We have this very deep, salient, unexamined belief that something is wrong. And if it’s not wrong right now, it’s about to be wrong. There’s a sense that this life is a problem to be solved. Our view is that life is imperfect, a faulty piece of machinery to be glued and pieced together. Something is off and we keep tinkering and trying figure out what’s going wrong and attempting to control things. What happens is the more we tinker, glue, figure, and try to fix and manage things, what we are actually doing is deepening our trance, our unconsciousness, deepening our sense that we are a self that must continuously strive for the unattainable and fix what isn’t there to be fixed.
Everything is otherwise and nothing is what it seems. The world wells up from the ground of being, the limitless expanse, formless becoming form. We, which are other bits of that limitless formlessness that have temporarily become limited form, attempt to place our labels of sound and language on all that which arises and no longer see the arisen in the light of truth but as labels and stories which veil our vision and cloud our unity, creating a false sense of separation. They make God something over there instead of all that is here. Truth becomes almost inaccessible, the maze of stories and labels is the game we see as life. Then the forms die, pass away, becoming infinite formlessness again and the dance of eternity continues infinitely.
Don’t sacrifice your personal seniority to anyone — only you know what you want from this life and how you should live it. Your answers for the journey are already here, within and around you.
Don’t make you decisions from an irrational or emotional state, but from a calm, meditative frame where you are not influenced be someone or something else’s energy. Help others and be compassionate, but realize that you can only do so much. You can not make other peoples’ decisions or live their lives, keep your energy in your space. Meditate.
You possess certain attributes that will allow you to help and inspire humanity. Remember your life experiences are a beautiful unfoldment of universal creation. There is likely a way in which we can learn and grow from them in some way. Respect, learn, and feel your emotions as they are a gateway to the wisdom of yourself.
Above all, let your light shine! You are sacred. You are whole. You are complete.
Explorations in Being
Nisargadatta
You are perfect, only you don’t know it.
Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders.
All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love.
Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors.
Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of the love you bear for yourself;
all I plead with you is this: make love of yourself perfect.
Deny yourself nothing – give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond.
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharajaj
I just finished reading Krishnamurti’s Notebook, a personal journal kept by the spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti. It is filled with many profound insights and teachings and I would highly recommend anyone read it. I found some excerpts that I would like to share:
Color was god and that god was everywhere. And as you watched meditation came upon you, not forced, without thought. It was the meditation of expanding, open emptiness which has no horizon, no time; it was that immeasurable space of mind meeting the vast space of time and distance and in the meeting there was emptiness. It was the death of everything known, every movement of pleasure, joy, and sorrow; thought could not travel in that emptiness of timeless space and it became silent; it could not experience and so recognition ceased. Experience is the recognition, the continuity of the known. Meditation is the uprooting of the known. Words, recognition, the known had come to an end and the immeasurable space of the mind moved with its own swiftness that left no mark. It was energy without frontiers.
You can’t find beauty, nor the tree nor the bird will give it to you, but you will find it everywhere if you look. Beauty as love, is not an act of experience; experience is the interaction of the thinker and thought as so of conflict. Beauty, as love, is there where the thinker is not and thought with its feeling has come to an end. All knowledge must come to an end for beauty, as love, to be. But you know about everything; you have argued and counter argued and come to many conclusions; you have become so clear for you have known dullness. You know everything and if you don’t you can always find it in books. You can go to the moon but you have no space in the mind; you have little open spots, but not space where the infinite past and the infinite future have met and lost their meaning completely. It is only in that space that there is beauty as love. There is no space for thought, there is , to go to the moon but beauty, as to love, is not there. It’s there, in that unspotted space of the mind and it’s difficult to find the mind for there is only exploding space. For creation is beauty, as love and death.
