Pointing To The Moon

This is how you shall love - Adyashanti

A little backstory and context for this anecdote from Falling into Grace: Insights in the End of Suffering, by Adyashanti: He was four years into his spiritual quest--one that took him into a monastic meditate all-all-the-time route. He got to a point where he thoroughly frustrated, and was now staying at a mountain hut. "And as I sat there in that moment of utter and absolute defeat--a defeat that was so total that I didn't even feel sorry for myself--right in the middle of that moment, my heart began to flower. It was like a golden love just was being poured right into my being. It was as if I could hear everything, and it was just singing with this love.

I went out of the hut, and everything I looked at was an expression of this love, a manifestation of this love. The whole universe was nothing but this immense, infinite love, which I was being bathed in. It was then that I heard a voice--which was very odd to me, because in my spiritual life, I wasn't prone to visions or hearing voices. I didn't know where it came from, but it just said, "This is how I love you, and this is how you shall love all beings everywhere." When I heard this voice, I knew it was true. This inner voice had told me something that I'd known all along, but I could never make contact with. What I didn't know is that I'd been showered with this love my entire life, but that I was never completely open to it. This love also put down a challenge to me. It said, "This is how you shall love all things and all beings.""

Prayer as Part of a Spiritual Practice by Thich Nhat Hanh

An excerpt from the book "The Energy of Prayer: How to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice" by Thich Nhat Hanh in the subsection, Prayer as Part of a Spiritual Practice:

"Even if you don’t pray very often, and spiritual practice is not a big part of your life, you may find yourself praying for health, prosperity, and good relationships. But for those who become monks, nuns, and for others with a strong spiritual practice, there is another object of prayer. In the Buddhist chant, “The Disciple Touches the Earth in Respect,” the goal is put like this:

To go beyond the cycle of birth and death, to realize the unborn and the undying.

Of course people who have devoted their life to spiritual practice also pray for health, success, and harmony, but these things alone are not enough. As you deepen your spiritual practice, you begin to question. You may want to know clearly, Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where shall I go? After death, do I continue to exist or not? Is there any relationship between myself and Buddha, between myself and God? What is the original purpose of my being here? These are the questions, the prayers, of a dedicated spiritual practitioner.

If we are practicing, and we only pray for health, success, and good relationships, we are not yet an authentic practitioner. An authentic practitioner has to pray at a deeper level. We have to practice in such a way that in our daily life we are able to have insight into the interdependent nature of all beings. Our greatest desire as spiritual practitioners is to discover the essence of things and to be in touch with this essence. When this satisfaction is there, then whether we have very good health or poor health, we can still be happy. Whether we are successful or not successful in our work, whatever it is, we do not suffer. When our happiness is not dependent on our success or our health, we will be less likely to argue with others or make them suffer. Good relationships will be there quite naturally.

So, how is this kind of prayer different? It is different because of the level of our prayer. When we have been in touch with the ultimate dimension, with nirvana, when we have been in touch with God, then we can accept whatever happens in the here and now. We have already gone to the land of peace and joy and we do not need to suffer. Whether we have another ten years to live or five years to live makes no difference to us. At that point we have changed our way of seeing the world.

If we do not pray and deepen our spiritual practice, we suffer intensely when we don’t have what we want in the world. But when we have been in touch with the essence, the suchness of all things, then it doesn’t matter if we don’t have what we want. Before, if we were not successful in what we wanted, we thought our whole life was a failure. But when we have been in touch with the ultimate dimension, then whether our temple or our practice center burns down, whether people smear our reputation, are jealous of us, or accuse us unjustly, we can still smile and be peaceful and joyful as usual. What we thought to be success, what we thought to be the basis of our happy life, we do not need anymore. Because our happiness is already there in the ultimate dimension, it goes beyond all ideas of success and failure.

When we can see that we and all living beings are of one and the same nature, how can there be division between us? How can there be lack of harmony? We are one with God, with Buddha, so how can there be any division? The deepest desire of a practitioner is to be in touch with the ultimate dimension. Once we have been in touch with the ultimate dimension then quite naturally our health will get better, we shall be successful in our practice and our helping others, and we shall be able to form a peaceful and joyful community that lives together in harmony." - by Thich Nhat Hanh

p.s. I have a private Spiritual Circle on Google+, if you'd like to join. It's private and as interactive (or not) as we'd like it to be. It's more personal than this blog, here's a sample posting. You may join Google+ by accepting this invitation.

