Hello and welcome…  

Thank you for visiting  ~ AT THE HUB ~

The material below is a series of chapters for study and development associated with Café-Satsang.  The content is in ongoing editorial development subject to continued research and updating.  It contains some 40+ chapters which are directly accessible from the chapter headings below and you are welcome to brows/review chapters that take your interest.  You may find the links above (or index/cell phones) of interest and the ‘Contemplations‘ short and to the point with some revealing YouTube links for some intriguing views to consider.

As a regular visitor, you may like to visit (Daily reflections) short, concise posts of the day.

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The aim of this work is to bring ageless, time tested teachings of Mindfulness, Destiny and the Art of Living in life, commerce, education and governance into the modern era, culture and language of today.

At the ‘Hub of Life’, our centre, our true heart and soul is our natural home… all that we are; without beginning or end… eternally Present.

“The purpose of all valid spiritual disciplines, whatever the teaching from which they spring, is to enable us to return to this native state of being – not after death but here now, in unbroken awareness of the purity within and throughout creation.  Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language, and the practices they follow lead to the same goal.”                 ~Brihadaranyaka Upanishad – Indian vedic text

Far from being lost in the clouds and feet off the ground, this work is eminently practical, to be here and present to all that is real!

Is there anywhere else really worth being?

Consider how much time you spend in the world you have created outside of reality; your dreams, desires, fears and expectations, of acquired and assumed knowledge and beliefs.  Are you really here?  All you need is to ‘Be Present… Here-Now’, to look, listen; pay attention, your mind selflessly clear – to reveal the answers to life’s most practical and fundamental questions… but you can’t wait to be somewhere else!  Desire, Fear – be damned! They are always trying to put you somewhere else!

<>  What/Who am I?  What is my calling/my craft and my destiny?

<>  On any endeavour I choose, by what measure can I know the true nature of success?

<> Can I be really happy, always, no matter what my circumstance?

<>  How can I make the best of life’s transitions with insight, understanding and peace of mind?

<>  What is the meaning of ‘Enlightenment’?

PLEASE NOTE: This work is, and remains under continual editorial development.  It is published here, on-line, as it is researched, tested and developed, openly presented for comment and suggestions.

It is my sincere hope that the chapters that follow will go some way towards helping you find your way to answer these and other fundamental life questions…  Questions that lead to a better understanding of yourself, of Nature, Life, Life’s purpose, Consciousness,  Leadership, Education, Governance and fair-play.

With warm and sincere wishes for the journey of your life as you grow and develop. It is your work of art, all and the best that you can be; all that nature asks of you.  ~  Roy A Maunder

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To get the most from these chapters, they are not to be read as a story or set of instructions with beginnings and ends.  They are to be read for continuous growth in understanding and spiritual development.

The first chapter simply being a continuation from the last, for you to test alongside other commentaries and your own life experience.  A true life-experience, we are told by the wise throughout the ages that depends on how ‘truly present’ we are.  Are you present – or are you, like most of us mostly somewhere else?

The only true source of knowledge is to be found within, as you bring genuine experience in to your life, which cannot be found on these pages, or any others.  Just try learning to ride a bike, a discovery that cannot be found from words spoken or read in a book.  Words written or spoken might bring you faith, but true knowledge it is not.  True knowledge is to know and be at one with nature, as it flows through every fibre of your being. Eternally joyful, exhilarating!

As with any externally acquired commentaries, scriptures  and observations this can only be to help you to face the right direction and interpret what you see for yourself… as you open your eyes, feet on the ground, connect inner and outer world, and take one step at a time.

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I have received so many helpful and challenging questions and suggestions that have helped to bring this together.  Thank you…

The points of view expressed here are just that, ‘points of view’, and it is invariably more helpful to disagree than to agree… The very act of disagreement, with intent to understand helps to challenge not only these views, but also your own.

“The difference between Man and God is that Man has many points of view, and God has many viewing points.  ~ Anna –  from Mr God, this is Anna

May we learn and grow together

Helping you find ‘your’ way…        Roy Maunder 2015

If you would like to know more, make comment or if you would like to be on the list for any future publications or workshops, please contact me < here >

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Note – Chapter Index headings are active for direct link to chapters, and active links in the chapters for further direct information supporting the chapter content. 

0   INTRODUCTION

1   WHAT IT IS TO BE FREE

2   PAST, FUTURE AND ETERNAL PRESENT

3   HAPPINESS

4   NATURE, ACCEPT IT AS IT IS

5   NATURE OF BEINGS

6   REALITY AND ILLUSION

7   FEAR, PAIN AND SUFFERING

8   MEMORY, KARMA & FREE-WILL

9   ILLNESS AND DISEASE

10  WE GET WHAT WE WILL

11  TRUE KNOWLEDGE, ITS POWER AND BLESSING

12  WHAT AM I

13  SIN

14 CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS

15  HOW I KNOW MYSELF

16  I AM THAT I AM

17  DESTINY AND LIFE’S PURPOSE

18  UNIVERSAL SOUL

19 Nature of the SOUL

20  MANIFESTATION OF THE BODY – CAUSE

21  LETTING GO

22  BANISHING DESIRE

23  RIGHT ACTION

24  THE JOURNEY

25  DUTY

26  REALISATION

27 Nature of the Sage

28  GRACE AND HELP

29  THE GURU

30  MEDITATION

31  MANTRA

32  IT JUST HAPPENS

33  ATTENTION IS ENOUGH

34  TRUST, SIMPLE AND INNOCENT

35  CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS

36  LOVE AND SERVICE

37  DOING GOOD FOR OTHERS

38  SCIENCE AND RELIGION

39  AS TEACHER, HOW CAN I BE SURE?

40 LEADERSHIP – WAY OF THE SAGE

41 EDUCATION – ART OF PLAY AND DISCOVERY NEW – In development

42 GOVERNANCE …………………………………NEW – In development

43 REFLECTIONS ………………………………….NEW – In development

44 REFERENCES …………………………………..NEW – In development

45

46

47 THE KEYS

Feb’ 2016

This work is drawn from common themes found in many mystical traditions; Vedic, Buddhist, Taoist and other inclusive teachings through the ages to modern times. Such teachings are often referred to as non-dualist, (Advaita), which literally means ‘not two’. Some intense experiences can lead to the thought ‘I feel completely at-one’

It holds the view that our total integration and oneness with the universe we share is the principal and foundation of all life and matter.  There is no other in time and space, but ‘here and now’… no other time but now, no other place but here, no other self but ‘I’.  A common message they all share, along with a path to true freedom and happiness.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space.  We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest…. a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a prison for us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Albert Einstein 1879-1955. Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.

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Is this great path to freedom and happiness, shared by the wise, some kind of journey? Well, yes and no… It’s a bit like asking for the way home when all the time you’re standing in your own doorway. Or finding your way to the top of a mountain, a most difficult and challenging climb indeed, with slips, rock falls and great suffering; all the trials and tribulations it brings… only to find that the mountain was never really there! It was all in the mind. “The truth will set you free!”

You might well ask ‘is such a journey necessary, with all the challenges it brings?’  – Yes!   By nature we are born into darkness and ignorance, blessed with the great and noble task to find our way to the light. Is it a good thing or a bad thing..? That question just doesn’t arise, for that is just the way it is; not good or bad. You might just as well ask – ‘Is it necessary for a child to go through childhood, and all the learning, falls and tears that go with it to reach adulthood?’  Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so”  ~ Wm Shakespeare

We can only hope that we are granted good guidance and governance that our falls will not be too painful, and that the learning we gain will be true.  That we shall pass this on with wisdom and compassion for those that follow.

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I do hope you find this of interest, if not at least a little thought provoking. Much of this work, at first glance, will appear to be highly controversial, and deeply challenging to many of our fundamental beliefs.  The principle thinking of non-duality, ‘Advaita’, where no part, in time and space is separate from another, all flowing with the same inseparable will, like an immense river flowing to the sea it has vast implications for cause and effect, birth and death, Karma and free-will.

In writing this work I have found common perceptions shared across the many traditions, yet remaining free of dogma, fixed views and attitudes.  These notes are for guidance only, views to explore and ponder, and only when found to inspire deep reflection and insight.

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This work is in no way meant to present any kind of doctrine, but to be shared, tested and openly debated and reflected upon.  Many may well disagree; words at best are a guiding map only, not the territory.  As was once said to me, “there is your way, my way, and the right way; and working together we may just come a little closer to the truth”. True knowledge and understanding can only come from direct experience. That must be found by living action, deep mindful reflection and insight. At best, I hope this will help you find ‘your’ way.

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Apart from skilled use of enlightened, and paradoxical poetic license – Wm Shakespeare being a master of such – modern western language is not well adapted to convey some of the deeper spiritual truths.  Consequently I have developed the meaning applied to ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’. I draw your attention to, and recommend reading chapter 14, for clarification. This distinction will bring greater clarity throughout this work.

Each chapter brings greater light to the preceding and following chapters and, as suggested, should be read over in sequence and in conjunction with the others with mindful attention. This mindful attention, greater presence of mind and body to reading, thought, and application will bring deeper understanding, wisdom, calmness and contentment. Most of what we learn is held in memory which is on the surface only and temporary. Deep attention to reading, listening and application brings understanding which is deep and permanent.

Every good ball player knows the importance of paying attention, body and mind, to every stroke and catch for the lessons learned. All good teachers know the value of student attention. And every mountaineer depends for his life on being completely present to every foot’ and handhold.

To help you to develop and bring your skills of mindfulness, not just to these pages but throughout life, please find this simple, transferrable programme at www.keystoneway.com – Keystone Meditation. There you will find a full explanation and an on-line link to a Meditation timer and support group – ‘Keystone Group’. The on-line timer is an independent service that links many thousands of meditators around the world of all traditions.

Most of today’s house-holders, as opposed to monks and ascetics, find themselves in a busy and competitive world.  With this in mind this simple approach requires little more than 1 minute per day, done in the right way, followed by simple acts of attentiveness.  It may seem too simple, but a single seed planted and nurtured in the right way, at the right time and in the right soil, will grow into a mighty forest.

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I am not here to change the world

I am here to help it grow

As every good parent would know

For further guidance I have searched out teachings that would help us to absorb and share what has been learned and understood by enlightened beings through the ages. I have made constant, personal referral to the works of G.I.Gurdjieff, who, along which many of his pupils worked tirelessly with such teachings for the betterment and harmonious development of man.  I could well have chosen any of the other great teachings. However, with this I have felt best directed and most at ease.

I claim no originality for many of the views and comments expressed here as I believe them to be timeless truths presented in so many works that have gone before.  However, the way I have collected, assembled and presented them is uniquely constructed to bring new clarity to the work.

It is, as I am, a work in progress, and I hope it helps to open up some inspirational thinking, and can only hope that it adds something worthwhile to your own journey in life, and for others who come across this work.

Love not the world for your-self, but as your-self…        ~ Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad Bk IV

I welcome any views and comments that will help to bring more light of understanding to this amazing universe we all share.

For those who have followed a similar work you may recognize some references from Shankara, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, with references to the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Tao-Te-Ching, Buddhist and Sufi sages.

For further reflections and thoughts in progress… http://www.twitter.com/NaturesDestiny

 “Follow not the teacher, but the teachings truth’s your home – he knows his way is not your own but must be your’s alone”

 “Neither teacher I nor pupil be, just hold my hand, walk with me and together… we shall see”

ram <contact and further information>

“Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer nor afraid of losing,
Who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality:   He is free.”   – Rumi

To be a person, identified by all you associate with your name and form – your ego – is to be constrained within the boundaries of your own imagination.  It is as if, like a film on a screen, you have projected on to yourself a world built from memories and expectations, of pleasures and pains.  It feeds the flames of desire, greed, acquisition and the fear of loss. Afflictions such as aversion, pride and jealously are built from momentary feelings of attraction and repulsion.  Suffering warns us that this identity, this world we have built out of our own imagination is threatened by loss or change.  The very notion of independent identity must, for its very survival, be relative, dependent and constricting.  Once this notion is removed there is no possibility of these afflictions arising, and you are free.  Argue for your limitations and sure enough… they are yours.

Happiness is found not in the limited world of form and quantity, but in the subtle world of qualities, of sharing, love and service.  What suffering you experience is all in the mind; this ‘seemingly’ unyielding world of boundaries, claims and expectations, your attachment and fear of loss.  In the light of truth, this structure you have imagined, with all its attractions will lose their meaning, and so will end your fears and suffering… it is the truth that sets you free.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…” Wm. Shakespeare.

See the illusion for what it is, the part it plays in the story that you claim your own; the story of your dreams.  As the actor on a stage no matter what the act, rise, fall or outcome it is of no concern, for that you are beyond.  Play the part, play it well but remember ‘your-self’, live and learn, for it is the magic of the stage that shows you who and what you are.  But you are concerned!  And you’ll be concerned while the picture clashes with your own ideas of what and who you think you are, and the outcome you desire.

All at one with the part you play, you will see that life lives through you, not by you.  Accept what is and go with the flow.  As a river finds its way to the sea, so nature’s elements flow effortlessly towards peace and harmony, without any effort on your part.  Any effort you feel is just the pain of conflict between opposing desires.  There really is nothing to oppose.   As for your actions, they just happen, they cannot be avoided.  You will see that you do what you must, and will know your will to act only after you have acted.  To know that it’s all in the mind, is, in-itself, letting go. Boundless, you are free.

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To free the mind from its limiting beliefs is to embrace the world and yet be free of the world, or at least your ideas about it, about yourself.  It is to be at peace, free of dependent-concern for its past and future.  Otherwise you are caught between what has happened and what must happen, of regrets and expectations.  And the body, following the mind, it too finds peace.  You are what you are, not your memories, ideas and possessions.  Let go, set yourself free.

Even the idea of letting go, of giving up, is in the mind.  The real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is there to call your own.  You are that you are – nothing personal, no attachment. It’s like deep sleep – you hold to nothing of before, you just fall asleep; blissfully free, unconcerned you just let go.  Like water, flowing into water, merges into itself.

But People do not care to let go.  They do not know that to let go of the finite, the temporary, is to embrace the infinite, as to embrace death is to embrace life.  Letting go is not about being detached which only leads to a kind of indifference.  Free of condition and expectation, non-attached yet at-one with the eternal flow of life… it is life, and love in action.

To be free is to live life to the full, to move on free of limitation – life depends on it.  As a caterpillar lets go of one leaf when firmly held to the next, one form as it changes to the next, so you too move from room to room, place to place, childhood to adulthood.  The gift and legacy of the past is all in the present, nothing left behind, nothing to turn back for.

The water-mill would never turn if its buckets kept their fill.  The toys you held, the games you played, the scenes that you beheld were there for life’s fulfilment, whose legacy is found right here and only in the now. It’s the fuel that lights your path, the dawn of knowledge, the light of wisdom and the joy and bliss of happiness.  Let go, for the past is done and gone, like the scaffold on a temple, to be released when it is done.  Even the temple, the schools of learning are the scaffolding for you to grow, and all released when done.

Empires of the personal may be gained and lost, moment to moment.  But the ‘I’ that you are remains timelessly clear, untouched and free; as the Sun remains untouched by day or night, cloud or shine, neither wealth nor poverty can enhance or diminish it. As you learn to free the mind from its preoccupations it becomes clear and quiet, and blissfully at peace.

