Taking the elevator to heaven

 The quest up the illusionary enlightenment mountain can be compared with a traffic analogy. You are stuck in traffic and you see the lights changing but no car is moving. You get out of the car and you go to the first floor of a nearby building and see that traffic is even stopped as far down as the second set of lights but that is as far as you can see. You take the elevator to the roof top and you are finally able to see the accident. A towing truck is already approaching so you conclude that shortly traffic should be moving again. 

It feels good to be reminded that we are “That”, but if we spend our time at the bottom of the imaginary mountain projecting into the masters, frustration will grow just like the poor guy who is caught in traffic seemingly without end. Everyone has access to the “I Am” moment here and now. There is no point in the future when the energy pull of the “I Am” is any stronger than right now, but our conditioning might be less of an interference. Looking at our self-induced interference is something we can do right now and here. 

Life as is—with all its beauty and its challenges—always encourages us to arise from the conditioned slumber. God gave us two eyes to spot life’s miracle as well as the self-induced interference along the Way.

#awakening #spirituality #mindfulness #powerofnow 

Beyond good and bad

 Prior to Awakening there are good days and there are bad days, with some normal ones in-between.

With Awakening there come the “connected” moments and the “disconnected” days, with some moments that are not registered either way in-between. Even though it doesn’t make much sense, our conditioned mind classifies the “connected” days as good and the “disconnected ones” as work in progress.

When the completion to the new mode of living is complete we may not necessarily become superhuman beings. There are still sense experiences, and some are more pleasurable than others. Even the guru has to go to the dentist now and then so to speak. What changes is that the classifications into “good” and “bad” lose all meaning. 

Draw from the “Field of Infinite Possibilities”

 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

(Mark 5:25–34)

The “Field of Infinite Possibilities” is available to all of us. It’s in our power to spot this usage of energy that Jesus talked about. Conditioned energy is much weaker than the Power of Now and once we take notice of this fact, we have already risen out of the slumber. There are always two ways to proceed, see the miracle of living on the outside or spot the interference on the inside. Either way, the workings of the “Field of Infinite Possibilities” appear.

Indifferent to pleasure and pain

 Only the man who is unmoved 

by any sensations; the wise man

indifferent to pleasure, to pain,

is fit for becoming deathless.

Bhagavad Gita 

Say we fall in love again, and after a brief and stormy romance things settle just as they were before in the relationship we outgrew. Errands have to be run; children have to be taken care of and two lives grow into one once again. 

Or take a promotion at work. After some initial excitement the job becomes routine again. Employees have to be hired, trained and let go of. Upper management becomes our new constituent. Yes, the paycheck is higher, but the work is more or less the same. If anything, the stress is probably going up with the higher pay.

Our modern brain has a very simple happiness formula proportional to the desires fulfilled. You might say a measure of unhappiness is the ratio of unfulfilled desires to the fulfilled ones. True spiritual living in contrast happens outside of the world of desires. We are content with what comes by itself!

Many spiritual seekers are lost for a while because they don’t understand that they have a foot in each world and are not totally committed to either. We have a desire to be enlightened and we seek a life full of love and outside the established responsibilities. It’s a fantasy! Everything we need and want awaits right in front of us. The desired twin flame connection is also just a relationship between two people like before and the desired light worker role will have the same annoying commitments as our current job. This does not mean that our life will not receive a big upgrade along a spiritual quest. As our vibrations change, so does the environment we attract. 

Make the orientation to the here and now complete and step out of the world of desires without repressing and without jumping on some spiritual ideals. Just look through the illusionary nature of desires. Pleasure and pain come and go. Stay in the “be content with whatever comes and goes” when it feels natural and inquire into the reasons why when it feels unnatural.

Awareness is the answer to all of our problems!

 J. Krishnamurti discovered the law of quantum physics, “the observer is the observed,” but few understand what this actually means. Our mind is a projector. The world we live in reflects what we are all about in the depth of our being. 

The Law of Attraction crowd attempts to use this insight by making this world our oyster. Material improvements and more wholesome relationships can be accomplished as long as this method is used for going inwards and letting go of all inner interferences.