You should never be here too much; be so far away that they can’t find you, they can’t get at you to shape, to mould. Be so far away, like the mountains, like the unpolluted air; be so far away that you have no parents, no relations, no family, no country; be so far away that you don’t know even where you are. Don’t let them find you; don’t come into contact with them too closely. Keep far away where even you can’t find yourself; keep a distance which can never be crossed over; keep a passage open always though which no one can come. Don’t shut the door for there is not door, only an open, endless passage; if you shut any door, they will be very close to you, then you are lost. Keep far away where their breath can’t reach you and their breath travels very far and very deeply; don’t get contaminated by them, by their word, by their gesture, by their great knowledge; they have great knowledge but be far away from them where even you can not find yourself.
–Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Everywhere there was silence; the hills were motionless, the trees were still and the river-beds empty; the birds had found shelter for the night and everything was still, even the village dogs. It had rained and the clouds were motionless. Silence grew and became intense, wider and deeper. What was outside was now outside; the brain which had listened to the silence of the hills, fields and groves was itself now silent; it no longer listened to itself; it had gone through that and had become quiet, naturally, without any enforcement. It was still, ready to stir itself on the instant. It was still, deep within itself; like a bird that folds its wings, it had folded upon itself; it was not asleep nor lazy, but in folding upon itself, it had entered into depths which were beyond itself. The brain is essentially superficial; its activities are superficial, almost mechanical; its activities and responses are immediate, though this immediacy is translated in terms of the future. Its thoughts and feelings are on the surface, though it may think and feel far into the future and way back into the past. All experience and memory are deep only to the extent of their own limited capacity by the brain being still and turning upon itself, it was no longer experiencing outwardly or inwardly. Consciousness, the fragments of many experiences, compulsions, fears, hopes and despairs of the past and future, the contradictions of the race and its own self-centered activities, was absent; it was not there. The entire being was utterly still and as it became intense, it was not more or less; it was intense, there was entering into a depth or a depth which came into being which thought, feeling, consciousness could not enter into. It was a dimension which the brain could not capture or understand. And there was no observer, witnessing this depth. Every part of one’s whole being was alert, sensitive but intensely still. This new, this depth was expanding, exploding, going away, developing in its own explosions but out of time and beyond space.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti’s Notebook
This persistent and rapacious belief in a separate, abiding, self-subsisting “I” and its illusory incompleteness, compounded with the story placed upon story after story in our mind stream that attempts to perpetuate this lie of the “I” is all our suffering is ever based upon. Contrarily, we are always intrinsically whole and complete because our innate interconnectedness to the ground of being necessitates that we ourselves are that wholeness. There is, nor can there be, anything truly outside “us”.
Once we feel separate, once we believe ourselves alone and insignificant, once we have the slightest inclination of fear, when we think we are dwarfed or disillusioned, or especially separate from god/awareness/being/that which is the eternal sea of consciousness, then the greatest lie has overtaken us and we’ve forgotten our latent, indisputable connection with everything. It is here where we then agree to have succumbed to the lie of death and meaninglessness.
People are so stuck in the form world. They are hypnotized by it and believe it to be the only thing important, the only thing that is real. It is all that matters to them. The only place that has any substance in their perception. And, in reality, this is the only place that actually has no substance. It all fades. Nothing there causes any lasting happiness. Nothing there has any lasting meaning. Nothing thaere will lead us to ourselves. But we are so hypnotized, because everyone else is. Society is. We are sucked into the dream. We believe the dream is real. Dreams upon dreams and stories upon stories. This entire planet, this entire universe, will one day dissolve into nothingness. It will all change at one point yet we hold on to our dreaming, thinking that it is substantial and going to continue for ever. It won’t. It can’t. Only one thing will. The Absolute. That within us that is still. Abiding. Present. That’s where it is. That’s where the real happiness is.
The totality of reality seeks to shower you with experience. All experience –“good” or “bad”. They’re the same. It’s your perception which distorts them to be “positive” or negative”. You, yourself are this totality. Nothing more. Nothing less. And this totality seeks to know itself through you and the eternal, sublime dance of experience. Relinquish your attachments and aversions. Here. Now. Welcome the peace and truth of the silent ocean of consciousness that you are.