Emotional reactions

born of ignorance or inadvertence, are never justified. Seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace.



- Nisargadatta Maharaja, "I Am That"
Along the Way Feb. 25th 2008



All you need

is to get rid of the tendency to define yourself. You will revert to your natural state spontaneously and effortlessly. You will reach the Source of being, life and consciousness.

Shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind. Refuse all thoughts except one: Who am I? Just live your life as it comes. Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself. Perception is based on memory and is only imagination. The world can be said to appear but not to be. Only that which makes perception possible is real. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown.

Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you. Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond. Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. It is utterly beyond both. It gives birth to consciousness. All else is in consciousness. Nothing you can see, feel or think is so.

Go beyond the personal and see. Stop imagining that you were born. You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence, utterly beyond all that the mind conceives. Question yourself: Who am I? What is behind and beyond all this? Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person is mere habit built on memory. Inquire ceaselessly.



- Nisargadatta Maharaja
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Awakening doesn't happen through effort or will

but by being what my teacher Jean Klein used to call "disponible," a French word meaning "available or receptive." to truth.  The less you do, the better, no need to make sense of what I say in a conceptual level.  Over time, the teaching will keep returning to you unbidden at unexpected moments in your everyday life, perhaps to bring light to a particular circumstance or challenge, or merely to illuminate another aspect of truth.  The fact is, the awakening process, once begun, develops its own momentum without effort on your part, and the truth naturally yearns to awaken itself through you.

- Stephen Bodian, Wake Up Now
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When you awaken to truth as it really is

you will have no occult vision, you will have no "astral" experience, no ravishing ecstasy. You will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and you will realize that truth was always there within you and that reality was always there around you. Truth is not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. It is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. It is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again.
 
- Paul Brunton, Notebooks
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You are the Self, here and now

Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realize that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature.



- Nisargadatta Maharaja "I Am That"

Along the Way, February 6th 2008


A man who moves with the earth

will necessarily experience days and nights. He who stays with the sun will know no darkness. My world is not yours. As I see it, you all are on a stage performing. There is no reality about your comings and goings. And your problems are so unreal.



- Nisargadatta Maharaj
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Take a look at the room that you sit in

Just notice how there is an automatic registering of all that you see in the instant that you see it. The instant registering happens even before you gave names to what you saw. It is effortless to see the objects in the room- the walls, floor and ceiling. It is automatic, immediate and natural to actually see. No one needed to teach us how to see. No one can take away the actuality and effortlessness of this seeing. The living activity of seeing does not need to be maintained, mastered, developed or figured out. It simply is. It lives us without 'us' being there. We don't need to plan how to see the wall in front of us, nor do we need to understand what we see for the activity of seeing to take place. Our seeing is a given. It is constant and untouched by thoughts or ideas about it. 

Similarly to the effortlessness of seeing, is the recognition that we Are. This recognition is as ordinary, common and inescapable as seeing the wall, is. Who we are is so obvious that we overlook it, or take it for granted. Registering the objects in the room is such an unavoidable and constant reality that we miss the essence behind it. We mistakenly think that the labels and definitions of the objects that we see are what they are (including our own image in the mirror). 

In our ignorance, instead of recognising the immediate invisible pure-intelligence that enables us to register images, we focus on what the images (objects) mean to us and on the self-image (subject) of the one we believe sees them. When we identify with self-image we say, "It can't be that the truth of what I am is so simple and self-evident." Thinking that it is too simple we look outward and reach for a high that seems to come with extra-ordinary phenomena. 

Instead of attending to the fact of our being we hold on to the act of seeking and hoping that it will reward us with the promised happy future. We think we can have mind-flavored based experiences to know a no-thing. Yet, a thing (which is what the mind is) as Sailor Bob says, cannot know a no-thing. So, given what we discovered here, lets take another look around the room that we sit in and watch how the seeing is all that is happening. There are no separate things that are seen, and no separate person that sees them. There is simply the actual, effortless seeing that lives all by itself, free of duality, free of conditions. We are that one immediate seeing. We are the things that we see, and we are the Oneness that is living as the seen and the unseen. 