We realize that the heaven everyone is seeking is where we have always been. - Adyashanti

"When you have let go of all conditions - when you have let go of how you want your own awakening to be and what you want the journey to be like - you have let go of your illusion of control.  In fact, we have to be willing to lose our whole world.  That may sound romantic when you first hear it - "Oh yes, let me sign up! I'm willing to lose my whole world." But when your whole world starts to crumble, and you start to emerge from unimaginably deep states of denial, it is something altogether different.  It is something altogether more real and gritty.  It's something that some people sign up for and some people don't.  This isn't a journey about becoming something.  This is about unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves.  In the end, it's ironic.  We don't end up anywhere other than where we have always been, except that we perceive where we have always been completely differently.  We realize that the heaven everyone is seeking is where we have always been. " -- The End of Your World, by Adyashanti

I can’t tell you what it is; no one can. It’s not a thing, it’s not a concept, it’s not a place. - Jed McKenna

An Interview with Jed McKenna...

A: The truth is that enlightenment is neither remote nor unattainable. It is closer than your skin and more immediate than your next breath. If we wonder why so few seem able to find that which can never be lost, we might recall the child who was looking in the light for a coin he dropped in the dark because “the light is better over here”. 

Q: What is enlightenment?

A: No-self. Okay, what is no-self? Abiding non-dual awareness. Okay, what is—? I can’t tell you what it is; no one can. It’s not a thing, it’s not a concept, it’s not a place. There’s no explaining fire to someone who’s never seen fire; no description can do justice to the direct experience of fire."

-- from Jed McKenna's Notebook

So throw away your baggage and go forward. - Aldous Huxley

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered." - Aldous Huxley, Island

"Dynamic ocean of being, everything is constantly swirling in and out of existence..." - Jed McKenna

An exchange between Jed McKenna (pseudonym) in his book, Spiritual Warfare, and a student:

"Scoop a jar of water out of the ocean and put a lid on it, I tell them. Study it in its segregated state.Where is the ocean in that jar? Where are the tides and the currents? Pour it back into the ocean and it returns to its integrated state. The temporary entity no longer exists.

Entity? Ronald asks.

By scooping it into a jar, you've created a new entity, a sub-ocean. It's not possible to subdivide infinity, of course, but try telling that to your new entity. It has all the properties of the ocean from which you scooped it, in no way greater or lesser than any other sampling you might take, yet it bears little resemblance to its authentic oceanhood. It has an independent existence, yet as soon as you pour it back, it merges seamlessly back into the integrated whole. Where is that particular sub-ocean entity after you pour it back in? The same place it was before; everywhere and nowhere. It didn't exist before you scooped it up, but you didn't create it. It doesn't exist after you pour it back, but you didn't destroy it. So what was born when you segregated that jarful? What died when you reintegrated it?"

Love Rests in Certainty

"Love rests in certainty. Only uncertainty can be defensive. And all uncertainty is doubt about yourself." - A Course in Miracles (Chap 22, V, 3:10-12)

Love As Energy

We are distressed and pained when we see modern attempts at human collectivisation ending up, contrary to our expectations and theoretical predictions, in a lowering and an enslavement of consciousness. But so far how have we gone about the business of unification? A material situation to be defended; a new industrial field to be opened up, better conditions for a social class or less favoured nations -- those are the only and very mediocre grounds on which we so far tried to get together. There is no cause to be surprised if, in the footsteps of animal societies, we become mechanised in the very play of association. Even in the supremely intellectual activity of science (at any rate as long as it remains purely speculative and abstract) the impact of our souls only operates obliquely and indirectly. Contact is still superficial, involving the danger of yet another servitude. Love alone is capable of uniting living things in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

...all we may well need is to imagine our power of loving developing until it embraces the total of men and of the earth.

It may be said that this is the precise point at which which we are invoking the impossible. Man's capacity, it may seem, is confined to giving his affection to one human being or to very few. Beyond that radius the heart does not carry, and there is only room for cold justice and cold reason. To love all and everyone is a contradictory and false gesture which only leads in the end to loving no-one.

To that I would answer that if, as you claim, a universal love is impossible, how can we account for that irrestible instinct in our hearts which leads us towards unity whenever and in whatever direction our passions are stirred? A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music -- these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence. The 'mystics' and their commentators apart, how has psychology been able so consistently to ignore this fundamental vibration whose ring can be heard by every practised ear at the basis, or rather at the summit, or every great emotion? Resonance to the All--the keynote of pure poetry and pure religion. Once again : what does this phenomenon, which is born with thought and grows with it, reveal if not a deep accord between two realities which seek each other; the severed particle which trembles at the approach of the 'the rest'?

We are often inclined to think that we have exhaused the various natural forms of love with a man's love for his wife, his children, his friends and to a certain extent for his country. Yet precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list, the one which, under the pressure of an involuting universe, precipitates the elements one upon the other in the Whole -- cosmic affinity and hence cosmic sense. A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

-- snippets from 'Love As Energy' section in chapter, 'Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal', The Phenomenan of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin