think the solution to our unhappiness can be found in the external world, our desires can only be temporarily sated. Not understanding this, we are tossed this way and that by the winds of desire, ever restless and dissatisfied. We are governed by our karma and continually plant the seeds of future karmic harvest. Not only does this mode of action distract us from the spiritual path, but it also prevents us from finding satisfaction and happiness in our daily life. As long as we identify with the grasping and aversion of the moving mind, we produce the negative emotions that are born in the gap between what is and what we want. Actions generated from these emotions, which include nearly all actions taken in our ordinary lives, leave karmic traces.

Karma means action. Karmic traces are the results of actions, which remain in the mental consciousness and influence our future. We can partially understand karmic traces if we think of them as what in the West are called tendencies in the unconscious. They are inclinations, patterns of internal and external behavior, ingrained reactions, habitual conceptualizations. They dictate our emotional reactions to situations and our intellectual understandings as well as our characteristic emotional habits and intellectual rigidities. They create and condition every response we normally have to every element of our experience. This is an example of karmic traces on a gross level, though the same dynamic is at work in even the subtlest and most pervasive levels of experience: A man grows up in a home in which there is a lot of fighting. Then, perhaps thirty or forty years after leaving home, he is walking down a street and passes a house in which people are arguing with one another. That night he has a dream in which he is fighting with his wife or partner. When he wakes in the morning he feels aggrieved and withdrawn. This is noticed by his partner who reacts to the mood, which further irritates him.

Christ, Consciousness and Love

~Richard Rohr

You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
1 Corinthians 3:22-23

We are all the Body of Christ, and even more so in our togetherness (1 Corinthians 12:12ff). Now that is quite Scriptural, in many sacred texts, but perhaps it just seems too good to be true for most Christians: “There is only Christ, he is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11). The ego resists such inclusivity, because the ego is that part of you which wants to be special, separate, and superior instead. The ego (“flesh” for Paul) resists any change, vulnerability, and union with anything else.

The Risen Christ is our icon of God’s universal presence, now unlimited by space or time. This is why the Resurrection stories always show Jesus’ body to be both here and there, passing through doors, visible and not visible, white light itself, everywhere and nowhere, as it were. He cannot be one object because he is in all objects (“panentheism”).

Even to Mary Magdalene he says, “Do not cling to me” (John 20:17). Why? Because you can’t! He is no longer bound by this one body. Christ is consciousness itself pervading all things—waiting and hoping for its inner yes!

[Adapted from The Cosmic Christ, CD, MP3]


The Crack in Everything

Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem,” states in the refrain: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” It sounds a lot like Paul’s statement about carrying “the treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:7). These are both much more poetic ways of naming what we unfortunately called “original sin”—a poor choice of words because the word sin implies fault and culpability, and that is precisely not the point! Original sin was trying to warn us that the flaw at the heart of all reality is nothing we did personally, but that there is simply “a crack in everything” and so we should not be surprised when it shows itself in us or in everything else. This has the power to keep us patient, humble, and less judgmental. (One wonders if this does not also make the point that poetry and music are a better way to teach spiritual things than mental concepts.)

The deep intuitions of most church doctrines are invariably profound and correct, but they are still expressed in mechanical and literal language that everybody adores, stumbles over, denies, or fights. Hold on for a while until you get to the real meaning, which is far more than the literal meaning! That allows you to creatively both understand and critique things—without becoming oppositional, hateful, arrogant, and bitter yourself. Some call this “appreciative inquiry” and it has an entirely different tone that does not invite or create “the equal and opposite reaction” of physics. The opposite of contemplation is not action; it is reaction. Much of the “inconsistent ethic of life,” in my opinion, is based on ideological reactions and groupthink, not humble discernment of how darkness hides and “how the light gets in” to almost everything. I hope I do not shock you, but it is really possible to have very “ugly morality” and sometimes rather “beautiful immorality.” Please think and pray about that.

[Adapted from Spiral of Violence: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. CD, MP3]

In the World But Not of It

~A.H. Almaas

There is a Sufi saying, "to be in the world but not of it." This phrase can have many meanings. The meaning depends on the situation and on your own development and capacity for understanding. To be "in the world but not of it" is a matter of orientation. I will talk about some of the meanings of this phrase so you'll have a better understanding of what we are doing here.