Placed in a world of wealth or not is not of your concern.  But ask yourself, ‘are you in charge or is it in charge of you?’  Not that you should own nothing which leads to a kind of arrogance in poverty, but that nothing should own you, however rich or poor.

“May I never lack clothes, cows, food and drink that I may share and serve you better.  May I become famous, may I become richer than the richest that I may share and serve you better” (Taittireeya-Upanishad)

To act and perform your duties in service from the heart of love, your true heart, is to know and live as one.  Any idea to hold on; to possess for oneself alone is to ‘bind and so be bound’.  Claim nothing but this moment, and the gift of life itself.  To embrace all, yet free of attachment and dependency is to be truly free and selfless; empty of self-defined name and form.

To Be-Here-Now, fully present, the unfettered mind is free, fresh and vibrantly alive.  Always now it grieves for nothing left behind – not concerned for birth, nor death but in eternal timeless flow.

“It was like I had been chasing after something and suddenly I just stopped and looked around me.  I stopped inside and my mind became peaceful and clear.  We don’t know what it means to let go… to discover that nothing is permanent and we invent numerous beliefs to protect us from the fear of letting go.  We are frightened of letting go because we have postponed it.  I believe that only through that act will my mind be free and able to experience what true freedom is.”  ~ Mark Forster – Screenwriter/Director

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By devotion to the self the highest is reached, not bound by birth or death – Bhagavad Gita: Ch 8

On the path to freedom, to claim, ‘I am not this, not that’, not this bundle of habits and beliefs it would be fair to ask, ‘So then, what am I?’  That raises and interesting question – ‘are there two selves for one to say, ‘I know myself’ as if it were a separate self to be known by ‘I’, that I am?’.  By reason, the observed cannot itself be the observer.  It may not be in your power to say what you are but can you say, ‘I am not?’  That you are is undeniably true. This self, this ‘I AM’, this simplicity of ‘being’ is without boundary, beyond anything you conceive yourself to be. It is pure, boundless awareness.  It is the immovable background of motion.  The screen onto which everything you conceive is projected. Once you are there, you are at home everywhere. Whatever you may hear see or think, of that, you can be sure, you are not.  To attend to my-self, to that which is beyond name and form is to reach for the highest.

To know that I AM is the first ‘knowing’, before knowing anything else. Free from being a percept or concept, it is your natural state before any conception of name, form and association arises. It is pure choiceless-awareness, aware of all without choice, good or bad, like or dislike.   It is just a state unaffected by acquisitions of the mind, free from past and future and all associations.  In most cases it is distorted by the pull of form, memories and hopes, desire and fear.  In choiceless awareness it is as it is – normal.

For the Enlightened mind, the person, the ‘I am this body, this mind, this chain of memories, this bundle of desires and fears disappears, but something you may call identity remains.  It enables a sense of being, of the here and now as you would understand it.  Seeing is not clouded by images clothed with judgements, description and evaluation, of opinion or attitude.  And when turned away, the mind does not allow memory to linger, but is free and fresh for the next impression.  Notice how a child, before the acquisition of ideas, opinions and possessions have invaded, the mind will so easily move on from one point of attention to another, leaving nothing to linger in the mind.

To grasp for a sense of identity, to be caught by the taste of pleasure casts a veil of ignorance, a sort of blindness to the truth.  And so, as a man born blind, we must rely on pointers to find our way back.   As the blind cannot visualize light and colors, so the ignorant mind is unable to give meaning to such descriptions of the natural spontaneous state, such as dispassionate happiness, affectionate detachment, timelessness, choiceless awareness, and the causelessness of things.  As even the most accurate map is not the territory, words are only indicators, they can only point but they will not come with us. Intuitively we feel they have deep meaning, and they even create in us a strange longing for the ineffable, the thrill of what may be, but that is all.  The truth can only be found with right action, words merely point the way.  Freedom is beyond mind consciousness and its dreams and acquisitions which come and go.

The state of freedom is beyond sensory consciousness and the world we identify with.  It is pure, boundless awareness, as the sky is beyond the cloud yet one with it, dependent on none but itself.  Sensory consciousness in ignorance of this binds itself to this world and form, whereas awareness, beyond mind and form has no attachment, it shines immutably.  When there is a ‘particular’ person there is also consciousness.  ‘I am’, mind, and consciousness denote the same state.  If you say ‘I am aware’, it only means: ‘I am conscious of thinking about being aware’.  There is no identity with form in awareness, it is beyond form.  Witnessing is of the world of mind and duality.  The witness goes with the witnessed.  In awareness, there is no duality of seer and that that is seen, there is only seeing.  In awareness, the seer and the seen are one; seeing contains both seer and seen.

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From the moment that we are born we make the painful transition from a world of oneness to a world of duality, a world where all form and its parts are seen as separate, and separate from us. It is a world populated by opposites; each being dependent on the space between, and each other for existent identity, as a cup is dependent on the space and the mind for its ‘cupness’.  The waves on the sea are dependent on the sea for existent identity and not the other way around. The sea itself enables the waves to appear and disappear and is not touched by their rise and fall. What is the relationship between the ocean and it waves?  As like the waves on the sea, the mind, consciousness and thoughts are dependent on universal awareness.  Awareness is dependent on none but itself.

From the point of non-duality, or ‘oneness’ (Advaita), all ideas of separation, name and form, have no meaning.  You might say it is empty of identity or ‘selfless’… it is free and fertile for absolute creativity. Questions of your formative relationship in time and space is only in the mind.  For example, a chair has no inherent ‘chairness’, it is empty of any label or meaning until the mind chooses it so.  While the mind is so occupied in a world of form, gain and loss, it is limited, not open to see beyond it.

The succession of transient moments, ideas, thoughts and forms are just ripples on the surface of the mind, they create the illusion of time.  All movement requires a motionless background to give it form. The timeless reality of pure being, pure awareness, is not in movement.  Just as the projection on a cinema screen is dependent on the still, formless background of the screen for the images to appear.  If you were not still, silently aware, the experience of the passage of time would not exist for you.  Once you have found the stillness within, you will know that it was never lost to you, that ‘being’ that you are, independent of time and space, independent of all divisions and separations.  But don’t look for it in consciousness, you will not find it there.  Don’t look for it anywhere, for nothing contains it, not in time or space.

On the path to enlightenment, the mind ultimately discovers that it is free from questions, that no answers are needed. Answers are just another form to distract our attention.

The silent state of universal awareness is not inactive.  ‘Not dead for it is aware; ‘not alive for it does not change.  The flower fills the space with perfume, the candle – with light.  They do nothing yet they change everything by their mere presence.  You can photograph the candle, but not the light.  You can know the man, his name and appearance, but not his influence.  His very presence contains the essence of life in action. – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

ram <contact and further information>

March 2016

Charity feeds the present from the food of past as nature consumes the past to feed the present. – B’Gita Ch: 8

Birth and death, only in the eyes of the ignorant; a continuous cycle with no space between. In reality birthless, deathless – B’Gita Ch: 9

Here and now is your home and where you live. But with dreams of past and future-yet a sleep-like veil is cast. Awake to here and now, and the difference between actual and dream comes clear; unmistakably so. By no effort of will or imagination can you interchange the two.

Now, what is it that gives this unique quality to the actual?   A moment back the remembered was actual, in a moment the actual will be the remembered. What makes the actual unique? Obviously, it is your sense of being present. In memory and anticipation the feeling is clear that it is a mental state being observed, whilst in the actual the feeling is primarily of being present, timelessly still and aware. Look closely and you will see there is no ‘moment’ in the present that can be captured; all is just flow. In stillness that you are, feel the flow.

We all depend on a perceived relative position in time and space for any sense of personal existence.   If ‘you’ were not still, relative to the passage of events in time, there would be no perception of the passing of time. Two trains side by side traveling at the same speed, to each other there would appear to be no motion. Without ‘apparent’ relative motion, the passage of time would not appear to exist.

Whenever existence and time appears, it is only because of your sense of being, here and now; free of form and motion that you carry with you timelessly. It means that you are independent of space and time. Space and time is in the mind, not in them. It is your self-identification with mind and body, which of course is limited, that gives you the feeling of relativity; finiteness. In reality you are not bound by measures of time and limits in space. There is no separation; you and the source of being are one.  “I and my father is one…”

‘The wise man does not cross the same river twice, for he can see that he is not the same man and it is not the same river. The enlightened man does not cross the river, for he is the river and the river is he; there is no separation’.

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The supreme spirit is without beginning, without qualities and imperishable – B’Gita Ch: 13

There can be no continuity in the objects of awareness. Continuity, permanency, these are illusions created from memory, mere mental projections of pattern where no pattern can be. Let go of all ideas created out of mind and memory, of temporary or permanent, body or mind, man or woman; what remains? What is the state of your mind when all separation is given up? It is not to say there are no distinctions, for without them there is no manifestation.

Your concern with future is due to fear of pain and desire of pleasure. A child just grows, s/he does not make plans for growth, a leg here, and hand there, s/he grows integrally, naturally and unconsciously; without lingering memories and fearful anticipation. Moments of sadness are quickly transformed into moments of joy. This is because s/he is free of expectation born of memory and anticipation. It is one of the peculiarities of the enlightened; that s/he is not concerned with past and future; all is bliss: all just happens by the flow of nature, by the needs of the moment, just as the swirl and motion of rivers to sea.

ram <contact and further information>

March 2016

There is no greater conscious happiness than alert, sustained self-dependent peace of mind. It lies at the pinnacle of life’s work; true success. After all, what is the state wished for along the path of action? Not the destination, a mere passing experience cursed with expectation rarely satisfied, whose proper value lies as a guiding star for direction and alignment. Attached to outcomes, everything in between is seen as an inconvenient necessity, including the people who help you get there, and the attributes of love and care along the way are lost.

The most productive thing you can ever do is to be consciously present, the natural flow in nature’s field will take care of the outcome. Your will to act will be knowingly at one with the eternal will of nature; the harmony, the joy of this moment. By learning to be here-now-present and attentive, your life purpose, at one, becomes clear. You rush ahead for objects of desire only to leave behind the ocean of peace and eternal joy.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 50 – Pleasure and Joy:

How heavy do I journey on the way, when what I seek my weary travels end, doth teach that ease and that repose to say, ‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!’

The beast that bears me, tired with my woe, plods dully on, to bear that weight in me, as if by some instinct the wretch did know his rider loved not speed being made from thee.

The bloody spur cannot provoke him on that sometimes anger thrusts into his hide, which heavily he answers with a groan more sharp to me than spurring to his side;

For that same groan doth put this in my mind: My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.

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Following the inner journey, you cannot help find happiness – even amongst what you perceive as so much suffering.  Inner happiness is overwhelmingly real.  Like the sun in the sky, its expressions may be clouded but it is never absent.  By discovering and cultivating your natural purpose, joy and fulfilment is inevitable.

Happy people cultivate the discipline to discover and follow their natural path.  They live in the present, get organised and act on the here-and-now – ‘first things first’.  Any Satnav user knows to faithfully follow immediate instruction once destination is set.  Trust the destination built in to your very nature, your True Heart, the Hub of life’s work.  Every moment so lived is a moment of joy.  The great universal ‘Satnav’ will be your guide.  How often do you hear ‘I just followed my intuition’?

Happy people feel as a valued contributor to something greater than themselves. Cultivate a passion for something permanent beyond people, things and events.  Transient, attachment can only lead to loss and sadness.  Great artists, poets and architects of every kind know this.  When the job is done, lessons learned are left to grow and live in the mind, and minds that follow.  Every child, who has had pleasure in building sand castles only to be washed away, knows this too.  Yet, how soon we forget and suffer the misery of attachment and loss.  The contented stone mason is not just cutting stone for a dollar a day, but helping to build a great cathedral.  A great cathedral that will live in the hearts and minds, beyond the stone from which it is build

Understand the difference between happiness and pleasure.  Pleasure depends on things; happiness does not.  Fear is the only trouble.  Know yourself as independent and you will be free, free from fear and its shadows.  As long as we believe that we need things to make us happy, we shall also believe that in their absence we must be miserable.

Happy people intuitively cultivate harmonious connection with their inner and outer world. By being at peace inwardly, free of contention, the outer world is naturally attracted with the will to be at one. See how we naturally soften and feel drawn to innocent calmness of youth.

‘All rivers flow to the sea, in deep calmness, the lowest point’ ~ Tao-Te-Ching.

With vigilance, courage and kindness, inner happiness is inevitable.  Anyone who has found their true craft in life knows this and can be said to be ‘In their Element’, performing a natural ‘Work of art’.  Letting life unfold as your work of art is intensely joyful even in the face of great difficulty.  Ask any great explorer.  All great people of achievement know this, whether in the arts, sport, home-making or industry.

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood” ~ Marie Curie

The innocent mind knows the joy of learning and discovery. Any parent knows the joy of children with the toys with which they play, and the lessons they learn. Big children too! The toy business thrives on it.

Mind always shapes itself according to its beliefs. Hence the importance of convincing oneself that one need not be prodded into happiness. On the contrary pleasure, dependent on things, is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have things to be happy, when in reality it’s just the opposite. The natural world is nature’s playground for us to play, discover, build, learn and grow, and to pass on what we have learned.

Why think of happiness at all? You do not think of happiness except when you are unhappy. A man who says: ‘now I am happy’, is between two sorrows – past and future. This happiness is mere excitement caused by relief from pain. Tue happiness is beyond compare.

Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. It is best expressed negatively as: ‘there is nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to worry about’. After all the ultimate purpose of meditation is to reach a point when the conviction, instead of being only verbal, is based on the actual and ever-present state of being free of clutter; of memories and expectations. It is like the joy of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.

The choice of oneness is blissful – B’Gita Ch: 9

What remains to discover is that the immensity of the universe is in reality in the boundless heart of the Universal, where lies the source and purpose of existence, the secret of suffering, and life’s redemption from ignorance.

Your true home; the true heart empty of all content; empty of all fears, desires, expectation, pain and suffering. You face emptiness cheerfully when you go to sleep. You can discover this for yourself when ‘fully awake’, a state of wakeful sleep, observing but not attached, and you will find it quite in harmony with your real nature. A kind of joyful bliss. Words can only give you the idea and the idea is not the experience. True happiness has no cause; not dependent on anything or anyone but itself for happiness, and what has no cause is immovable, which does not mean it is perceivable as pleasure.

The state of freedom from sorrow can be described only negatively. What is perceivable is pain and pleasure. To know happiness directly you must go beyond the addiction to causality, to things, people and events, expectation, and the tyranny of time.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 123.  The Eternal Self, and the Tyranny of time:

 No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change: Thy pyramids built up with newer might to me are nothing novel, nothing strange; they are but dressings of a former sight.

Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire what thou dost foist upon us that is old; and rather make them born to our desire, than think that we before have heard them told.

Thy registers and thee I both defy, not wondering at the present nor the past, for thy records and what we see doth lie, made more or less by thy continual haste.

This I do vow and this shall ever be; I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

.

ram <contact and further information>

March 2016

‘All things emerge and exist by nature’s qualities, and perish by themselves subject to no plan or purpose but for nature’s flow toward harmony and rest. All parts are one with all. To know the part is to know all as the chariot is one with all its parts’. All parts depend on the Central-Hub, the Golden-Mean, for its manifest existence. ~ Tao-Te-Ching

All is Nature’s great show. A universal field in action, the flow and maintenance of harmony and peace. It is ineradicable.  Once understood and fulfilled all concern ceases. Physical life becomes effortless, below the level of attention.