Awareness is the answer to all of our problems! On the inside, using our awareness to shine light on the pain-bodies that distorted our mind perception before, and on the outside, the awareness of the world as is without getting our conditioning reflected back to us.

The observer is the observed—enjoy the beautiful view!

Don’t just do something—sit there!

 Modern society admires goal-getters. In Europe, only the toughest survived the elements during the ice age. In the New World the motto of the settlers became, “grab as much land as you can and do something constructive with it!” We may still have some admiration for Diogenes who lived in a barrel and still managed to argue with Alexander the Great, or the Indian rishis, but we also abhor homelessness. It makes us scared.

Purposeful action seemingly beats sitting on the couch, but what if that action that we consider purposeful is still recycled pain. Is Greta Thunberg a product of her cause? Was Gandhi a product of British oppression? The point is that creation does its thing, and the ones who participate in it will naturally get more limelight than the one sitting it out, but what about our spiritual evolution? The key is to become aware of our pain-body and learn to let go.

The Bhagavad Gita distinguishes three energies—dull, driven and serene. The opportunity for “tamas” is to look through the depressed energy and get moving; for “rajas”, to discover the serene energy in the action, and for “sattva”, to find enlightenment in being. We all contain all of these energies at different stages in our life. Modern man tries too hard and should not be embarrassed to sit it out sometimes.

If you see an opportunity for reform in the outside world, do something about it. If you spot a pain-body on the inside, just sit there and wrap your arms around it until you get to the bottom of it. Reform on the outside, healing on the inside—those are the cornerstones for serene living. Don’t just do something, sit there until inspiration finds you.

#spirituality #awakening #activism

Resting in the eye of the storm

 It’s early in the morning. Something seems off. Thoughts are rushing through me—a feeling of inadequacy, past regrets, worries about the future. This is unusual, typically I am always completely still in the early morning hours. A tune of lost love is humming in my head. I notice a pain-body inside. It’s not specific. It’s the cause of all the regrets, concerns and ill-feelings but it is not subject specific at all. It interrupts the free flowing of energy that I am so used to. I let it envelop me. The temperature is getting warmer. I am inside and the painful feeling stops. It’s like being in a womb, in the center of a storm. Even the humming of the sad tune is getting weaker until it stops. Complete silence, you could even say there is a feeling of well-being. It feels cozy there. I rest in this silence for ten minutes or so and come out of it refreshed. The storm has passed!

Learning and transformation along a spiritual quest

 Whether you like it or not,

whether you know it or not,

secretly, all nature seeks God

and works towards Truth.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

Before we address learning and transformation we have to ask, is there a spiritual quest? Everyone is on a spiritual quest—consciously or subconsciously. Even if we strive for power, meaningless sex and material riches, we are on a subconscious journey that is bound to demonstrate sooner or later that these things also don’t make us happy. Everyone searches for the inner Bliss.

We may call those who look for a new way to be on a conscious spiritual quest, but nobody is “better” or “worse” than the other. Our perceived identity is the interference that gives us the feeling that we are away from Home, whether it is the identity of the greedy CEO who abuses people and the environment or the spiritual seeker. Everyone is just one insight away from the realization that we are Home.

The missing step in the Home-coming is to look through the apparition into the essence of things. There is no one around after the coin has dropped! A Course in Miracles writes, “All of his miscreations can literally disappear in the ‘twinkling of an eye’ because they are merely misperceptions.” That is true. The breakthrough is a new way of seeing, but the subject-object-knowing connection disappears with it. 

Take the sea that is visible to the traveler in the desert or the rope that got mistaken to be a snake. Is the observer who was fooled before learning or transforming if even his existence was never real? Learning and transformation belongs to a lower plane of consciousness that the spiritual seeker aims to leave behind altogether. In the “body-mind-world matrix,” the “learner” aims to see the rope while realizing his own non-existence too!

The transformation is the switch from mind-centered living to heart-centered and the learning opportunity is to see through the illusions of pride, greed, lust, jealousy and anger, but be mindful of the identity of the spiritual aspirant which might be growing with every break-through. The direct path is understanding that there is no learning nor transforming; in fact, there is not even a spiritual path. We are part of That in which body, mind and the world appear.