When a baby is born, it is pretty much all essence, or pure being. Its essence is not, of course, the same as the essence of a developed or realized adult. It is a baby's essence--nondifferentiated, all in a big bundle. As the child grows, the personality starts developing as a result of interactions with the environment and especially with the parents. Since most parents are identified with their personalities and not with their essence, they do not recognize or encourage the essence of the child. So, after a few years, the essence is in fact forgotten, and instead of essence, personality develops. Essence is replaced with various identifications. The child identifies with one or the other parent, this or that experience, and with all kinds of notions about itself. As the child grows up, these identifications, experiences and notions become consolidated and structured as its personality. The child, and later, the adult, believes this structure is its true self.

However the essence was there to begin with, and is still there. Although it was not seen, not recognized and even rejected and hurt in many ways, it is still there. In order to protect itself, it has gone underground, undercover. The cover is the personality.

There is nothing bad about having a personality. You have to have one. You couldn't survive without it. However, if you take the personality to be who you truly are, then you are distorting reality , because you are not your personality. The personality is composed of experiences of the past, of ideas, of notions, of identifications. You have the potential to develop a real individuality, the personal essence, which is different from the personality that covers the loss of the essence. But this potential is usually taken over by what we call our ego, our own acquired sense of identity.

If a person believes himself to be the ego, the identifications, ideas and past experiences, then he is said to be "not in the world, but of it." He is not aware of who he really is, of his essence. This is difficult to understand unless we are aware of our own essence at least some of the time.

So the ego, or the sense of ego identity, takes the place of what we call the real identity; and the personality as a whole takes the place of essence. The personality is a substitute, an imposter. However, the world is just the world. It is the same for both essence and personality. What exists, exists. But the way the world is seen is different. A person who is "not in the world, but of it," is oriented toward the personality instead of toward essence.

[From: Diamond Heart, Book One]

Ignorance

~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

All of our experience, including dream, arises from ignorance. This is a rather startling statement to make in the West, so first let us understand what is meant by ignorance (ma-rigpa). The Tibetan tradition distinguishes between two kinds of ignorance: innate ignorance and cultural ignorance. Innate ignorance is the basis of samsara, and the defining characteristic of ordinary beings. It is ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of the world, and it results in entanglement with the delusions of the dualistic mind.

Dualism reifies polarities and dichotomies. It divides the seamless unity of experience into this and that, right and wrong, you and me. Based on these conceptual divisions, we develop preferences that manifest as grasping and aversion, the habitual responses that make up most of what we identify as ourselves. We want this, not that; believe in this, not that; respect this and disdain that. We want pleasure, comfort, wealth, and fame, and try to escape from pain, poverty, shame, and discomfort. We want these things for ourselves and those we love, and do not care about others. We want an experience different from the one we are having, or we want to hold on to an experience and avoid the inevitable changes that will lead to its cessation.

There is a second kind of ignorance that is culturally conditioned. It comes about as desires and aversions become institutionalized in a culture and codified into value systems. For example, in India, Hindus believe that it is wrong to eat cows but proper to eat pigs. Moslems believe that it is appropriate to eat beef but they are prohibited from eating pork. Tibetans eat both. Who is right? The Hindu thinks the Hindus are right, the Moslem thinks the Moslems are right, and the Tibetan thinks the Tibetans are right. The differing beliefs arise from the biases and beliefs that are part of the culture - not from fundamental wisdom.

Another example can be found in the internal conflicts of philosophy. There are many philosophical systems that are defined by their disagreement with one another on fine points. Even though the systems themselves are developed with the intention to lead beings to wisdom, they produce ignorance in that their followers cling to a dualistic understanding of reality. This is unavoidable in any conceptual system because the conceptual mind itself is a manifestation of ignorance.

Cultural ignorance is developed and preserved in traditions. It pervades every custom, opinion, set of values, and body of knowledge. Both individuals and cultures accept these preferences as so fundamental that they are taken to be common sense or divine law. We grow up attaching ourselves to various beliefs, to a political party, a medical system, a religion, an opinion about how things should be. We pass through elementary school, high school, and maybe college, and in one sense every diploma is an award for developing a more sophisticated ignorance. Education reinforces the habit of seeing the world through a certain lens. We can become an expert in an erroneous view, become very precise in our understanding, and relate to other experts. This can be the case also in philosophy, in which one learns detailed intellectual systems and develops the mind into a sharp instrument of inquiry. But until innate ignorance is penetrated, one is merely developing an acquired bias, not fundamental wisdom.