The world of form and substance, visible and invisible to the mind, consciousness and senses, and the laws and qualities of nature are rooted, formed and nourished in the field of the unmanifest. It is as if as a thought, a vision emerging in the mind as the need arises yet the mind is untouched; a cloud emerges in the sky, the sky untouched.

‘All action is driven by the laws of nature’ – B’Gita Ch: 13

We live according to nature’s bequest of qualities and instincts – B’Gita Ch: 4

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All action is the play of form by the will of nature in harmony with its qualities. The Eternal, from which all arises, free of duality takes no sides, and the balance is naturally sustained.

In keeping with eternal law all things are born, rise and flourish, share existence, decline and fade, always in relative steady balance and harmony. Divine, they return as they began as all rivers flow back to the sea. As the waves depend on the sea for existence and flow by nature’s course, yet the sea itself remains untouched; so all things depend on the One, the Universal, the source of all, for their being and non-being, their rise and decline.

No one can change the course of Nature, for it is bound by the very laws of universal governance, as it was is and always will be. Change of form, its substance and destiny may be, but the governing laws remain… mother, father, Yin and Yang – child yet to be born.

‘The universe depends on the Universal, Eternal Self for its existence. The Universal finds its enjoyment through the senses’   ~ B’Gita Ch: 15

Father, Son and Holy Ghost,  God just loves to see a show,

So much so he plays all parts.  We provide the form and make up,

and nature she conducts the show ~ ram

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Gaining existence means losing nonexistence, the formless, the unmanifest.  Existence gained brings form, visibility of beauty, fragility and decline.  As an image in nature’s field, in that field we are made, rise, flourish and fade not by will or accident, but universal law in action, and the magical path from the unmanifest to the manifest. All in accord with eternal, natural physics, natural law.

Everything conforms naturally as it should.  There are no Miracles… it is just Nature doing what it does with what is has, without deviation, and what you do every moment of your life.

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Thoughts and actions of man are dependent on the qualities of nature’s laws, and manifest as Purity, Passion and Ignorance.

• In purity, the goodness of wisdom brings happiness
• Passion in duality brings commotion, and
• In ignorance, obscuring wisdom, leads to a life of discontent.

By awaking to the light of purity, the divide between the wisdom of the true heart and the pleasures of the senses is revealed. The choiceless unconditional presence and acceptance of the ‘True Heart’ free of fear and desire, and the sensory world, the choice-full world of mind and body.

Every man faces both. ‘The mind of the wise man draws him to the good, the flesh of the ignorant draws him to the pleasant’ ~ (Katha-Upanishad). ‘Diverging roads; one called wisdom, the other called ignorance’.

‘One who is good, leaves no sign, fault or trace, yet all will follow, and none is cast away. This is named Essential Subtlety.’ Tao-Ta-Ching Ch:27

It is not hard to discern the difference when faced with difficult decisions of choice. Just ask ‘What would a wise man do?’ – By choosing an icon of wisdom outside and beyond yourself, the fears and pleasures of mind and body are, for the moment, forgotten, and the wisdom of right action is revealed. It may not be easy to follow, but you do know. It is the voice of your true heart, the wisdom of your soul. Happiness is on the other side of discipline, and skilful choice.

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‘Nature compels us to act. Worship the qualities of nature, let them be your guide, they will nourish you’ – B’Gita Ch: 3  

‘It is only the qualities that act. He who understands that, and shuns not the qualities with an attitude of indifference, attains divine nature and remains calm’. – B’Gita Ch: 14

All corporeal life and matter is so intimately linked and lives according to nature’s bequest of qualities and instincts. All is compelled to follow and act in accord with universal, natural will.

When the child in you is frustrated or denied, it kicks. Do not restrict or condemn, just look at the kicking to its cause. As painful as it may be there are no remedies but one, the search for remedies must cease. In anger or pain, just watch. Mindfulness, external but one with the event is the first step to understanding true knowledge and freedom. “The truth will set you free”. Physical events will go on but you will see that they have no more importance than dreams in sleep, or stories on a page.

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In the world you inhabit you must accept its ways, for its ways are your ways. Your needs and demands have created them. Your desires are so complex and contradictory it is no wonder that the world you create is also complex and contradictory. The good of the ‘True Heart’, your Soul, will set you free; simplicity itself. To live at-one with your True Heart is enlightened.

To know what is, you must accept what is, which can be frightening. But first you must accept yourself which is even more frightening. Your being ‘as a person’ depends on violence. Your very body is a battlefield, full of the dead and dying. Existence in separateness implies violence; manifest survival depends on it. Do you realise that as long as you choose to maintain a separate self to defend you must be violent? The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further. What helps is attentive, mindful understanding. When you see yourself as one, not separate, the will and need for violence will cease.

Look at yourself in mindfulness, do not describe yourself. This does not mean a silent mind. That may not, for you now, be possible. Words and ideas are like furniture in a room; the space around them is forever silent. You are that space, looking from within the eternal silence ~ your True Heart. Nature, form and substance will reveal itself for what it is, not what you think it to be.

‘Natural form contains complete and supreme knowledge in its leaves for those who can see. Understand one thing well, and you have arrived’ ~ (Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Look at the being you believe you are and remember – you are not what you see. High reason makes it clear ‘…that that sees cannot be that, that is seen’. ‘This I am not – what am I?’ is the movement of self-enquiry. There are no other means to liberation, all means delay. Resolutely reject what you are not, till all that is not falls away to reveal the ‘not-a-thing-ness’ of the self that you are, beyond mind, ideas and concepts.

Nature – Accept it as it is. To know what is, is to accept what is. Be still and see that all is as it should be. In this moment in time and space the entire universe is contained; holographic, every point contains the whole.  In your dream there are affections which seem real and everlasting – you love some and not others.  On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all.  Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; the true heart of love is love of all; choiceless, unconditional, all embracing.

ram <contact and further information>

April ’16

Your true heart and Soul (re chapter 19), is at the center and at one with being; about which, as the hub on a carriage, all revolves and upon which all depends; itself silent, motionless. As the content of a wave is at one with the sea upon which it depends, and so the Soul is at one with Universal Spirit… nameless, boundless and conditionless. It shines with the light of true knowledge for those with the will and sight to see, here, now, everywhere.

All as seen is joint product of matter and spirit – B’Gita Ch. 13

The wise see me as all the postures that nature can portray, animate or inanimate – B’Gita Ch: 11

Just as the sea in motion gives rise to form, the true heart in motion reaches out from the here-and-now giving rise to form, body, mind, senses and the multitude.

Our true nature is that of the soul, and is the same for all that walk the earth – pure unconditional acceptance… pure love – and exists by universal law; perfect and eternal.

“Your soul and my soul are very old friends” ~ Rumi

As a wave contains the sea, which is the same everywhere, our soul contains universal spirit which is, for all, the same.  The sea acquires the nature of the wave it inhabits but the sea itself is not changed, just as gold is not changed by the form we give it.

And so, we have a true universal nature, and an acquired nature by birth and nurture which gives us our unique individuality.

All beings are of two classes, purity and ignorance: – B’Gita Ch. 15

• Beings of purity see all as one, free of attachment, judgement and ill will, and where doubt arises lets insight and scripture be their guide.

• The ignorant suffer pain of attachment and seek to destroy the source of pain and enhance gratification of desire. Events are seen as accident or force of personal will.

Corporeal heart and mind, reaching out through body and senses favors sensory attachments through sound, sight, taste, desire and the like for favored goods; acquiring ‘personalized ideas’ of benevolence, righteousness and principle; of high and low, good and bad.

Mind-consciousness in turning outwardly in favor of sensory images, the true heart is hidden behind a veil of ignorance.  Mind through sense organs traveling far from its roots deep in the heart of all, is lost in separation, attachment, fear, opinion and judgement.  Differentiated by personalization, divisiveness is inevitable… fear and conflict the outcome.

By meditation and reflection we can begin to see and reflect the purity our true nature.  Because this is the same for all creatures, large and small, they will instantly recognise the divinity within you as it is for themselves.  This is why, when people meet an enlightened person, they feel a Devine resonance within.  They often don’t at first recognise that it is their own Divinity they see.  Those who do can have an epiphany experience, and be changed for ever.

An enlightened person sees only the divinity within all, and does not, and sees no cause to bring suffering to another living being. They live by the laws of ‘ahimsa’ – cause not to suffer; the cardinal virtue of the enlightened.

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Man has inherent faith in one of three qualities: Purity, passion and ignorance, and is made by the faith he holds – B’Gita Ch. 17

• The pure, at one with the true heart and soul, worship the true spirit.

• The passionate, driven only by sensory pleasures, worship the powers of sense, wealth and magic; addicted to acquisition and possession.

• The ignorant, driven by imagination and illusion, worship the illusory world of spirits of the dead and lower orders of nature.

The undisciplined mind in its acquisitive nature, for matter and lower orders of learning, reaches out to acquire forever more. Excess, beyond the limits of need soon turns sour and generates the false belief that still more will bring peace and happiness.

‘All true goodness stems from true knowledge. All true evil stems from ignorance. ~ Socrates

Mindful insight at one with the true heart decreases attachment, uncovers the light of true knowledge, knows the limits of passion and desire; free of excess, at one in natural balance and harmony.  Only for those with the sense, the will and the mind to see can trace the journey back to its roots, and be born again… out of ignorance into the light of truth. We are compelled by our personalized nature to act according to the way we see and interpret the world. With the mind lit with the light of truth, impersonal true knowledge, all action is natural, good and in perfect harmony.

.                   Q – How do I find my way?

.                                               A – Go back the way you came.

~ Shri Ramana Maharshi

Words of true wisdom, unclouded by ignorance, are easy to understand and perform, yet few are able to know or practice them as they are blinded by the personal, the external world; by attraction to acquired ideas and practices. All outward acquisition of form, ideas and attitude is on the surface only, temporary and inconsistent; changeable with fashion, values and attitudes, creating division of opinion and attitude.  People of true heart, at one with true knowledge are ignored, or seen as ignorant as their being is seen as opposite, contradictory.

‘To know things of false heart is wise. To know the true heart is enlightened. To conquer others is mighty. To conquer oneself is enlightened’ ~ Tao-Te-Ching

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves” ~ Edmond Hillary

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When people do not fear the outcome from acts of the false heart; of ignorance, of excess – not knowing what is enough, calamities follow.

Artificial, indirectly acquired knowledge and action is full of dreadful things – fearful choices, temples built, fear and desire for things to protect at the expense and loss of the one true home. Excessive, disproportionate worldly gain is lost.  The best way to know this, and not let the false heart take hold is to meditate with choiceless, boundless attention and reflection.

With superior wisdom, reflected from the true heart, unbound, all comes naturally without personal administration – the path of intuition and discrimination. With insight, true knowledge is gained by mindful attention towards the heart and source of action. True knowledge is of that which does not change; timeless, universal. Man of spiritual and physical science know this well.

Relying on the false heart for action, though appearing brave, leads to conflict and suffering. Bravery in ‘daring not to take action inspired by acquisitive desire’, the skillful, difficult path, is the road to life and well-being. Life free of attachment and expectation is loose and free. Life bound by attachment and expectation is harsh and unforgiving.

People of passion for the acquired, of things, action and lower knowledge are constantly in motion beyond the limits of need, forever seeking to satisfy endless desires with unwelcome side effects.

When the natural will of the true heart is followed, peace and growth is seen to be the natural order.  However, the majority of mankind today think that the only object of this earth-life is for the purpose of acquisition and material gain.  Order is seen through the need for control and defence, and the ‘natural goodness’ (harmony and balance) is lost.  Undisciplined, the false heart driven by sensory pleasures and its excessive nature leads to attachment, fear, brittleness and failure.

The wise nurture non-attachment; all action being natural and self-regulated. Free of attachment yet embracing all… all becomes one. All things submit; desires and fears dissolve in the blissful light of truth. Free of acquired artificial values, desires and expectations; free of control and administration, all functions naturally.  Contentment; peace of mind inspired by natural harmony is the norm.

We all experience times when mindfully, at peace of mind ‘I just know what to do’…   “I just intuitively knew…” Your inner, true heart has spoken, and you were there to hear it!

ram <contact and further information>

April’ 16

So, you take the world you see, hear and read about as real? What you see is real enough… it is your ideas about it, your own or those of others that is the trouble. You see a coil of rope in dim light and believe it to be a snake! The great illusion is when you believe what you think you see, and believe that it is separate from you, that it has its own separate identity; its own past, present and future. Non-Duality (Advaita), ‘Not Two’, is literally what it says. Apparent separation in time and space is not as you perceive it to be. What you perceive is in the mind, and you and the mind are one.

Timelessly, you inhabit a world of infinite potentiality; at the same time everything and nothing. ‘No-thing am I’. Otherwise you are bound by fixed ideas and opinions – not true!

Is time linear in the way we believe it? Like a story on a page it only appears so when the mind casts it into yesterday, today, tomorrow, beginnings and ends. Leave the page and the story is still there, timelessly present from beginning to end, all in this moment, here and now. Observe a sleeping man as he dreams. Does the dream to the dreamer take the same time to unfold as does the reality, ‘your reality’, of the world about him?

Is space dimensional as we experience it? Like an image in the mind or captured on film… it only appears so when projected into up and down, there and here, left and right. Roll up the film, store it in memory, and it is all nowhere else but here and now.

Perceived content of space and time can be likened to a holographic image. Every part, however you observe it contains every other. Cut the image into tiny pieces, and each in itself contains and displays the whole.

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We live in the world of illusion populated by opposites – B’Gita Ch: 7

All acquired knowledge is a form of ignorance. The most accurate map is yet only paper. All such knowledge, in word and form is in memory, an image remembered. Reality is beyond the divide between knower and known. In reality there is only knowing. Beyond the divide between seer and the seen… in reality there is no separation, only seeing.

You appear as a separate identity only as long as you conceive yourself to be so. In reality are you ever anything in particular? Is any part apart and separate from any other? Full of ideas and opinions, they only separate you into a world of opposites; of conflicting views and attitudes. Accept them for what they are… no more than propositions to be explored in the laboratory of life.

The world of absolute reality, onto which your mind has projected a world of conceived reality appears as independent of yourself, yet by simple reason that it is your own conception, it is yourself. Apparent, relative independence proves identity. Examine the motion of relative change and you will see; one cannot be without the other. Let go of your fixation on the particular and the possibilities, your possibilities are infinite; not bound by ideas about it.

The main point here is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, made in your image based on memories, desires and fears, and that you have bound yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.

What you perceive as knowing can only be in the mind and not in the real. Reality is not approachable as something to be known, it is already with you, and not something to reach for. The very reaching out makes you miss it. Give up the idea that you have not found it; focus all your attention to being in-the-now, and the truth will come into focus. When all that is in the mind is let go, what remains is pure awareness; pure being.

 “There is no such thing as good or bad, but thinking makes it so” ~ Wm Shakespeare

In truth, free of duality, of knower and known, seer and seen, there are no opposites. The opposite of Love is not hate for it is the heart and centre of all that is. All embracing, love has no opposite; it contains all that is and depends only on itself for existence. The opposite of Good is not bad, for in heart and mind it is itself love made visible.

