Friday, January 31, 2020

Ram Dass

The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. What we go from is being born into our humanity, sleep walking for a long time, until we awaken and start to taste our divinity. And then want to finally get free. We see as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.



Thursday, January 30, 2020

Ramesh S Balsekar

“The sense of duality, which is a barrier to true love, must prevail so long as the apperception of Truth has not occurred. Once individuality is surrendered, there is only total Love.”





Don Miguel Ruiz

You are Life passing through your body, passing through your mind, passing through your soul. Once you find that out, not with logic, not with the intellect, but because you can feel that Life, you find out that you are the force that makes the flowers open and close, that makes the hummingbird fly from flower to flower. You find out that you are in every tree, and you are in every animal, vegetable, and rock.

You are that force that moves the wind and breathes through your body. The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that force, and that is what you are. You are Life.


Ramana Maharshi

Leave it to God. Surrender unreservedly. Either surrender because you admit your inability and require a higher power to help you, or investigate the cause of misery by going to the source and merging into the Self. Either way you will be free.

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Paramahansa Yogananda

“To know God, you must experience Him within your own consciousness. The best way to attain this realization is to practice the scientific methods discovered and used with proven success by the ancient rishis and yogis of India.”

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Adi Shankara

Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognize your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

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Srila Vyasadeva


“I offer my respectful obeisances unto Srila Vyasadeva, the incarnation of Vasudeva who compiled the Vedic scriptures. The pure devotees drink up the nectarean transcendental knowledge dropping from the lotuslike mouth of the Lord.”~Srimad Bhagavatam 2.4.24

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Huston Smith, The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions


“Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad”
                                                                                 
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Milarepa of Tibet

"I have understood this body of mine to be the product of ignorance, composed of flesh and blood and lit up by the perceptive power of consciousness. To those fortunate ones who long for emancipation it may be the great vessel by which they may procure Freedom. But to the unfortunates who only sin, it may be the guide to lower and miserable states of existence. This our life is the boundary mark whence one may take an upward or downward path. Our present time is a most precious time, wherein each of us must decide, in one way or other, for lasting good or lasting ill." 

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Happy Datta Jayanti

Lord Shree Dattatreya is regarded as an aspect of the divine Trinity or Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh; Creator, Preserver and Destroyer respectively. Thus creative, preservative and disintegrating powers are visible in the personality of Lord Dattatreya. The name “Dattatreya” is derived from two Sanskrit words, Datta means given and Atreya refers to Rishi Atri father of Lord Datta. Lord Dattatreya is considered to be an avatar of Suprem Lord and honored as the Adi-Guru and teacher of Yoga.

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Sant Mat

Many Sants like Sant Tulsi Das, Goswami Lakshminath Paramhans, Sant Kabir, Sahib Surdas Ji, Sant Tukaram Ji, and Shri Maharshi Mehi unanimously pronounce that all human beings — irrespective of gender, age, occupation, and race — have an equal right to follow the inner path to the Divine. This view is verifiable by the fact that many Sants and sages, including Sant Kabir, Sant Ravidas, Sant Garibdas were born in ‘lower castes’ and in the lower strata of their society. Many ancient sages like Vyasa and Narada also have unusual births. Sant Tulsidas emphasizes that physical conditions, including birth in lower caste, poverty, and a lack of bodily beauty do not inhibit the progress of the soul. Sants declare that we are all children of one Supreme Being, God. This Divine Being is all compassionate and generous and does not have preference for any persons on the basis of their birth, class, or gender. However, there are certain disciplines all seekers must follow in order to tread this inner path to realize the Divine.
 
According to Maharshi Mehi, “There are a number of necessary observances required to tread the spiritual path.”
 
Observances: Complete faith in one Divine Being, determination to realize the Divine within, service to the guru, satsang (association of the Sants and the study of scriptures), and steadfast meditation. Prohibitions: Use of intoxicants, practice of adultery, lying, violence (causing suffering to other beings, eating the flesh of animals), and stealing.

The Traveler of the Inner Subtle Path, by Swami Vyasanand

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's
.

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Eckhart Tolle

Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body’s aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past.

Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.

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Swami Vivekananda

Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.


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Nisargadatta Maharsj

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth and love, intelligence and goodwill, imploring God and man — all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself — this is the inexorable law.

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Eknath Easwaran, Meditation, Part 2

The discovery that you are not the body has far-reaching consequences. For one thing, you no longer see black or brown or white people, but people with all kinds of beautifully colored jackets. You no longer identify people with their color - or their age or sex or hairstyle or any other peripheral matter like money or status. You begin to awaken to the central truth of life, that all of us are one.

Then, too, you develop the capacity to see clearly the body's needs and how to provide for them wisely. You will not be taken in, for example, by just the taste of food, or by its color, or texture, or the sound it makes . . . or the sound the advertiser makes on its behalf. If the senses set up a clamor for junk food you can say affectionately, "Sorry, friends, that's not fit for you." The senses may be disappointed at first, of course, but your body will be grateful: "He really takes good care of me!"

Please do not think this means you lose your appreciation of food. Actually, it will increase. When you can change your eating habits at will, you not only enjoy wholesome food, you have the satisfaction of taking good care of your body. All the other things we charitably call food will leave you unsatisfied.
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Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche

But if, through fundamental misperception of reality, the individual enters into the confusion of dualism, primordial consciousness, which is in fact the source of all manifestation (even of dualistic consciousness and, in fact, of all phenomena), itself becomes obscured. The individual’s deluded mind then mistakes the manifestations of its own pure, innate primordial awareness for an external reality existing separately from itself, which it endlessly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempts to manipulate, trying in vain to bring an end to the continual underlying sense of dissatisfaction and unease which is the inevitable experience of the obscuration of pure awareness. The experience of underlying dissatisfaction (or ‘dukha’ in Sanskrit) that unavoidably arises with a deluded mind, continues, no matter how ‘successful’ the individual becomes in dealing with his or her world in materialistic terms, until the individual regains the experience of the primordial state.


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C.G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga

“A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself. A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.” 

Ramana Maharshi

The appearance of water in a mirage persists after the fact that it is a mirage has dawned on us. So it is with the world. 

Though knowing it to be unreal, it continues to manifest - but we do not try to satisfy our thirst with the water of the mirage. 

As soon as one knows that it is a mirage, one gives it up as useless and does not run after it to get water.


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Rabindranath Tagore

Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment.
It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.




–Rumi


A step toward your own heart
is a step toward the Beloved.


In this house of mirrors
you see a lot of things –


Rub your eyes.
Only you exist.