the-mystic-garden

[the-mystic-garden]

A good reminder 😌

the point of having is giving

[the-mystic-garden]

[the-mystic-garden]

...The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong—only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action you experience.

If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign—body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on—alters the moment you decide to do anything. Decisions are signals, telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.”

[the-mystic-garden]

Enlightenment is Knowledge Itself, not knowledge of a person, a thing or an idea. Just Knowledge Itself.

Enlightenment is there when there is no imagination of the past, no imagination of the future, not even an idea of the present.

Papaji

[the-mystic-garden]

the shape of me

[the-mystic-garden]

[the-mystic-garden]

[the-mystic-garden]

“You cannot truly love others and not love yourself first. If your love for others does not begin with yourself, then it is not genuine.”  

~Anon I mus

Before you can truly love another, you must first create the sacred space to love/know yourself deeply (by healing your unhealed split mind). Genuine love is not possible without unconditioned ‘self-love’ preceding it. 

*Subscribe to Anon I mus Youtube channel @ https://www.youtube.com/user/SpirituallyAnonImus http://egoawarenessmovement.org  

[the-mystic-garden]

My key notes:

"And the mind that is seeking security can never find it."

"Life is not static..."

"....All life is movement"

"To be aware of every thought, to know from what source it springs and what is its intention-that is meditation."

Always interesting to read little tidbits and gain some perspective 😌

Not being anything is the beginning of freedom. So if you are capable of feeling, of going into this, you will find, as you become aware, that you are not free, that you are bound to very many different things, and that at the same time the mind hopes to be free. And you can see that the two are contradictory. So the mind has to investigate why it clings to anything. All this implies hard work. It is much more arduous than going to an office, than any physical labor, than all the sciences put together. Because the humble, intelligent mind is concerned with itself without being self-centered; therefore, it has to be extraordinarily alert, aware, and that means real hard work every day, every hour, every minute... This demands insistent work because freedom does not come easily. Everything impedes—your wife, your husband, your son, your neighbor, your Gods, your religions, your tradition. All these impede you, but you have created them because you want security. And the mind that is seeking security can never find it. If you have watched a little in the world, you know there is no such thing as security. The wife dies, the husband dies, the son runs away—something happens. Life is not static, though we would like to make it so. No relationship is static because all life is movement. That is a thing to be grasped, the truth to be seen, felt, not something to be argued about. Then you will see, as you begin to investigate, that it is really a process of meditation. But do not be mesmerized by that word. To be aware of every thought, to know from what source it springs and what is its intention—that is meditation. And to know the whole content of one thought reveals the whole process of the mind.⁠

⁠

⁠

J. Krishnamurti⁠

The Book of Life

[the-mystic-garden]

I have to remember to find calm within me. Despite my struggles, there is an invincible calm. An inner peace. I just have to practice letting my mind, body, and soul pause for a moment, and remember that it's there....

[the-mystic-garden]

[the-mystic-garden]

According to Bashar, "If a belief creates any fear in you, that belief is not in alignment with your True Self" - meaning that any belief which generates fear within you is not a reflection of your authentic, highest self, and should be examined and potentially released.

[the-mystic-garden]

[the-mystic-garden]

The impulse to avoid the dissatisfaction of our current experience can be followed in one of three directions:

one, outwards towards an object, substance, activity or relationship in an attempt to escape the discomfort of it;

two, inwards to the self on whose behalf the sense of lack arises; or three, towards the feeling of lack or dissatisfaction itself.

The first approach could be called the way of avoidance and is the default approach for most people. The second could be called the way of self-enquiry or investigation, and the third, the way of openness.

In the way of avoidance, the intense, painful emotion is considered unbearable and we distract ourself from it with objects, substances, activities and relationships. In this case the sense of lack, and the separate self or ego on whose behalf it arises, will remain intact, albeit temporarily masked by the distraction.