Ultimately let go of all teachings, all books, anything put into words – ‘out of head into heart’, into the reality beyond words, only then can truth be revealed.

Dive deeply within yourself, your soul, your true heart, the essence of meditation, (refer Keystone Meditation) where no opinion is there to cloud your judgement… only reality. ‘Diving deeply’ is to bring all the powers of thought and mind into the present moment, away from what is not – not here… not now. Only then can you truly let-go of what is not, to reveal what is. This alone will solve all your problems, and you will find yourself in full mastery of every situation. You will not be held captive by conflicting ideas about the situation.  With all sense of boundaries and limitations gone in favour of ultimate freedom – fear, pain and the search for short lived pleasures all cease… only awareness remains.  Mind and body acts naturally, contentedly, without excess.

Do not be misled by manifestation – higher nature is above them all – B’Gita Ch: 7

Personal interest and personal concern for form and possession are the focal points of the mind in ignorance of the truth. Your daily life vibrates between desire and fear. Watch it intently and you will see how the mind conjures up innumerable names and shapes, fears and desires, like a cloud in a storm – a turbulent mind. Trace every action back to its personally centred motive, and look at the motive intently until it dissolves, bringing calm to troubled waters.

Whatever is conceived by the mind is bound to be relative and limited. The real is beyond conception and there for its own sake, and cannot be willed as something separate. What else but the inseparable-self is worth wanting? Undivided, it is where absolute peace and contentment is found. Granted, the real cannot be wanted as a thing is wanted. But by seeing the unreal as unreal, the letting go happens all by itself – no effort on your part. It is by the dissolution of what is not, the unreal, that the way is opened.

ram <contact and further information>

Apr’ 16

You fear the unknown, of imagined threats that you believe are outside of you, out of your control. Yet your own body, too, is full of mysteries and dangers… yet you are not afraid of it for you take it as a world of your own. But what you do not realise is that the entire world and the universe you perceive is a world of your own making; of what you make it to be. Let go of any idea of control – you were never in control – nature controls itself, quite perfectly, and in perfect harmony. You would only get in the way.

You may say you have two bodies; the personal of many parts, and the universal. The personal, born and dies every moment, comes and goes and bound to change. But the universal, behind, now and beyond is always with you… as you are; part and one with life’s great flow. You are so blinded by what is personal that you do not see beyond it; a blindness that will not end by itself – but by your hand, skilfully, deliberately. When the illusion of duality is understood and abandoned you know yourself, at-one, in free and perfect state. All ideas of separation, between the personal and universal are no more.

Pain is physical, suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is merely a signal that the body is in danger and requires attention. Similarly, suffering warns us that the structure of fixed ideas, memories and habits, which we call the person, is in threat of loss or change. Most, if not all suffering is in the desire and stress of wanting… to be somewhere else. Pain, the call for attention, is essential for the survival of the body; nothing compels you to suffer. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of your unwillingness to let go, to move on, to flow with life.

You may believe that you are mentally and physically at peace, but this may not be the ultimate state. To know yourself is to be at-one. You will recognize that you have returned to your natural state by a complete absence of desire and fear. After all, at the root of all desire and fear is the feeling you are incomplete, fear of loss, and far from home. In true love’s embrace, do you not feel at home, at one, and complete?  At-one with yourself and the eternal flow of life, you have no need beyond that which you are.

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All self-concern is a symptom of mental distortion which disappears as soon as you discover you never left home in the first place. You may find that the search for home and all the challenges that go with it is like climbing a mountain, only to find when you get there, the mountain is not, and never was.

You can learn to accept both pleasure and pain as they come, embracing both while they last, to let them go as they must. Physical pain calls for attention. The bliss is in the conscious acceptance and in awareness of it, in not shrinking or in any way turning away. All happiness is rooted in boundless awareness. The more we live in awareness, unbound, unattached, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance – these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.

In our ignorance pleasure is readily accepted, while all the powers of mind and body reject pain. As the acceptance of pain is the denial of the illusory mind, and the mind stands in the way of true happiness, the wholehearted acceptance of pain releases the springs of happiness. The great joy of adventure and discovery depends on it.

In boundless awareness, unattached, observer only, you will not suffer. You will see the world as a show, a most entertaining show indeed. The cause of suffering is in the attachment of the perceiver with the perceived. Out of attachment desire is born, and with desire blind action – seeking to preserve and gain. Look around and you will see – suffering is a man-made thing. We look around and see the suffering of others. Descriptions are many and contradictory, but in reality all is one, complete.

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Reality is simple – all at one – harmony is the eternal law, nothing compels you to suffer. It is only when you try to describe and explain that you find that it is beyond separation, beyond words. There is only the source, the route of all being, dark in itself yet making everything shine. Unperceived it causes perception. Unfelt it causes feeling. Unthinkable it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. Like a screen in a cinema, it is the immovable background of motion which are but fleeting images playing on the screen of the mind. Once you are there, and know yourself… you are at home everywhere. Reflect back on your life for a moment… while your body, mind and the world around you has gone through many changes, the you that you are is just the same as it ever was.

ram <contact and further information>

Revised July ’16

The whole universe is geared together like an infinitely complex, unfailing mechanism; all in perfect harmony.  Eternal, uniform laws govern the whole, and by the law of eternal Karma all affects all in constant action and reaction… at one with the boundless river of life, flowing inexorably through time and space.

‘All action is driven by the laws of nature’ – B’Gita Ch: 13

Nature’s laws are incontrovertible, unchangeable and eternal.  We depend on it for our learning, understanding and growth.  Causal relationship helps us to see structure rather than separate unrelated events.

As a finely balanced clock with its parts, this infinite universe with galaxies, stars and planets down to the most microscopic elements, we are interdependent and at-one with everything – all governed by natural law.

By the forces of natural will, fire gives out heat, rivers flow to the ocean; the pull of desire, and repulsion by fear of mind and body is directed energy… from highest to lowest.  We are compelled by the will and flow of nature, ‘Nature’s Destiny’ to find the shortest route… to fulfilment, balance and harmony, all in perfect union.

‘It is only nature’s qualities that act.  He who understands that, and does not shun the qualities with indifference, attains divine nature and remains calm’. – B’Gita Ch: 14

There are no miracles independent of the laws of nature.  What may appear so is just ignorance.  We can debate or deny God or Gods, ground Zero, the primordial source of creation and its manifestations, the children of the Gods.  But the laws by which this moment is governed, in space and time and all it contains, is undeniable… it is the ‘Holy Ghost’ of the physical universe.

Without universal constants – predictabilities found through experimentation and discovery – the products of science, engineering and architecture would not be possible.

As for our actions… we cannot help but act according to our beliefs, the way we see our world, and the will for survival, pleasure and happiness.  The criminal acts because that is the way he sees his world, and acts by his will, his desire for survival.  He may be bound (punished) by society as a consequence; lessons to learn for protection of himself and others – just as wild animals are separated for the good of all.  No one to condemn or forgive… just cause, action and consequence.

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We unwittingly believe ourselves to be separate and individual, at the root and cause of our own destiny.  Our ‘ego mind’ talks to us constantly – ‘I did this’, ‘I did that’… but we are far from independent of the universe of cause and effect that flows through, and with us, in orchestral harmony.  Nor are we independent in our actions or intent.  In reality we are as one, at one with all, acting in consequential cause and effect.

Matter, life and spirit are bound together as one, a vast river flowing through time and space, vibrant in its nature, consistent in action and enduring in its being… ignorance of this fact does not change it.  In our ignorance we are innocent; in our actions we are part and one with nature’s great flow – however we may perceive it – not good… not bad.

So, what of ‘free-will’? For independence of will, our so called ‘free-will’, would require independence of being, with independent power.  As a river takes the shortest route to the ocean, its power granted to it by gravity, lay of the land and the natural forces of nature… and so it is are we.  No one can see and act beyond options found, choices understood.  Nature compels us to see and take the choice we understand.  You could say ‘yes, but we are conscious, we are free to choose’, but are we really free to choose the choice we make?

You might say ‘Ah, but we have independent thought and will, which gives us choice of direction.’  Is it really independent of ideas and thoughts that led up to it?  Our thoughts are also integral, inseparable, with all there is.  And how about the will to know and grow, fear and the will to defend… the will to find a better way? That is just the product of nature in action.

Yes we have will, but it is in no way free from circumstance that compelled it.  It cannot choose beyond that granted by nature, any more than a river can choose direction of flow, compelled by nature’s gravity and the lay of the land.  Our choices and preceding actions are simply Karma in action.  Yes, we appear to choose, but are we really free to choose the choice we make?  The way of this moment exists only because of everything that is before, within and without, in complete union.

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So, why are we so compelled to believe in free-will? – Our ego, all that we associate with our name and form, ideas, beliefs and expectations, is built on sensory desires and a perception of independence in a world of duality.  It is in our nature to want to grow, possess, and preserve the form in which we find ourselves.  Ideas of independent freedom is driven by personal desire and fear, which, in turn, is driven by memory and expectation – rarely true, and rarely fulfilled.

Our desire to be in control of our life and all it contains is quite natural – without it our survival would not last. We naturally feel compelled to want control over adversity and change… the fight to be in charge of our own destiny – the beginning and end of all our troubles.

 ‘A BELIEF IN FREE WILL touches nearly everything that human beings value.  It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions’.                   ~ Sam Harris

Much of our life is spent trying to be somewhere else.  However, by consciously willing to be here, now, and go with the flow a great burden is lifted with a feeling of great freedom.

We could have been much happier people ourselves, but for our self-interest, leading to indifference to the sufferings of others; for we share their suffering – it is as much ours as it is theirs.  The belief that we are the primary cause of our actions makes things personal, self-centred, and burdens the actor, not the act, with the weight of pride or guilt.  ‘I did this’ or ‘I did that’ is one of the last bastions of ego to fall before enlightenment can dawn.

Only by freedom from ideas of personal ownership, attachment and expectation can we know true freedom – freedom from ourselves, and our notion of possession and attachment.  To willingly go with the flow, along with the forces within and without.  What flows along with us is there for as long as is needed.  Clouds in the sky, corn in the fields, fish in the sea, they do not fight the wind or the flow of water; they join the dance in free and graceful motion with it.

Free of any idea of independence does not mean we would not act.  The natural will of mind, body and community compel us to act – options found, choices made compelled by nature.   “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…”

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Giving up the notion of free-will, far from limiting us, leads to a life of freedom and adventure.  All expectation is replaced by curiosity, adventure, discovery and learning.  As a play on a stage, all great stories are full of surprise and discovery.  If you could choose and know the outcome, how much fun is that?  It is not to say we cannot change, it is precisely how we do change – by natural curiosity, observation, trial and learning.  New and enlightened understanding leads to a natural change of intent and action… it is nature’s way for us to find a better way to peace and harmony.

We err without knowing and suffer without understanding.  Our only hope: to stop, to look, to understand and to get out of the entrapment of memory, attachment and expectation.  Our fixations contaminate imagination like a virus, generating desire, expectation and fear.

Only by the light of truth and understanding do we change our ways.  Mindful action – reflection and insight – brings understanding and enlightened action.

Just watch, discover and learn, in mindful attention, the direction of your actions driven by the power of will, will naturally change – a better course towards our natural destiny.  In ignorance it is our lot that we continue to repeat the errors of our ways, until mindfulness in action finds a better way. This was well elaborated in the film – ‘Groundhog Day’.

Visions and goals cease to be expectations, but simply a guiding light for alignment, direction and discovery.  Until we accept nature’s laws, and trust its reliability, our journey is full of error.  However, trial, error and discovery is the foundation of our growth.  To our limited minds, natures laws appear so complex that at the very best, expectation can only ever be within tolerable limits, otherwise no building would stand, or planes fly.  Such constructions were naturally full of error until sufficient lessons learned.  The same is true as we break through new boundaries in our understanding.

Free from the idea that we have independent choice we expect nothing but what is; blame no one for the outcome and let consequence be our guide.  Forgiveness is not required, of oneself or others, as there is no blame assigned, only cause and consequence.  It may be painful, but the burden of self-guilt is instantly lifted… it has nothing to attach itself to. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The mother lays fault with the act and not the child and loves him/her no less.  No personal judgement, but the search for meaning and understanding.  Through lack of understanding, the child may err with painful consequence.  That does not say the child is to be judged bad.  Badness does not belong to the child, but to the cause, action and consequence.  Imagine if that was the social norm?  Error is simply a voice to be heard and lessons to be learned.  Crime is seen as misguidance of mind or illness to be resolved.  Punishment is seen as a natural consequence; lessons to learn, and not some kind of personal damnation.  Solutions are found in a world of education, understanding of consequence or the vagaries of mind.

Free of the personal and its attachment, judgement and condemnation is replaced by tolerance, understanding and kindness.  In developing relationships a great kindness is to give each other the space to ‘screw up’ and learn from the experience.  Fear of ‘screwing up’ binds one to a life of expectation and misery.  Tolerance brings us closer together.  If the tolerance required is found to be beyond our nature to cope, then it may be time to learn from the lesson and move on… with love and understanding.

To know this; to willingly, consciously, go with the flow is enlightened action; each spark of life, at one with, and playing its part, in this great universal orchestra.

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When we become more enlightened to options and consequences, good and bad, greater goodness in our actions naturally follow.  Self-judgement is replaced by self-discovery and enlightenment.  The burden of guilt falls away and we are free to love without condition, share without expectation.  That does not say that you stay with unhealthy circumstances – you still separate yourself from it as best you can, as is natures will – for you and universal nature are at-one.

To follow the good takes great courage, and know that it is good for all.  By the light of understanding the courage follows to do what is right.  And what of courage?  …it is simply ‘the power and direction of the will that follows understanding.  And understanding?  Well, just watch, listen, and pay attention, along with the presence of wise counsel in good company.

The message for the enlightened coach and counsellor is that we are all fundamentally looking for happiness and peace of mind. We all inwardly know the way. With love, care and patient understanding, natural-will guided by mindful-insight will find its way.

Pay attention, learn, understand, and ‘Go-with-the-flow’, and a great burden is lifted.

ram <contact and further information>

Revised  July 2015

Disease, for the most part, is simple, and the remedy equally simple.

It is your mind that makes you insecure, unhappy and unwell.

Expectation and anticipation makes you insecure, memories and toxic thoughts make you unhappy and unwell.

When misuse of your mind stops, all will be well with you.

ram <contact and further information>

Jan’ 2016

The universal is not known until the visible world is cast asunder by the sharp edge of wisdom. From this knowledge there is no return. – B’Gita Ch: 15

Any statements and ideas held in memory, heard, read or seen, is not true knowing. Such knowledge is on the surface only. It is but a tangled web of information cluttering the mind; a stored and dark residue after its useful truth has been absorbed. The truth of eternal beauty made visible from moment to moment, ever fresh… ever new, as flowers in bloom, waves on the sea or snowflakes in winter. As useful as they may be, the residue of formative memories are for passing reference, and not for residence.

Anyone who has learned to ride a bicycle knows that the discovered knowledge of riding goes far beyond instruction and information about it.  True knowledge goes beyond memory – it is knowing and permanent.  Words may guide you, but they can’t go with you.