[From: Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep]  

Your timeless and immutable Self

In between two thoughts, what is there?
You cannot think two thoughts at the same time.
Try it and see. It cannot be done.
One has to stop before another one starts.
In between the stop of one thought and the start of another, what is there?
You are there!
But this you is not a person.
It is the great emptiness, the womb and source of the universe.

Awaken to your timeless and immutable Self.

~Mooji

Religionless Christianity

~Richard Rohr

Listen carefully to the many examples, parables, and metaphors used by Jesus. You will notice that they are more nature-based, lifestyle-based, relationship-based—much more so than based on any concepts of philosophy, academia, or churchiness. He says things like “Look at the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:28) and “Observe the ravens” (Luke 12:24); he speaks of a woman looking for a coin, and a father running after his son. He does not talk about the candlesticks, priestly vestments, or what was later named “orthodoxy,” in fact he warns against such “righteousness.” Certainly in the three Synoptic Gospels there is no sense Jesus is walking around proclaiming eternal doctrines and dogmas. If so, he left an awful lot of room for misinterpretation, a contrary opinion, or even fuzzy thinking. Christian teachers must be honest here.

Jesus uses normal language that uneducated people can understand. Frankly, it is a bit disappointing. Jesus looks at things right in front of him, and talks about what’s real and what’s unreal, what lasts and what does not last at all. He often criticizes us for our lack of common sense, and lack of religious common sense: “You know how to read the face of the sky, but you cannot see the signs of the times. This is an evil and unfaithful generation” (Matthew 16:3-4). The problem seems to be that we too quickly made Jesus into “God” before we just let him be our daily teacher, lover, and friend.

[Adapted from the webcast What is the Emerging Church?]

Not a Competitive Religion 

Paul, a good Jew, quotes Deuteronomy, “The Word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (Romans 10:8), and begins with a challenge that we still need today: “Do not tell yourself that you have to bring Christ down!” (Romans 10:6). He knew that God had overcome the human-divine gap in the Christ Mystery once and for all. God is henceforth here, and not just there.

This is Christianity’s only completely unique message. Full incarnation is what distinguishes us from all other religions. This is our only real trump card, and for the most part, we have not yet played it. History, the planet—and other religions—have only suffered as a result. Incarnationalism does not put you in competition with any other religions but, in fact, allows you to see God in all things, including them! It mandates that you love and respect all others.

The mystery of the Incarnation is precisely the repositioning of God in the human and material world and not just part of that world. Common variety top-down religion often creates very passive, and even passive-dependent and passive-aggressive Christians. Certainly that is very common in my own Roman Church. Bottom-up, or incarnational, religion offers a God we can experience for ourselves and a God we can see—and must see—in everyone else. Any God on a throne does not achieve that purpose, but merely makes you fight other “thrones.”

[Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality]

Materialism

~A.H. Almaas

More than any other factor in our modern life, the dissociation of soul/self from the divine realm or Being and from the world terribly impoverishes us. The transformation of our identity from soul to self has indirectly impoverished our world; robbing us of our spiritual potential, this development left us increasingly identified with and thus dominated by the physical dimension of the self. And the more we experience ourselves as mainly physical, the more we see our world as fundamentally physical. This view of the world is in most of modern society the prevalent one: the world is simply matter. Rather than inhabiting a comprehensible but ultimately mysterious living world, we inhabit a material universe, explainable only by physical science. The world or cosmos, separate from soul and from God/Being, is only matter. It is a dead world, an inert universe waiting to be explored by our scientific reason.

For many people in the modern world, and for virtually all thought that is considered scientific, the dominant orientation is materialistic. When the soul is considered to be and experienced as a self, an objectifiable entity whose most fundamental identity is the physical body, we are bound to be materialistic, caring for material well-being, wealth and possessions, security and comfort more than inner depth and fullness.

Materialism is naturally the central philosophic position of our science, for our science is first and foremost a study of matter. Even the study of life involves the consideration of exclusively material components and physical processes. This orientation is actually a logical necessity for the separation of cosmos/world from the rest of Reality. It is clear that if we sincerely desire an amelioration of the rampant materialism of our times, we need not only to become more spiritual—namely, to regain our soul—but also to realize the unity of our Reality. And since the closest and most accessible facet for us is that of soul/self, we need to begin there.

[From Inner Journey Home]