However, as soon as the object, substance, activity or relationship has passed or changed, the underlying sense of lack will resurface. In an attempt to avoid it, we may again turn away from it towards the distraction of our choice, only this time a slightly stronger dose will be required. In this way a perpetual cycle of lack, avoidance, temporary fulfilment and inevitable failure will lead eventually to despair and, often, addiction.

To illustrate the difference between the second and third approaches – the way of enquiry or investigation and the way of openness – imagine a professional boxing match. When the two boxers are at a distance of about one metre from one another, they are dangerous and in danger. In the interval between rounds, each goes to his respective corner, where he is safe.

However, during the fight itself it is not possible for either boxer to retire to his corner. So what does a boxer do if he wants respite from the intensity of the fight? He comes close to his opponent and wraps his arms around him in a ‘clinch’, thereby neutralising him. He finds safety in closeness.

The path of self-enquiry is the equivalent of the break that the boxers take between rounds. That is, in self-enquiry we increase the apparent distance between our self and our suffering. We disengage from the struggle with our emotions, trace our way back through the layers of our experience, and come to rest in and as the presence of awareness.

In reality, awareness is so utterly, intimately one with all experience that it cannot separate itself from any experience and stand at a distance from it, any more than a screen can be separated from an image. At the same time, awareness is utterly free and independent from the content of experience. So the analogy of the boxers retiring to their respective corners is simply meant to illustrate this disentanglement from the content of experience and the return to the peace of our true nature.

In other words, in the way of enquiry or investigation, we turn away from the feeling and investigate the suffering self: Who is this ‘I’ on whose behalf my suffering arises? The way of self-enquiry is, as such, an inward-facing path, in which we turn away from the unpleasant emotion and question the ‘I’ at its heart, thereby tracing our way back to our essential, irreducible being, the presence of awareness. It is often initiated, at least in the early stages, by a process of negation or discrimination, in which we discard every aspect of our experience that is not essential to us: ‘I am not this, not this, not this’. In the Western tradition it is known as the Via Negativa.

In the way of openness, we turn towards the unpleasant emotion and embrace it. This is like the clinch during the boxing match. We decrease the distance between our self and our suffering. We turn towards it. We embrace the danger, neutralising it in our welcoming presence.

In fact, we need not turn towards any afflictive emotion; it would be enough to cease turning away from it. The presence of awareness that we essentially are is already turned towards, or open without resistance to, all experience. This openness is what we are, not what we do. It does not need to be practised.

However, all psychological suffering arises because we have temporarily forgotten or overlooked that we are this resistanceless presence of awareness and, as a result, have mistaken our self for a separate self or ego. Therefore, it is legitimate to suggest to this apparently separate self or ego that it turn towards the suffering that it would normally seek to avoid.

Some courage may initially be needed as we face the discomfort of the sense of lack from which we have been in flight for much of our lives. However, by facing the sense of lack in this way we will be withholding from it the one thing that it requires for its survival, namely, our resistance to it.

By welcoming what was previously unacceptable to us we are, without necessarily realising it at first, taking our stand as the presence of awareness, and it is only a matter of time before the peace and joy that is its very nature will begin to emerge and percolate into the foreground of experience.

In the way of openness, we go deeply into the emotion itself and find at its very core the peace we previously sought by avoiding it. It is a path in which we turn towards the content of experience. It is the way of surrender, of embrace, the way of ‘yes’, the Via Positiva.

~ Rupert Spira

[the-mystic-garden]

[the-mystic-garden]

This is an interesting read (as well as the comments), and an important thing to note.

With any religion, or spiritual reading, it's always important to use your critical thinking skills.

I am really coming to appreciate how what many people refer to as "spiritual" readings of certain texts is literally just projecting whatever they want to believe on the parts of the text that seem to support their beliefs while ignoring all the parts that don't.

I need people to understand that this is bad methodology because you can convince yourself that nearly any text says nearly anything you want by reading and interpreting it this way. You're not finding objective spiritual truths, you're just bamboozling yourself.

[the-mystic-garden]