True knowledge is hidden behind a cloud of memories, above, beneath and beyond… eternal – unchangeable, waiting to be discovered. It is not held in memory which is at best an acquisition of ideas which we may call being ‘learned’. Understand the difference between learnedness and real knowledge. Understanding is not held in memory. True knowledge is knowing, understanding. It is direct, non-verbal.  A degree in flight technology does not make you a pilot.

Understand one thing well leads to truth – B’Gita Ch: 7

Higher knowledge is of the root of all that is, the eternal and unmanifested. The being of being, where the source of all is known directly. Lower knowledge is of the eternal natural laws that govern all that appears to be. Men of true Spiritual and Physical science know this well.

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Before you can know anything directly, nonverbally, you must know the knower. So far you took the mind to be the knower, but it is just not so. The mind clogs you up with images and ideas, which leave scars in the mind. You take remembering to be knowledge. True knowledge, ever fresh, new, wells up from within. When you know what you are, you also are what you know. Between knowing and being, there is no gap.

Knowledge sees all as one, Passion sees all as separate; Ignorance clings to one idea – B’Gita Ch: 18

You look around without understanding and take appearances for reality. Ignorance of reality is the cause of inevitability – ignorance of yourself, and the true nature of things, their causes and effects. You believe you know the world and yourself – but it is only in ignorance that makes you say: I know. Begin with the admission that you do not know and start from there. The very admission: ‘I am ignorant’ is the dawn of knowledge. An ignorant man is ignorant of his ignorance.

You can say that ignorance does not exist, for the moment it is seen it is no more. Therefore you may call it unconsciousness or blindness. Of all you see around and within, you know little and do not understand without even knowing that you do not know and do not understand.

You need not know all. It is enough to know what you need to know.  At every moment you will know what you need to know for the next, the rest can look after itself without your knowing how it occurs. Just like a Satnav, you only need to know the next ten yards, any more is just noise.  What is important is that your unconscious does not contest the conscious.  In peace-of-mind there is integration on all levels.

To know is not so very important. To know that you do not know and do not understand is the doorway to true knowledge, the knowledge of a humble heart. The fact is that knowledge is of ignorance only. Know that you do not know as a thing is claimed to be known.

‘I am’ and ‘the world is’ are related and conditional. They are due to the tendency of the mind to project names and shapes. As a person, your existence is momentary. But are you a person only? Are you a person at all? Your very being is the only reality. The truth cannot be experienced as if something separate from you to be experienced. We are like a child that says: Prove the sugar is sweet, then only I shall have it. The proof of the sweetness is in the mouth, not in the sugar. To know it is sweet you must taste it, there is no other way. Then only all doubts dissolve and your knowledge becomes first hand and unshakable.

The truth will only be revealed one step at a time. It is like climbing a tree in the dark – you can get hold of the next branch only when you are perched on the previous one. In science it is called the experimental approach. To prove the theory you carry out an experiment according to the operational instructions left by those who have made the experiment before you. In the spiritual search the chain of experiments one has to carry out is called Yoga.

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He who understands gains wisdom – B’Gita Ch: 15

There is nothing that can help the world more than you putting an end to ignorance. Then you need not do anything in particular to help the world; your very being is a help, action or no action. Once you are inwardly integrated, outer knowledge comes to you spontaneously.

In awareness, at every moment of your life you know what you need to know. In the ocean of the universal, all knowledge is contained. It is as you are, and yours on demand. Most of it you may never need to know – but it is yours all the same.

Conscious awareness is power; awareness of what needs be done… will be done. ‘My Will be done’.

As with knowledge, so it is the power follows. Whatever you know to be done happens unfailingly. No doubt Nature, the right hand of the Universal, attends to the business of managing the universe, and with your help. When the helper is knowing and intelligent all the powers of the universe are there to command. Even the powers of nature for they are not blind to your presence.

 He who sees non-action in action and action on non-action is wise – B’Gita Ch: 4

Be alert, quiet, and attentive. Once you discover and know your real nature your existence becomes a blessing to all, for that you are. You may not know, nor will the world know, yet the help radiates.

There are people in the world who do more good than all the statesmen and philanthropists put together. They radiate light and peace with no intention or knowledge. When others tell them about the miracles they worked, they also are wonderstruck. Yet, taking nothing as their own they are neither proud, nor do they crave for reputation. They are just unable to desire anything for themselves, nor the joy of helping others. Knowing that ‘ALL’ is good they are at peace.

ram <contact and further information>

Jan’ 2016

In wakeful consciousness you can observe what you can see, touch, feel and think.  But the observer, you, cannot observe itself, yourself.  You can only know yourself by direct insight, and not by any observation, which can only observe that which is not the self-observing.  Any part that you can observe, tangible or intangible, cannot be of yourself. Denied to observable boundary, “I know that I am” is the only true, unchallengeable statement you can make. You are what you are, and all you observe is not. The self is known as being, the not-self is known as transient.

In reality all is in the mind. The observed, observation and observer are mental constructs. The self-alone is. Realise that whatever idea you have of yourself is just a stream of events; that while all happens comes and goes, you alone are the changeless among the changeful, the self-evident among the inferred. Free the observed from the observer and abandon false identity in sacrifice to reality.

Eternal spirit dwells in all neither with nor without form – B’Gita Ch: 13

The perception of separateness of form yet bound and dependent is not real. Do not be misled by words – one word may convey several and even contradictory meanings. The ‘I’ that appears to pursue the pleasant and shuns the unpleasant is in error; the ‘I am’ that sees pleasure and pain as one, inseparable, sees rightly. The witness who appears to be enmeshed in what he perceives is the person; the witness who stands aloof, unmoved and untouched is the watch-tower of the real. It is the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested, contacts the manifested. There can be no world without the witness; there can be no witness without the world.

I am no thing and yet everything, visible and invisible, I am cause but not bound by action – B’Gita Ch: 9

Without beginning or end, I am all without bound – B’Gita Ch: 10

The ‘I am’ and the ‘Self’ are neither one nor separate.  Without one, the other cannot be.  Yet they are not one.  It is like the flower and its colour.  Without flower – no colours, without colour – the flower remains unseen.  Beyond is the light, which on contact with the flower creates the colour.  Realize that your true nature is that of pure light only – pure awareness – and both the perceived and the perceiver come and go together.  That which makes both possible and yet is neither is your real being, which means not being a ‘this’ or ‘that’, but pure awareness of being and not-being.  When consciousness is turned on itself, awareness shines, and the feeling is of not knowing.  When Awareness is turned outward, the knowable consciousness comes into being.  To say: ‘I know myself’ is a contradiction in terms for what is ‘known’ cannot be ‘myself’.  There is no separation between the mind that experiences, and that which is experienced, as the two are one.  The mind insists in seeing duality where there is none… ‘That I may know myself’.

I am not bound by time, no beginning, middle or end – B’Gita Ch: 11

The Enlightened is not a person in your sense of the word, though he may appear a person to you. He is that infinite ocean of awareness in which all happens. He is also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. There is nothing he feels separate from, hence he is all. No thing is he, so he is nothing. The same power that makes the fire burn and the water flow, the seeds sprout and the trees grow, makes him answer your questions. There is nothing personal about him, though the language and the style may appear personal. A person is a set pattern of desires, thoughts and resulting actions; there is no such pattern in His case. There is nothing he desires or fears – how can there be a pattern?

Spirit is timeless, indestructible, not borne nor dies, the sward cannot cut it’ – B’Gita Ch: 2

Universal self not bound by birth or death and source of all creative forces – cause/effect – B’Gita Ch: 8

Body of man and matter is the playground of the self – B’Gita Ch: 13

It may appear that you were born into the world that was there before your birth, but to be born means to create a world around yourself as the centre. But do you ever create yourself? Or did anyone create you? Everyone creates a world for himself and lives in it, imprisoned by one’s ignorance, of personally created boundaries. All we have to do is to deny reality to such boundaries. The seed of the world may appear to exist before the child is born but the seed actually exists with him who is the witness of birth and death, but is neither born nor dies. He alone is the seed of creation as well as its residue. Don’t ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind. Direct experience is the only valid confirmation.

ram <contact and further information>

Jan’ 2016

The Wise see neither sin nor sinner, and is not bound by valuations and distinctions. Everyone, and every-thing behaves according to his/her, its nature.

Opposing forces are seen as they are, not good or bad – just forces of opposites taking part in nature’s play. It cannot be helped, nor need it be regretted.

Life lives on life, a battleground between birth, survival and death, and by its very nature the process is compulsory; in society we choose, and in that choice by Nature we are compelled. Look at the body, in birth, life and death… it is itself a battleground of dead and dying, yet we do not condemn it.

Sin is in mind and body, in the nature of ignorance… the refusal to let go, refusal to sacrifice attachment. And in that refusal invites death… by holding on to the past, and that which does not belong.

This is as it is and gives no cause for condemnation or pity. Into ignorance we are borne, and out of ignorance we grow on the path of enlightenment. It is Nature’s way… our way. Enlightenment is inevitable; you can slow it down, divert its path, but it cannot be stopped.

There can be no life without sacrifice, just as the past must be sacrificed for the present, childhood for adulthood, caterpillar for butterfly. It is the call of peace and enlightenment: ‘Let go, Let go… be-here-now’

Sin, in the mind of the ignorant, when ignorance (the mother of sin) dissolves the compulsion to sin again ceases.

The wise can do no harm. It is not in their nature.

With ignorance coming to an end, things are then seen as they are, at-one… boundless, choiceless, and it is good.

ram <contact and further information>

Feb’ 2016

The conscious mind is interested in space, time and boundaries, and what happens. Consciousness is like a cloud in the sky and the water droplets are the content.  Whereas awareness is boundless, beyond the mind… as the infinite sky is boundless, beyond cloud and content, awareness is beyond mind and consciousness, dependent on nothing but itself. ‘Not alive, for it does not change – not dead for it is aware’.  ‘Mind Consciousness’ and ‘Spiritual Awareness’ – a bridge the mind cannot cross.  As clouds depend on the sky for existence, consciousness is dependent on Awareness, and not the other way around.

As clouds need the sun to become visible, so consciousness needs being focussed in the light of awareness.  When content is viewed from beyond the boundaries of consciousness, all duality along with likes and dislikes, good and bad, falls away – this is awareness.

“Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, and unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. Consciousness is partial and changeful, awareness is total, changeless, calm and silent. And it is the common matrix of every experience.” ~ Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj

But still there is a difference between awareness as reflected in consciousness and pure awareness beyond consciousness.  Reflected awareness, the sense ‘I am aware’ is the witness, while pure awareness is the essence of reality.  Reflection of the sun in a drop of water is a reflection of the sun no doubt, but not the sun itself.  Between awareness reflected in consciousness as the witness, and pure awareness, there is a void beyond the reach of mind and consciousness.

Clearly, a quiet mind is not a dead mind.  Awareness in the waking state differs from deep sleep only by the presence of the witness.  A ray of awareness illumines a part of our mind and that part becomes our dream or waking consciousness.  Awareness appears as the witness beyond name and form.  The witness is merely a point in awareness.  It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew.  The dew-drop has name and form, but the infinitesimal point of light is caused by the sun.  The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself.  Similarly, clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient.  There must be reality beyond it.  Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions.

Meditation consists in the witness turning back first on consciousness, then upon self in awareness.  Self-awareness is Yoga.  The Enlightened mind commands a mode of spontaneous, non-sensory perception, which makes things known directly, without the intermediary of the senses.

The Enlightened is beyond the perceptual and the conceptual, beyond the categories of time and space, name and shape.  Neither the perceived nor the perceiver, but the simple and the universal factor that makes perceiving possible.  Reality is within consciousness but it is not consciousness or any of its contents.

Bringing duality to questions where there is none only brings confusion to understanding.  There is the body and there is the Self.  Between them is the mind, in which the self is reflected as ‘I am’.  Because of the imperfections of the mind, its crudity and restlessness, lack of discernment and insight, it takes itself to be the body, not the self.  All that is needed is to purify the mind so that it can realize its identity with the Self.

When the mind merges in the self, the body presents no problems.  It remains what it is, an instrument of cognition and action, the tool and the expression of the creative fire within.

Memory, Wisdom and discrimination owe their origin in the universal – B’Gita Ch: 15

The ultimate value of the body is that it serves to discover the cosmic body, which is the universe in its entirety.  As you realize yourself in manifestation, you keep on discovering that you are ever more than what you have imagined..

ram <contact and further information>

Feb’ 2016

This chapter expands on the views raised in chapter 12 – ‘What Am I’, then to ‘How do I know myself?’   The very quest to ‘know myself’ is a contradiction of terms.  As a question from the point of view of duality it is like asking an ‘eye’ to see ‘itself’.  The self that you are cannot be seen as something separate, apart from the self to be known.

Are you made of several selves, that one can know another?  Let go of any ‘ideas’ about yourself as something that can be studied and known.  Anything that can be in any way observed cannot be the self, the ‘I am’ that is seeing.  ‘Not this, not that’ is the movement of ‘self-enquiry’.  Letting go of all that is not ‘the self’, the truly real, leads to unbounded ‘knowing’; the eternal, formless, boundless presence; the one without a second.  That you are is unquestionable… however, to realize that, that you are is the greatest prize of all.

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Perhaps you take the thoughts, mind and body as the ‘self’ that you want to know. How can that be known? Only the changeless can be known.  What you were a moment ago is no longer that in a moment hence. The mind, thoughts and body are in eternal flow, an expression of life; nature playing itself out.  If you are trying to freeze and capture the flow, like trying to capture a beam of light, or a water-mill trying to capture the watery life force upon which it depends, you are doomed to restlessness.

Without knowing it your state of restlessness is really in the search for yourself; longing for the perfectly lovable. It is like a man standing in his own home and asking for the way home. In ignorance you are looking for yourself in the world of the other, of opposites and contradictions.  Pleasure and pain, good and bad, high and low, progress and regress, rest and strife – they all come and go together.  Along with the appearance of your world, a world you perceive as separate from you, so the world of opposites and contradictions will also appear.

And, it might seem that there are periods of perfect harmony, of bliss and beauty, but only for a moment; a mind’s eye glimpse of universal beauty and harmony, love made visible, as a wave on the sea, a flower in bloom, a snowflake in a winter fall.

Self-knowledge, true knowledge, is ever fresh.  It wells up from within.  When you know what you are, you also are what you know. Between knowing and being, there is no gap.  The ‘being’, life and energy of a river is in its flow, not in bits that can be caught and studied.  An aircraft depends of unrestricted flow or air beneath its wings for lift and flight.  The water mill depends on unrestricted flow for energy and drive, and so does life itself.

What is perfect returns to the source of all perfection, and the opposites play on in Nature’s playground.  It is only your mind in its attempt to capture, hold and preserve images held in memory that prevents self-knowledge.  Hearing, remembering, and verbal statements are not knowing.  Before you can know anything directly, nonverbally, you must know the knower that you are.  So far, you took the mind for the knower, remembering to be knowledge, but it is just not so.  The mind clogs you up with the fixation of captured images and ideas, which are but scars on your memory; dark clouds that hide the Sun, the light of wisdom.