Letting go of the story of “me”

 I had a dream the other day, I was in a soccer competition and twice managed to steal the ball from my opponents and scored, advancing to the next level each time. The rush I experienced felt familiar. I spent my youth as a soccer player and afterwards used academics and the financial industry as an outlet to compete with the best, intellectually this time around.

That’s how the notion of the “me” gets programmed. We perceive the highs as us and want to see the lows as the outlier and wish it away. The spiritual quest is the letting go of this conditioning and the insight that life’s ups and downs don’t define us. We realize that the story of “me” was not real and we are free to let go of this story altogether.

Do you know the story of the scorpion and the holy man? A passer-by sees a man rescuing a scorpion but the moment he lifts the scorpion out of the water he gets stung and drops it in agony, only to rescue it again a moment later. When the passer-by asked him what was going on, he shrugged his shoulders and said, it’s the nature of the scorpion to sting and my nature to save!

Our nature is not written in stone—or in the dna in this case—it’s something to be mindful of as it gets activated but it doesn’t define us. The dissolution of self is the realization that body, mind and world are One; the observer is the observed. Everything that life confronts us with is a stepping stone to leave the conditioning behind as long as we acknowledge its existence.

The holy man got hung up on his holiness title that’s why life put him in a painful time-loop to encourage him to let go—of the scorpion as well as his holiness. Likewise, I acknowledge my competitive conditioning but no longer feel compelled to participate in the story of “me.” Universal Consciousness is in charge. There is a time to “win” and a time to “lose”.

#spirituality #awakening #competition 

Have you still not found what you are looking for?

 You might say unhappiness is the number of unfulfilled desires divided by desires fulfilled, and that’s what humanity focuses on. Reducing the perceived unhappiness by fulfilling as many desires as possible.

“When she becomes my wife, I will be happy.”

“When I have children I will feel fulfilled.”

“I am one promotion away from happiness.”

“This house will stay with our family for generations.”

“Retirement is like riding into the sunset.”

Life doesn’t work that way—it only appears that way. A desire creates a tension in our system and its fulfillment releases happiness hormones, but the system is only at rest for a little while, then a new desire is born. In the depth of our being is a feeling of “I still haven’t found what I am looking for!”

Naturally, spirituality has the answer to the problem statement. Buddha, and many others have solved this problem for us which was nicely summarized by David Bohm in a conversation with J. Krishnamurti, “Desire is a thought producing feelings.” Spot the root cause of this thought and the game is over.

We have two areas we can tackle in order to get to the root of our never-ending discontentment. One, notice the games we play with ourselves on the thought level and two, zoom into the pain body that creates artificial desires to voice its presence. Find it, get your arms around it and let go!

You still haven’t found what you are looking for? Work on the outer as before, but dig into the inner until the realization hits, the inner is the outer, and restlessness and unhappiness can be resolved once and for all. 

Stop doing what takes “you” away from That!

 Look through the illusion!

To keep attention on your being is not to do anything.

It is to stop doing what takes you away from it.

The sense “I am” is not a practice.

It is your original knowing before thought divides the moment.

Remain with that.

Not the words “I am”—but the silent clarity they point to.

Not a mantra. Not an idea. Not a position.

Just the felt, immediate knowing that you are.

Before body. Before mind. Before identity.

This is not concentration.

It is relaxation into what is already effortlessly present.

(Emily Snow, The I Am That Needs No Effort)

I have a love-hate relationship with non-duality. Love because every word is true. The direct method is so easy—we are a manifestor of the “Field of Infinite Possibilities” as long as we manage to leave our conditioned mind outside of it. It’s an energy that flows through us. No thought comes to the surface as we allow life as is free reign.

The drawback of the direct method is that it leads to projection. When you approach the present moment with the attitude “I am That,” you have already polluted the free energy flow. Emily Snow offers a solution though, stop doing what takes “you” away from it! We can feel, sense and see when the conditioned mind takes charge of a situation. Be mindful!