- Brian Lake & Naama Livni
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Separate yourself from your Body/Mind

and rest as Pure Awareness. Don't try to stop your mind. Don't try and do anything. It is all the trying and searching and sweating yourself into a frenzy that makes you unhappy. Let go of all of it. Rest in Pure Awareness, right now, in this moment, and confusion is gone, sorrow is gone, bondage is gone, fear is gone, limitation is gone. Yes, the mind may say something. Thoughts may arise. But you are not the thoughts. You are not the feelings. You are Pure Awareness. You are free from all concepts. 

Are you looking for spiritual experiences? You are not the experiences. Experiences are phenomena. Phenomena come and go, but you are always the witness to all experiences and all phenomena. Do you want to see God. The experience of seeing God may come and go but you are always the witness to all experiences and phenomena. That Witness state, that Absolute Pure Consciousness is itself non-different from whatever you might conceive of as God. Do not underestimate this. Do not evaluate it at all. Give up all evaluation, all judgement, all intellectualizing and reside in the peace of who you are. 

Are you seeking Awakening? As long as you are seeking you will never find. You cannot be a seeker and a finder at the same time. You must give up your seeking. You must give up your striving. You must give up all that which is the very nature of your mind and intellect. What is prior to that. It is only Pure Consciousness without an object. It cannot be known or grasped for it is the Knower, the Knowing. Let go of all concepts and simply rest in that. 

Who you think you are is concepts. It is your personal mythology in which you are the Hero/ine. But that is a story based on a supposed individual that doesn't exist, like a reflection in the mirror. It is an appearance only. A case of mistaken identity. Don't be fooled any longer. It is like watching a movie and thinking that you are the main star. But it is just light on a screen that gives an appearance of people and personalities. Recognize the projector, which is the pure light of consciousness itself. Only then can you be content and free from all of your desires and anxieties (which are also only an illusion).



- Aja Atari
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Turn your attention away from the dream right now

Just for right now, you don't need it. Let the thoughts and worries of the dream character continue as they will, but just step back for a moment and watch it happen, watch the dream character involved in its dream.

And while the dream character is going about its business, turn your attention to the one thing right now that is shining and clear, peaceful and unassuming, steady and solid: the consciousness with which the dream character is being observed.

Just rest here, in the unchanging consciousness which reflects but is not changed by what it reflects. This is reality. Nothing else is.

Rest your attention here. Get to know it. Let the reality of consciousness be known to you, as you. Nothing needs to be done here. No thought affects it, and so thought is not needed. No action affects it, and so action is not needed.

It's not possible to do anything with this consciousness because this consciousness is everything already.. Pay attention to it for a moment right now and it is easily noticed that consciousness is complete. And since consciousness is complete, you are complete. The only thing that ever makes you feel like you are not complete, not whole, and that you need to "return" somewhere to find wholeness, is that you have put your attention into the dream life, and forgotten that wholeness is all that you really are. 

So observe the dream character as it desires enlightenment, and as it desires love, reassurance, respect. Watch the dream character as its life plays out. It is not who you are. You are this consciousness, which has no mortality, no vulnerability, and no limits. Beyond all imagination, the nothingness within which resides the seed of all existence, the shining creation of infinite universes - this is you.

Put your attention here, and allow your sense of this to grow. If you are looking for Wholeness, here it is. If you are looking for True Love, here it is, in the One Unlimited Self that is Reality. No other love is possible. And this Love is already here, as You. It's only a matter of attention.



- Annette Nibley
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Voluntary actions

What we call our voluntary actions are in
fact involuntary, and our supposed personal
free will is nothing but an ineffectual and
temporary obstruction to the natural,
involuntary workings of the universe. But
even our false assumption of volition is as 
involuntary as everything else and can only
fall off when we have involuntarily seen it as
fake.



- Ramesh S. Balker "A Net of Jewels"

Along the Way, January 31st 2008