In reality, there is no such thing as mind. There are ideas and some of them are wrong. Abandon such ideas for they obstruct true knowing. To test for wrong ideas they are usually of assertions, of this and that. Denials are usually right – ‘not this, not that’. Only by denying attachment, either by attraction or rejection of the particular; pure choicelessness, can one truly live. Life depends on unrestricted flow… assertion is bondage. To question and deny your tendency to reach out and grasp, or repel the particular is necessary. It is the essence of spiritual revolt, and without revolt there can be no freedom. To embrace all in choiceless, unconditional acceptance as yourself is freedom. “Love they neighbour as thyself”.

As for yourself, there is no second or higher self to search for. You are the highest self, the only self, give up the false ideas you have about yourself. Both faith and reason tell you that you are neither the body, nor its desires and fears, nor are you the mind with its fanciful ideas, nor the role society compels you to play, the persona you are supposed to be. Give up the false and the true will come into its own. You say you want to know yourself? You are yourself – you cannot be anything but what you are. Is knowing separate from being?

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Consciousness with an object we call witnessing. When there is also self-identification with the object, caused by desire or fear, such a state is called a person. In reality there is only one state; when distorted by identification with the particular; name and form, it is called a person, when coloured with the sense of being it is the witness; when colourless and limitless it is called Awareness; not bound by ideas of self. Whatever you can know with your mind is of the mind, of consciousness, not you; about yourself you can only say: ‘I am, I am aware’. The boundless awareness of pure being.

You may say that you do not know yourself, but how do you know that you do not know yourself? Your direct insight tells you that ‘I am’ that you know first, for nothing exists to you without your being there to know existence. You imagine you do not know yourself because you cannot describe yourself. You can always say: ‘I know that I am’ and you will rightly refuse as untrue the statement: ‘I am not’. But whatever can be described cannot be yourself, and what you are cannot be described. You can only know yourself by being, without any attempt at self-definition and self-description.

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You may find being alive a painful state, but you, the ‘I’, the self that you are cannot ‘be’ alive for you are life itself. It is the person you imagine yourself to be that suffers, not you. Dissolve it in awareness. It is merely a bundle of tethered ideas, of memories and habits. From the consciousness of the unreal to self-awareness – your real nature – there is a chasm which you will easily cross, once you have mastered the art of present-centred-consciousness, of pure awareness.

A person appears to come into being exactly as a shadow appears when light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure self-awareness is obstructed by the ‘I am the body’, idea. And as the shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land, so does the person appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find and lose; dancing to the pattern of destiny.

Once you have understood that you are nothing separate, perceivable or conceivable, that whatever appears in the field of consciousness cannot be yourself, you will apply yourself to the eradication of all self-identification as the only way that can take you to a deeper realization of self. You literally progress by rejection: Not this, Not that. To know that you are neither in the body nor in the mind, though in and beyond both, your very soul, is already self-knowledge.

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The personality we believe ourselves to be is just tethered experiences, reflected in memory… by identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future, eternally present, and the personality dissolves. Then, what remains? The word ‘remain’ does not apply… ‘I am’ is ever afresh, as the moments of a river in flow is ever fresh. You need not remember in order to be. As a matter of fact, before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present you mix up your being with experiencing. All you need is to detach your being from the flow of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that you will discern it as the changeless and timeless spirit and soul within all experiences. Names and forms will no longer mislead you.

Imagine a thick jungle full of heavy timber. A plank is shaped out of the timber and a small pencil to write on it. The witness reads the writing and knows that while the pencil and the plank are distantly related to the jungle, the writing has nothing to do with it. It is totally super-imposed and its disappearance just does not matter. The dissolution; letting go of personality, is followed always by a sense of great relief as if a heavy burden has been lifted.

The stage beyond the witness is like washing printed cloth. First the design fades. Then the background, and in the end the cloth is plain white. ‘The personality gives way to the witness, then the witness goes and pure awareness remains. The cloth was white in the beginning and is white in the end: the patterns and colours just happened – for a time.

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When the body is no more, the person disappears completely without return, only the awareness and the ‘Great Unknown’ remain. ‘Awareness is that which ‘Knows’. The person says ‘I do’. Now, to say ‘I know’ is not untrue – it is merely limited. But to say ‘I do’ is altogether false because there is no-body, independent of the will of nature, who does; all happens by itself, the play of nature, including the idea of being a doer. The universe is full of action without there being an actor who ‘does’.

Ref: Ch:4 Nature, accept it as it is…

‘All things emerge and exist by nature’s qualities, and perish by themselves subject to no plan or purpose but for nature’s flow toward harmony and rest.  All parts are one with all.  To know the part is to know all as the chariot is one with all its parts’. All parts depend on the Central-Hub, the Golden-Mean, for its manifest existence’. ~ Tao-Te-Ching

‘It is only the qualities that act.  He who understands that, and shuns not the qualities with an attitude of indifference, attains divine nature and remains calm’. – B’Gita Ch: 14

There are innumerable persons small and big and very big, who, through identification, imagine themselves as acting, but it does not change the fact that the world of action is one single whole upon which all depend, and affects all. The stars affect us deeply and we affect the stars. Step back from action to awareness, leave action to the body and the mind; it is their domain, and by the will of nature. Remain as conscious presence till witnessing dissolves in supreme awareness.

It is not action, but understanding that is essential. Action is only incidental. A person of steady understanding will not refrain from action. Action is the test of truth. Continuous testing is also essential. If you do not test yourself all the time, you will not be able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Observation and close reasoning help to some extent, but reality is paradoxical. How do you know that you have realised unless you watch your thoughts and feelings, words and actions, and wonder at the changes occurring in you without your knowing why and how? It is exactly because they are so surprising that you know that they are real. The foreseen and expected are rarely true.

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To attain perfection, presence of mind is all that is required. Do your work in the world as you understand it and according to nature’s bequest, but inwardly be present, and silence will follow. Then all will come to you. Do not rely on the outcome of your work for realisation… it may appear to profit others, but not you. Your hope lies in facilitating silence of mind (present centred consciousness), quietness of heart. Realised people are very attentive, very quiet.

ram <contact and further information>

Revised November 2015

There is nothing separate in the world. Look closely and you will see that there is no separation between the seer and the seen. They may ‘appear’ separate but where is appearance, but in the mind only. In seeing, both the seer and the seen are contained in it.

It is in our nature to perceive differences where there are none. The seer and the seen appear only in seeing; they are attributes of seeing. When you say ‘I am seeing this’, ‘I am’ and ‘this’ arise with seeing, not before. You cannot have an unseen ‘this’ nor an unseeing ‘I am’.

All parts are one with all. To know the part is to know all as the chariot is one with all it parts. Every part carries all parts with it. Know one thing well and you will know all.

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Thinking yourself to be the body you see the world as a collection of material things. When you know yourself as the centre of consciousness, as the hub is the centre of the wheel – still, unmoving – the universe and all it contains appears as the ocean of the mind. When you know yourself as you are in reality you know all as yourself.

In ignorance you love people and things etc. ‘for yourself’. With true love inspired by enlightened insight, you love them selflessly ‘as yourself’. All you need is a sincere longing for reality; the love of the boundless self… the determination to be free from the false notion of separation.

Without love, and will inspired by love, nothing can be done. Merely talking about reality without action is self-defeating. There must be love embracing both the person who says ‘I am’ and the observer of that ‘I am’. As long as the ‘conscious’ observer considers her/himself above and apart from the observed, the ‘lower’, ignorant-self despises and condemns it, and the situation is hopeless.

It is only when the observer accepts the observed as a projection or manifestation of him/herself and, so to say, takes the self into the Self, the duality of ‘I’ and ‘this’ goes. And in the identity of the outer and the inner the Supreme Reality is known.

This union of the seer and the seen happens when the seer becomes conscious of him/herself as the seer; s/he is not merely interested in the seen, which s/he is anyhow, but also interested in being interested, giving attention to attention, conscious of being aware. Affectionate awareness is the crucial factor that brings reality into focus.

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Man who knows that s/he is neither body nor mind cannot be selfish, for s/he has and is no-thing to be selfish for. Or, you may say, s/he is equally ‘selfish’ on behalf of everybody s/he meets; everybody’s welfare is his/her own. In ignorance, we cannot help but be selfish in defence of the part against another, and as the light of awareness grows boundaries fade and merge, and the part and the whole are one. It would not be incorrect to say ‘I am always selfish on behalf of that that I see that I am. The child is selfish for what s/he perceives as his/her own limited world. The parent is selfish on behalf of the family. The Statesman is selfish on behalf of, and in protection of the state. And the enlightened, at one with the universal, is selfish on behalf of all. It would not be incorrect to say ‘I have never done an unselfish act’, it just depends on where you see the limits of your tolerance and your boundaries.

The feeling ‘I am the world, the world is myself’ becomes quite natural; once it is established there is just no way of being individually selfish. In this sense to be selfish means to covet, acquire, accumulate on behalf of the part against the whole. There is no part to be selfish.

ram <contact and further information>

Nov’ 2015

Destiny only refers to that which has name and shape, which, while in existence is subject to change and inevitable destiny.  Since you are neither body nor mind, changeless, destiny has no hold over you. You are already complete, and completely free. A cup is conditioned by its shape, material, use and so on. The cup is dependent on the space for its utility, but the space within the cup remains free. It happens to be in the cup only when viewed in connection with the cup. Otherwise it is just space.

Imagine a room full of furniture, and you are the space around the furniture. The furniture represents your ideas and attitudes.  It is they that is subject to change and destiny, you are not. Everything depends on you for its existent identity, you do not depend on it for yours. Remove the furniture, and even the walls, and you remain boundlessly there, and available for within and without all that may arise.

As long as you appear to look out from this body and the world it contains, you appear to be the body and its contents. Without body identity you are not disembodied – you just are. Even destiny is but an idea, a content of thought. Words can be put together in so many ways but does that make any change to reality? There are so many ways to view and explain things – all sound plausible, none is true. When you drive a car, your body and its destiny is subjected to the laws of mechanics and chemistry: step out of the car and it is under the laws of physiology and biochemistry.

Asking why be born and what is life’s purpose is like asking – ‘what does it profit gold to be made into an ornament?’ The ornament gets the colour and the beauty of gold, gold is not enriched. Similarly, reality expressed in form and action makes it meaningful and beautiful. The eternal self gains nothing through its expression, nothing whatsoever but it is in the nature of love to express itself, to affirm itself, to resolve difficulties. Beauty is but love made visible. Once you have understood that the world is love in action you will look at it quite differently.

It is easy to be misled by purpose as an aim to be more than you are; for beauty or perfection; that implies a sense of imperfection, a need for change. Would you say that a flower is trying to be beautiful? It is beautiful by its very nature. It is perfection itself, not an effort at perfection.

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It is an error to believe that what is good or bad is to do with what is pleasant, or unpleasant. Karma, or destiny is an expression of a beneficial law: the universal trend towards balance, harmony and unity.  At every moment, whatever happens now is for the best.  It may appear painful and ugly, a suffering bitter and meaningless, yet it is the governance of Nature’s balance in action.

Beyond happiness, the true universal nature of love wants growth, the widening and deepening of consciousness and being.  Whatever prevents that growth is a cause of pain and love does not shirk from pain.  But first is your attitude to suffering, for at the root of suffering is the want to be somewhere else. Pain is primarily a call for attention which itself is a call for love; the great healing power of attendance.

The natural motion for balance and harmony works for righteousness, and orderly development cannot be thwarted. In ignorance any attempt to obstruct turns against itself and becomes destructive, a source of suffering. Whenever love is withheld and suffering allowed to spread war becomes inevitable. Our indifference to our neighbor’s sorrow brings suffering to our door.

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Wisdom beyond knowledge finds perfection beyond birth and death – B’Gita Ch: 14

All that lives works for protecting, perpetuating and expanding consciousness.  This is the world’s sole meaning and purpose.  It is the very essence of Yoga – ever raising the level of consciousness, discovery of new dimensions, with their properties, qualities and powers.  In that sense the entire universe is a school of Yoga.

Perfect unity is Natures Destiny and that of all living beings. For living beings the possibility becomes a certainty when the notion of enlightenment appears in the mind.  Once heard and understood that deliverance is within his/her reach, s/he will never forget, for it is the first message from within.  It will take roots and grow with inevitable conscious unity.

ram <contact and further information>

Feb’ 2016

Only by meditation am I found…

In meditation: Boundless, beyond limits… Universal Soul is the true heart of all that is – perceivable and unperceivable. So vast that no boundary contains it, so minute it has no interior or content. Without body and shape it depends on none but itself for existence. Universal centre of all yet everywhere without centre. It is home to its self, source of all and home to all.

Not alive for it does not change. Not dead for it is aware; choiceless, conditionless-awareness. Universal Soul is beyond nature, beyond description yet master of all. To say ‘The Nature of Soul’ is a contradiction of terms for no nature is contained. Words can define nothing of it but only point the way.

Universal Soul, before, now, and always is desolately comprehensive – the great paradox – eternally nothing and yet everything.  Completely and eternally baron of any form yet always in a state of infinite potentiality, where form and time has no meaning. It remains always at the beginning, through and at end of form and time, untouched, unchanged.

The functioning source of all, Universal Soul, contained in all is treasured by the good, refuge of the bad. High or low of no concern, Universal Soul, its natural place is to the benefit and nourishment of all. In emptiness and stillness finds no burden in containing all, and formless goes through any form as form is none but itself. Timeless it goes through time as time is none but itself.

Free of sentient consciousness and feelings, Universal Soul is void of purpose, yet source of all – existent and non-existent. Its universal magical function is wielded naturally and gives rise to all things yet cannot be felt; fills all yet remains full, un-being cannot be found.

Free of exterior and content, Universal Soul accomplishes all without taking action. At the touch of consciousness… Spirit and Heart spring forth with form and time the consequence.  Nature, by natural law it maintains balance in the multitude of endless tastes, desires and actions, yet tastes and desires of nothing. Universal Soul, infinite self, acts as root and gravity sustaining all in universal balance. In truth, all is none other but self.

Not seer or seen but in the seeing, not taster or tasted but in the tasting… the universal centre of all sensing. As the mirror is the universal centre between object and image yet untouched – peaceful, eternal, balance assured.

Impartial, Soul gives rise to, and embraces duality and all things without condition. In stillness is master of motion, the root serves as the source of branches and leaves, which, in themselves have no permanence.

As the sea takes on form and attributes of the waves, fills every wave to its fullest – ‘I am that I am’ – formless self without a second takes on all shapes and attributes, residing in all things without discernment, design or concern – free of them, plays every part yet takes no credit, casts no judgement; without thought is infinitely forgiving.

ram <contact and further information>

Dec’ 2015

The Soul is the content, within and without, of all form – animate and inanimate.

The Eternal Self’s affinity for the qualities of nature is reason for living in all bodies, good or evil – B’Gita Ch: 13

As the sea inhabits the waves, so Universal Spirit inhabits all form, body and mind to  the full as its very Soul, the True Heart, the central normality in all things.

Love and beauty made visible it expresses itself according to the nature of the form it inhabits. At-one and none to compare, praise or condemn, it is at peace.

Shakespeare on the Soul:  Sonnet 53

What is your substance, whereof are you made,  that millions of strange shadows on you tend?  Since everyone hath, everyone one shade,  and you, but one, can every shadow lend. 

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you; on Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,  and you in Grecian tires are painted new:

Speak of the spring and foison of the year, the one doth shadow of your beauty show, the other as your bounty doth appear;  and you in every blessed shape we know.

In all external grace you have some part, but you like none, none you, for constant heart.