“Be still and know that I am God” is the guiding principle of life and when conditioned mind throws a wrench into the works of life as is practice there is always Viktor Frankl’s practice to fall back on: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

A conditioned mind is helpless investigating its nature, but in the presence of “I Am,” the conditioned mind surrenders to an overwhelming energy circuit. We are able to see, sense and feel when the conditioned mind is active. Our power lies in the “neti, neti” approach. Not this and not that. Take a pause. Look through the illusion and reconnect with what always is. 

Open up to the “Field of Infinite Possibilities”

 J. Krishnamurti once concluded that “Truth is a pathless land,” implying that any attempt to consciously approach the “Field of Infinite Possibilities” will be in vain. The reason for that hopeless reaching is simple enough, the entity reaching for Truth is the interference!

Spirituality is paradoxical at times. Another spiritual truism is the insight that “what you are looking for is looking for you!” We are walking magnets and all we have to do is to polish it and the limitless attraction of the “Field of Infinite Possibilities” will do the work for us.

Spiritual living is the feat to connect with the “Field of Infinite Possibilities” before the body, the mind and the event is. It’s a natural state that is our birthright, and if the conditioning kicks in just as the clouds cover the sun, we can spot them, get to their roots, and watch them pass.

The “Field of Infinite Possibilities” is intelligent beyond comprehension. Every interference that appears in our life has its destruction already built in. Viewed from the perspective of the “pathless land” it was the interference that brought us here. We are That! Realize this fact and the quest is over!

The Screen

 I had a dream in which I was crossing the street. A car stopped and tried circumventing another car that was parallel parking. I figured I had plenty of time to cross the road, but the incoming car accelerated with incredible speed after it had passed the parking car, heading straight towards me. That’s when it happened. Something inside me pulled the emergency brakes. I froze. It wasn’t me. The car accelerated way too fast for me to do anything consciously.

You may say, so what, you were dreaming of an instinctive reaction, but that’s not how I perceived it. At that moment, I saw that we are being lived by a different  energy. We are merely screens on which the movie life is being played. Let the movie plot unfold as it may. We are before body, mind and the unfolding event. 

You probably have heard the story of the farmer who first lost a horse; then it came back with wild horses; then the son broke a leg trying to tame a wild horse; then all young men were summoned for war but his son was spared because of an accident. Other folks would have oscillated between “good” and “bad” outcomes but not this farmer. When his neighbors celebrated or lamented with him all he could say, “Is that so?” 

If you live your life with a stoic mindset to get to that stage of inner equanimity you do not accomplish anything because the experiencing “I” is still around. You are just telling yourself a convenient story that you are more spiritual than others and numb your feelings in the attempt to be a cut above life’s happenings or protect yourself from suffering. Stoic living just adds another layer of distortion on top of the distortion our perceived self-identity brings. 

What can be done to return to the screen that cannot be defiled by anything life has to offer? Who wants to return? Be still for a moment. Does the screen appear?

A lot more free

 I’m a little bit hurt but a lot more free.

I ain’t saying that you never took a toll on me.

For what it’s worth, I can finally see

that I am a little bit hurt but a lot more free.

(Max McNown, A lot more free)

I let those who feel that they can create Heaven on earth speak for themselves. I am certainly rooting for you! My personal observation has been that besides enjoying the pleasures of the blue planet that we are privileged to experience, earth is a playground that encourages and allows us to break free from the “me-energy”.

I am 60 now and have much deeper insights about myself than when I was 50 or 40. As just one example, when you are 20, you run head over heels to the wonderful woman you meet. These days you are walking. Not because you can’t run anymore but because you know what it takes to make a relationship work. The good comes with the bad in every aspect of our life.

Maybe we can free ourselves from some professional compulsions or material desires, but we always will feel the good, the bad and the ugly that life confronts us with. The Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller said in one episode, “Being a parent is watching your heart walk outside of your body forever.” That’s true. If you are a parent, you will never be completely free.

The psychologist E. Graham Howe said in “The Druid of Harley Street” that for everyone of us when we die there is a standing ovation up there in the Heavens. That’s a nice conjecture. Everyone who lives tastes the pleasures of the blue planet while doing their thing to break a little bit more free from the compulsions that come with it.