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To be at one with the Soul is to be at one with all. When ‘knowingly’ at one with the Soul, the natural inhabitant and full content of all form, conscious identity stands aside. All is known directly… free of artificiality (false heart); free of unnatural, outwardly gained artificial learning, attitudes and opinions. The Soul, pure, consistent in truth, nothing divides it.

All action, at one with and inspired by the Soul is pure, is right action.  Pure by nature, the path of all action is towards balance, harmony and rest. All in conformance with natural law, eternal, no deviation is possible.

The enlightened Sage is knowingly at one with the Soul, the light of light. And all, without distinction or discrimination, turn to the light.

ram <contact and further information>

Dec’ 2015

Universal Awareness is the womb where seeds of being are planted and birth takes hold – B’Gita Ch: 14

‘All there is and its nature springs from me’ – B’Gita Ch: 10

‘I am the force within action and thought, good or bad’ – B’Gita Ch: 10

Free of time, space and condition, the magical function of infinite emptiness is wielded naturally without artificiality of design or control; free of administration. It is the true heart of all that is, the place where Yin and Yang divide; the residing places where congenital nature and life force reside… universal choiceless being. Everything to everything yet remains nothing; pure emptiness.

Out of the still, silent night the day is born. The Universal gives birth to one, in turn gives birth to two, to three, and in turn the birth of all. Not one, not two but infinite magnificence. All then flows by natural universal will without concern, condition or credit. Form and possession is gained without design or effort and functions endlessly as is nature’s course. Things rise from low, flourish and decline from high on reaching natural zenith. Free of administration all is linked in natural unity, settling in balance and harmony.

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The pull of lingering memories, of past attachments – unresolved desires and fears traps energy and manifests itself as the personal. When its charge gets exhausted the person fades with it. Unresolved desires and fears are carried on.  Self-identification with the body creates ever fresh desires and there is no end to them, unless this mechanism of bondage is clearly seen.

It is clarity that is liberating, for you cannot abandon desire unless its causes and effects are clearly seen. It is not to say that the same person is reborn – it dies for good. But subtle memories remain with their desires and fears, which supplies the energy to continue, to rise again. The real takes no part in it but makes it possible by giving it the light.

On returning to unity, passion leaves no footprint, the heart is undisturbed; the essence of life in all things. Birth and death have no meaning but eternal flow.

In reality, birthless, deathless, you were never born nor shall you die. But now you imagine that you are, that possess a body, and you ask what has brought about this state. Within the limits of illusion the answer is: desire born from memory attracts you, and makes you think as one with the body. But this is true only from the relative point of view. In fact the body and the world that contains it is but a mental condition, a dream-like state, born in ignorance, easy to dispel by questioning its reality. Whatever you may see, you might ask, ‘is this real?’… The answer is obvious… ‘It is as real as you are’.

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The lord’s prayer – translation from the Aramaic…

“Oh Thou, from whom the breath of life comes, who fills all realms of sound, light and vibration.

May your light be experienced in my utmost holiest. Your Heavenly Domain approaches.

Let your will come true – in the universe, just as on earth.

Give us wisdom for our daily need.

Detach the fetters of faults that bind us, like we let go the guilt of others.

Let us not be lost in superficial things, but let us be freed from that what keeps us off from our true purpose.

From you comes the all-working will, the lively strength to act; the song that beautifies all and renews itself from age to age.

Amên.

Sealed in trust, faith and truth. (I confirm with my entire being)

ram <contact and further information>

Feb’ 2016

If you are seeking happiness in a world defined by boundaries and limitations you are asking for the impossible. A world of sensory desires, struggles, pains and pleasures. No one can help you with that.

It is in the very nature of desire,  for acquisition, possession and fear of loss that we are trapped in the cycle of pleasure and pain.  It is the nature of objects of pleasure to be temporary and unsustainable.  You may taste moments of happiness perhaps, but it soon fades as it must.

If you seek real happiness, unassailable and unchangeable you must go beyond, be free of attachment to form, boundaries and limitations… leaving its pains and pleasures behind.

Oh how we become so attached to name and form, and the pleasures and pains it brings. Mere physical renunciation is only a token of earnestness, but earnestness alone does not liberate. There must be understanding which comes with alert perceptivity, eager enquiry and deep investigation. I can give you information but not understanding, no one but you can do that, and only through action and being awake,  present to the experience as it reveals its truth.

A righteous war ‘tween birth and death is nature’s natural flow. Pain is just refusal to accept the change and grow. – B’Gita Ch: 2

Liberation is not the result of some means skilfully applied, or of circumstances. It is beyond the causal process. Nothing can compel it; nothing can prevent it. You are free ‘here and now’. It is only the mind that imagines bondage… a mind possessed by desires, fears and expectations – the true meaning of demonic possession. Imagination, a most wondrous tool of conscious creation, there is no need, nor is it helpful to get rid of it, but that it should not possess you. A disciplined mind is like a skilled horseman taking the reins of a team of powerful horses.

Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, and let go of what poisoned it – the idea of a separate and isolated person – you just leave it alone to do its work among things for which it is well suited.

The mind held in its proper place, and on its own work – your natural calling – and in-the-flow is the liberation of the mind. The mind is the wife of the heart and the world is their home – to be kept bright, ordered and happy. Nothing but you stand in the way of your liberation, and it can happen here and now but for your being more drawn to other things. Not that you should fight with your interests. Just go with them, see through them and watch them reveal themselves as mere errors of judgement and appreciation.

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By nature, you can do no other than act according to the way you see your world and the ideas and feelings you have about it. As you see differently so your actions will naturally follow. This is the only way open to you to change… to wake up with growing knowledge of reality, a better way and the will to follow. As you see rightly all will change by itself, as it must.

Action, free of attachment delivers freedom – B’Gita Ch: 4

Going beyond leads to ‘self-surrender’; the surrender of all self-concern. It happens when you realize your true nature. Verbal self-surrender, even when accompanied by feeling is of little value and breaks down under stress. At best it shows an aspiration, not an actual fact.

With mind at peace, the light of discrimination seas right actions natural flow – B’Gita Ch: 2

For reality to be, possessive ideas of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ must go. The man who carries a parcel is anxious not to lose it – he is parcel conscious. The man who cherishes the feeling ‘I am’ is self-conscious. Such is the nature of attachments; they will go if you let them; with you only as long as needed. You need not strain towards the future – the future will come to you on its own. Just let things happen as they will. This is non-attachment – when the old is over and the new has not yet come.

The state of being afraid may be distressing but in reality there is nothing to be afraid of. Whatever you come across just go beyond and your normal natural state will reappear, in which you are neither the body nor the mind, neither the ‘me’ nor ‘mine’; a different state, a state of true liberation. It is pure awareness of being, without being this or that, without any self-identification with anything in particular, in general or in time. In that pure light of awareness there is nothing, not even the idea of nothing.

To ask about eternity, the timeless state, is a question in time about time. It is like asking about the contents of a story held in the pages of a book. Timelessness is beyond the illusion of time, not an extension in time. The dream story of an entire lifetime is held in a fragment of the mind, shared by the whole mind, timelessly, eternally present.

You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, the separation of form and its parts in time and place, to protect against collapse and extinction. Just let it flow as a play on a stage, dream in the mind or game on a board. Is there anything to survive? But you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. What you call survival is but the survival of the idea you have about yourself and your world.

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The universal hand of death devours everything in its path before creating the new – in eternal creation – B’Gita Ch: 11

Because your mind is so steeped in the habits of evaluation and acquisition, it is blind to the incomparable beauty and value that is waiting timelessly within your own heart for recognition. All you have to do is to let go of the pull of memories, fears, desires and expectations. Just keep yourself ready, in utter choicelessness. Just see the need of being naked of all possessive attachment. Don’t resist, don’t hold on to the person you take yourself to be. If you let free of your memories nothing will remain but the experience of freedom and its blessings.

Of course some memories are needed for reference to identify and guide the body, and such memories remain within your grasp when needed. To become an engineer you must learn engineering, or agriculture to be a farmer, but there is no attachment left to the body as such; it is no longer the ground for desire or fear… would it help? The people you love you only need to let go of your hold, and the rest is up to them. You may hold their interest or not… that is their concern, not yours.

The real you is timeless and beyond death.  And the body, well, it is in birth and death every moment, and will continue as long as it is needed.  Every moment a new birth, a continuous reincarnation until the need no longer arises; of fears and desires no more.  It is not important that it should live long.  A full life is better than a long life.

Just try to be, here, now… all will come – the work, the strength for work, the right motive. Must you know everything beforehand? You happily use a Satnav without needing detailed destination before you get there. Don’t be anxious about your future – be, here, now and all will fall in place. The unexpected is bound to happen while the anticipated may never come. Don’t say “I cannot control my nature”, you need not control it. It is well cared for; it is what it is. Just pay attention and all that is right will arise.

All experience is transient, a natural flow as air to wings in flight. Let go to be free bringing moments of deep insight, and know the rise of all-embracing love to purify the mind.

Without freedom you will be consumed by desires and fears, repeating them meaninglessly, in endless suffering. In truth, all desires and fears are gone, not because they were given up, but because they have lost their meaning.

By holding on to desires and fears you take on their shape. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state, formless and at peace.

The enlightened hold on to nothing and cannot be said to be conscious, but is the very heart of awareness. Clothed in space, beyond all appearance, there is no name and shape under which existence can be claimed, yet is the only one that truly is.

You imagine yourself to be a person, and you take the Enlightened to be a person too only somewhat different, better informed and happy but it is far from expressing the whole truth. Don’t trust definitions and descriptions – they are grossly misleading.   Don’t expect to be told what to do; it is ok to feel lost. As long as you feel competent and confident, which is only reinforced ideas of identity, with name and form.

Reality is beyond the reach of your mind. There is nothing wrong with worldly success; form fulfilling its natural destiny. It is your attachment to it and fear of loss that binds you.

Unless you accept inner adventure, free of expectation as a way of life, discovery will not come to you. Discovery of the centre of your being which is free of all directions, all means and ends. You must find your own way. Unless you find it yourself it will not be your own way and will take you nowhere. Earnestly live your truth as you have found it – act on the little you have understood. It is earnestness that will take you through, not cleverness – your own or another’s.

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I AM, when seen with mortal eyes, ego trembles with fear – B’Gita Ch: 11

In ignorance, the world as we see it is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone. Man, in ignorance, believes against all evidence that he is an exception, and that the world will provide him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have to give; impermanent, forever changeful it cannot give real happiness. That is up to you.

Just see this form, this person you imagine yourself to be as part of the world you see from without, for you are not the mind. After all, your only problem is your eagerness to claim attachment to, identify with, whatever you perceive as your form and beliefs. Look carefully and you will see that this ‘body’ you claim and defend is not just the physical body you seem to inhabit. It is the entire world on which you mind has built its beliefs and attachments. Let it go with the power of alert mindfulness.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, by attachment or value, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, a picture on the screen or furniture in a room, admiring and enjoying but really unmoved.

As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase. But when you know yourself as beyond space and time – in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable – no longer will fear hold over you.

There is no other remedy against fear but to know yourself as you are. In ignorance of your true self you will remain indefinitely on the personal level of desire and fear, gaining and losing, growing and decaying. A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level; the level of the personal. The very desire to live flows from your identification with the particular, and is the messenger of death; just as the longing to be happy, to be somewhere else is the outline of sorrow. Most, if not all suffering is born out of wanting to be somewhere else! Pain needs your attention, not your escape.

Unhappy with the limited, we seek happiness free of boundaries. It is there just waiting for us. Happiness is our true nature and we shall never rest until we find it. But rarely do we know where to seek it. Once you have understood that the world you believe is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears to be, you are free.

As only the river is compatible with the ocean, so only what is compatible with your real being can bring you true happiness. The world as you perceive and desire it is the very denial of truth. Keep very quiet… and watch what comes to the surface of the mind. Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown and reject it in its turn. ‘Not this, not that’ is the movement of enlightenment. Thus you come to a state in which there is no knowledge, only being, in which being itself is knowledge.

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To know by being, being beyond identity and separation of seer and the seen, is direct knowledge. Indirect knowledge is just an acquisition of ideas based on feelings, sensation and memory, proximity of the perceiver and his percept, and confined by the contrast between the two. It is the same with happiness; to be sad to know gladness, and glad to know sadness – all relative terms.

There is nothing relative in being, so no comparison is there. No friction between two can set in. True happiness is without cause, so cannot disappear from lack of stimulation. Without its opposite, even the idea of happiness loses its meaning, for unconditional peace takes its place – all in eternal, universal balance; universal harmony. True happiness is not the opposite and denial of sorrow; it includes all sorrow and suffering, all this is and is not.

Of the entire universe, being is the subtle cause. All is because you are. Grasp this point firmly and deeply and dwell on it repeatedly. To realise this as absolutely true is liberation.

All this is not so difficult to understand and practise, but you must be interested; the will to know. Without it nothing can be done. Once seen that you are a bundle of memories, ideas and expectations held together by attachment, you can step out and look from the outside. You may perceive for the first time something, which is beyond memory… that you are ‘beyond’. You cease to be a Mr/Ms-so-and-so, busy about his/her own affairs. You at last find peace; your true nature. You realize that nothing was ever wrong with the world – it is your ideas about it that caused you the problem, and now it is all over. Never again will you be caught in the meshes of fear and desire, born of ignorance.

ram <contact and further information>

Feb’ 2016

Those whose wisdom is obscured by desire worships lesser powers practising many wrights – B’Gita Ch: 7

As long as there is a body, mind and consciousness there must be desires and fears, fuelling the will toward excess and the stormy world of pleasures, pains and the flames of hell… not after or beyond life, but here and now.

However, it is neither necessary nor helpful to banish desire. It is an essential part of man’s existence and life’s longing for itself. The joy of life is found in the delicate balance between careful steps that may not reach their destination, and bold moves that overshoot their target. ‘The Art of Living’.

It is in the consciousness of man, and the flames of desire, that the possibility is found of turning to the light and joy of enlightenment.

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It is in the nature of consciousness to identify itself with the opposites. The waters of life are thundering over the rocks of objects, desirable or hateful. Be-here-now, and the presence of mindfulness will dissolve the rocks by insight. Freed of attachment to false reality, desire is given over to natural-will toward absolute harmony. The same waters will flow deep, silent and swift, in greater volume and with greater power.

Don’t be theoretical about it; give time to thoughts and consideration. If you think pain be at the root of desire, consider what is at the root of pain… ignorance of yourself. What is the root of desire…? The urge to find your-self. All creation toiles for its self, and will not rest until it returns to it. If you desire to be free, neglect not the nearest step to freedom. It is like climbing a mountain: not a step can be missed. One step less, and the summit is not reached.

Forgive me for holding on to the familiar – B’Gita Ch: 11

The cause of desire and fear is in the memory of past pains, pleasures and the will to survive and grow. Desire by itself is neither right nor wrong, it is nothing but striving for happiness. Having found and identified yourself with this body and the world you inhabit you feel lost and search desperately for the sense of fullness and completeness you call happiness. There is no great mystery about it. Conflict arises only when desire and fear refer to the same object. To put an end to desires and fears it is neither necessary nor possible to put an end to memory. The problem is the mind, its associations and attachments.

Realize that all happens in mind and consciousness. In awareness is the root, the source, and the foundation of consciousness. What you call your world is but a succession of experiences and you are what makes them conscious and yet remain beyond all experience. It is like the heat, the flame and the burning wood. The heat maintains the flame; the flame consumes the wood. Without the heat there would be neither flame nor fuel. Similarly, without awareness there would be no consciousness, nor life which transforms matter into a vehicle of consciousness.

In awareness you were before you awoke this morning. Go beyond your consciousness and you will find it. You know it already. Just do it. Go beyond; back to your normal, natural, supreme state. The light is there for you – just waiting. The eyes are there for you to see – ready.

There are no conditions to fulfil, nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive, you are beyond. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not bound by the field and its contents nor even by the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the results of your efforts – the motive, the desires, expectations, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration – all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens. As a play on a stage, know that you are above, below, beyond – and not that.

All beings go where devotion takes them – B’Gita Ch: 9

There is nothing to renounce. Enough if you stop acquiring. It is simpler than to practise renunciation, which leads to a dangerous form of ‘spiritual’ pride.

All this weighing, selecting, choosing, exchanging – it is all shopping in some ‘spiritual’ market. What is your business there? What deal are you out to strike? When you are not out for business, what is the use of this endless anxiety of choice?

Restlessness takes you nowhere. Something prevents you from seeing that there is nothing more you need, and a good deal less. Find it out and see its falseness. It’s like having swallowed some poison and suffering from unquenchable craving for water. Instead of drinking beyond all measure, why not eliminate the poison and be free of this burning thirst?

Desire or hate of sensual gain can only lock the gate – B’Gita Ch: 3

By attachment, wisdom is lost in ignorance, pleasure, pain and suffering – B’Gita Ch: 5

Whenever a thought or emotion or desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn from it. This has nothing to do with effort, just look beyond. This is not to say ‘suppress the feeling’, just re-direct attention, be here, now and the beyond will come to you.  Look between the thoughts rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every person you meet – you just find your way between. If you fight, you invite a fight, but when you do not resist, you meet with no resistance. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

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To be free of the mind it may seem to take great time, but in reality no time is needed. All you need is to be in dead earnest. Here, it is the intent, and will that is the deed. If you are sincere, you have it. After all it is a matter of attitude. Nothing stops you from being enlightened here and now, except fear. You are afraid of being impersonal, of impersonal being. Imagine falling off a cliff, and everything is falling with you… no bottom nor top any more, nowhere to fall to. It is all quite simple. Beyond your desires and fears, the thoughts they create, and you are at once in your natural state.

The desire for truth is the highest of all desires yet itself will eventually go, for once found all is found and no desire remains. There is nothing outside of yourself to be desired; you are all, all is yours. Remember that you are, this is your working capital. Rotate it and there will be much profit. A life of inner stillness can only enhance your health. Your body is food transformed. As your food, gross and subtle, so will be your health. Find yourself and be free.

ram <contact and further information>

Feb’ 2016

Action in self-awareness fuels the light of wisdom – B’Gita Ch. 4

You cannot live without action, and behind each action there is some fear or desire.

Trace the world to its source and you will find that you, the world and time are one. Find your timeless being and your behaviour will be quite different.

The battle for wisdom requires eternal vigilance and the help of the self – B’Gita Ch. 6

Whilst alive, your body attracts attention and fascinates so completely that rarely does one perceive or act according to one’s real nature. Your belief that you are the body is because you have never questioned that belief which, obviously, is born and dies. It’s like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath. The world is but the surface of the mind and in being you are infinite.

What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind. When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through it dissolves and only reality remains. This reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more tangible than mind and matter. Compared to the overwhelming actuality the world appears dreamlike and misty.

Of the drivers for action, desire fear and love – the only one true motive is love – B’Gita Ch. 3

There is nothing basically wrong with desire, nor will you act against it. Just live your life mindfully, intelligently, follow desire to its source keeping your deepest interests in mind on what you really want; not perfection, you are already perfect. Energy for right action comes from love, the core of natural will. Clarity alone is not enough, you must love to act.

Whether you plan or don’t, life goes on. But in life itself a little whorl arises in the mind, which indulges in fantasies and imagines itself dominating and controlling life. Life itself is desireless. But the false heart, the world of mind and matter, wants to continue and take charge. Therefore it is always engaged in ensuring one’s continuity, whatever that may be. Life itself is unafraid and free. As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is barred from you: The very notion of doership, of being at cause, is bondage.

Knowledge, knower and object of knowledge are the threefold incentives to act. Act, actor and instruments are the threefold constituents – B’Gita Ch. 18

By being present to the action, action becomes right action – B’Gita Ch. 3

Life’s action is now, not prepared for. Action delayed is action abandoned. There may be other chances for other actions, but the present moment is lost – irretrievably lost. All preparation is for the future – you cannot prepare for the present. Acting in the now is not much helped by your preparations. Clarity is now; action is now. Thinking of being ready impedes action. And action is the touchstone of reality.

As for courage, without love and charity, courage is destructive. People at war are often wonderfully courageous, but what of it? What you seek is to express in action what you are. For this you have a body and a mind. Take them in hand and make them serve you, not you to serve them.

Wisdom and right action is one – B’Gita Ch 5

The most improbable happens when human will and love, in alignment, pull together. Such is the magic of man’s mind and heart when pulling together. First words, then silence; we must be ripe for silence. Unattached work leads to silence, for when you work free of attachment/expectation; you don’t need to ask for help.

Indifferent to results, you are willing to work with the most inadequate means. With love and care results will take care of itself. You do not care to be much gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for recognition and assistance; act with love and all will arise in good time.   You just do what needs to be done leaving success and failure to the unknown, for everything is caused by innumerable factors of which your personal endeavour is but one.

The self is a friend if he has conquered his lower nature, an enemy if he hasn’t – B’Gita Ch 6

In the work you perform, what is the need to ask for help? Work on, and the universe will work with you. After all, the very idea of doing the right thing comes to you from the unknown. Leave it to the unknown as far as the results go, just go through the necessary movements as they come to you. You are merely one of the links in the long chain of causation.

Fundamentally, all happens in the mind only. When you work for something whole-heartedly and steadily it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make things happen.

In reality nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depths there is perfect peace. All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think your-self to be this or that, all conflict ceases.

Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire of the false heart can be undone only in freedom from such desire.

Those committed to here, now, one, sacrificing all on the altar of oneness, one self, are at peace and in command of and at oneness with nature – B’Gita Ch. 9

You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions. Turn to the true hart, be hear-now, and the heart of truth will be revealed.

To be released from the bondage of duality, of the doer and the done, contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realize yourself as one with it.

It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition.

By nature’s gift, you’ll find your place as sage soldier, merchant or labourer – B’Gita Ch. 4

Act only by your nature’s gift and not the shape of others – B’Gita Ch. 3

Once you realize that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realization you identify your-self with the externals, like the body, mind, society, nation and humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear.

It is only when you fully accept your true part in the world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation and destruction that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.

The wise, though shrouded in senses, does nothing, causes nothing; knows all action and consequence is the work of nature. – B’Gita Ch. 5

Whether success or failure it is the learning that is the achievement – B’Gita Ch. 4

Accept your life as it shapes, stay where you are and look after your abode, family and community with love and care. Nobody else needs you. Your dreams of glory will land you in more trouble. Moving home and assets to a quieter location, away from the world that has bothered you so much will not help you in your spiritual quest. The least you can expect is an endless succession of visitors who will make your home into a free and open guest house.

Pleasures that first seem like poison are born of purity, first as nectar and end as poison are born of passion, that drug the senses out of folly flow from ignorance. – B’Gita Ch. 18

If you seek reality, you need a well-ordered and quiet life, peace of mind and immense earnestness. At every moment whatever comes to you unasked comes from the Unknown and will surely help you, if you make the fullest use of it. It is only what you strive for out of your own imagination and desire that gives you trouble.

The wise do not let desire or fear affect whether they act or not. For he who renounces expectation, there is no fruit of action. Bound to the fruit of action is capacity for evil. – B’Gita Ch 18

With your identity arising in consciousness, the ideas of what you are arises in your mind as well as what you should be and do. This is at the very root of desire and fear which brings forth action and the process of becoming this or that begins. Becoming has, apparently, no beginning and no end, for it restarts every moment.

With the cessation of desire for the particular and expectation, becoming ceases and the being this or that merges into pure being. This is not describable, only experienceable.

The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real because you think of it all the time; you are not your thoughts, just see and it will dissolve into thin mist. You need not forget; when the particulars of desire and fear end, bondage also ends. It is the emotional involvement, the pattern of likes and dislikes which we call character and temperament which create the bondage. Without such fear and desire, love of life, of righteousness and of beauty is motive enough for action. Desire gives itself up for pure, natural, universal will.

Do not be afraid of freedom from personal desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting, that truly, by losing all you gain all.

Some sages say renunciation (action that springs from desire), should be foregone. However acts of benevolence, relinquishing (surrender of the fruits of action) should not be given up for they purify the aspiring soul. – B’Gita Ch. 18

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Those seeking the Absolute only with body and mind encounter great hardship – B’Gita 12

Personal-self/Impersonal-spirit has 4 conditions:  (Mandookya-Upanishad)

1 – Looking outwards to the material condition

2 – The mental condition – perception turned inward, dreaming condition

3 – Deep sleep, no dream, free of desire, the intellectual condition in union with self, unbroken knowledge of it – the mind is illuminated

4 – The self, eternal, the most worthy of all: Not knowable by perception inward or outward. Neither known nor unknown nor the sum of all that may be known.

Like climbing a mountain to reach its pinnacle, only to find the mountain was not there as believed to be.  It was just a mental condition.

Those on the devoted path are grouped in 4 stages – B’Gita Ch: 7

1. They who suffer,
2. Those who desire knowledge,
3. They that thirst after truth,
4. They that attain enlightenment

He who does not harm will not be harmed – B’Gita – Ch: 12

Accomplishing one-self, the beginning and end of all things are known.

Go back to the root, be as one; form without shape, image without body.

To attune with one by the ‘true heart’ is to become one, of inexhaustible attraction to all, whereas attraction to things is transitory; of limited duration.

To serve all things well there is none better than to revert to natural will, gaining deep roots, firm foundation.  Live not beyond that of the natural, as things rise and fall by natural inclination – cultivating one with the true heart.  Give up the excess of acquisition driven by desires and passions which drive beyond the Natural, the central normality.  One, quiet and still, easy to grasp, naturally held; by the true heart nothing is broken or lost. Sages take care from beginning to end, fail at nothing.

Acquired learning, though at times appearing noble, only leads to artificiality.   No acquired learning can bring about being of One; it only leads to transitory pleasures, impermanence and sorrow.  Acquired and artificial benevolence, righteousness and principle through expectation and want of loyalty generate discontent and disorder.  Exploring universal things with the false heart is a kind of sickness like deducing the universe in poor light.  Only when we know the bitterness of untruth do we begin to correct it.  By the true heart, all comes naturally without administration.

With acquisition and attachment, the false heart rises and the true heart is dimmed to view and lost.  All things start tender and soft, and with the rise of the false heart end hard, brittle, fragile and die.  The unbending is easily broken. Those who know how to stop and reverse the process take the road from death to eternal life.  The false heart cannot solve its faults or rule itself.  Demanding too much, by desires and passions we keep far from the truth.  The corporeal (physical) body is limited in birth and death.  Only the true self is eternal.

Seekers of true self know and value existence.  Fear not the death of the false heart, conditions of attachment and mind, and no threat will be of concern.  Using the false heart to calm itself only causes damage.  Only stillness in tune with the central normality, the true heart, calms the waves.    Recovering the true heart requires constant stillness, and congenital nature is recovered.  In stillness, the true heart is revealed.  Rid of all attachment so driven by desire and passion, congenital nature & life force is recovered

In constant stillness, consciousness of personal existence is reduced and so are the instruments of acquired ideas.  Travelling not far on the path of death, and reversing direction leads to life.  People of Truth are simple, free of contention, always complete, nowhere to go but here, and following their natural path.  Those of understanding (not clouded by the acquired) practise regularly.  Those of ignorance, ruled by acquisition (the false heart) laugh at the idea.  If not laughed at would not be what it is.  For those of ignorance, only freedom from the acquired can help.

Those who know don’t talk.  Those trapped in acquisition need to discipline the false heart, unravel the mess, bring all as one, one with all; harmonise the six roots – eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, consciousness

At one with Eternal, the Sage holds on to the centre, the hub of all things.

The Sage knows the transforming path.  Knowing High holds on to Low, Knowing Honour holds on to Humility. Knowing the transforming path tween honour and dishonour is to know proper action.  Sailing against life current will know emptiness of One.  Knowing what enough is, where to stop, no danger is met.

As all people have the same true heart, the heart of the Sage in true alignment, touches the heart of all.  All cause of disturbance overcome – desires, passions, addictions conquered.  All will happen naturally in great harmony – knowing harmony, enlightenment follows.  Primal force is plentiful – things develop in their own, free and unrestricted course.

True and false hearts are opposite, so words spoken of the true heart are not pleasing to minds of the false.  The good have no need to strive.  Those of acquired knowledge do not know.  Those aligned of true heart need not be learned, the more they serve, the more they know, the more they have and do things well without contending for credit.

In proper alignment:

• We will not be disturbed
• The root of all things are known and their consequences
• All things flow in choiceless will, as rivers flow to the sea
• All disease loses its foundation for existence
• Free of acquired action, all happens naturally

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

He who acts by natural duty, not just dogma, ritual or passion is spiritual – B’Gita Ch: 6

By nature’s instrument, follow your duty – B’Gita Ch. 11,  Ch. 18

• Duty of the sage: serenity, self-restraint, austerity, purity, forgiveness as well as uprightness, knowledge, wisdom, and faith in God.
• Duty of the soldier: valour, Glory, firmness, skill, generosity, steadiness in battle, governance, ability to rule
• Duty of the trader:  agriculture, production, protection of stock, trade.
• Duty of the servant:  to serve

All in part, all of these things – the wise know what, how and when

Duty of all… Act, Learn and teach (Taittireeya-Upanishad, book 1)

• Do your duty; Learn and teach
• Speak truth; Learn and teach
• Meditate; Learn and teach
• Control sense; Learn and teach
• Control mind; Learn and teach
• Kindle fire; Learn and teach
• Be hospitable; Learn and teach
• Be humane; Learn and teach
• Serve the family; Learn and teach
• Procreate; Learn and teach
• Educate your children; Learn and teach

Better to follow one’s own duty than the duty of another – B’Gita Ch. 18

.       Serve all with kindness and courage and all will be well

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

The wise is superior to all, the ascetic, the scholar and man of action – B’Gita Ch: 6

For what is real… there is little that can be conveyed in words. As with the taste of sugar, the sweetness is in the mouth, not in the sugar or any explanation.  Even the taste is no more than an experience. All experience resides in the mind: the real is beyond experience.  You know the real by being real.

Realization is not a new experience but the discovery of the timeless factor in every experience.  As with the experience of colour, light must be present, colourless and unseen; so in every experience awareness is ever present, yet it is not an experience.  It is awareness that makes experience possible.  Realisation may lead to new dimensions of experience; yet the new experiences, however interesting, are no more real than the old.

Wisdom is knowledge of matter and self – B’Gita Ch: 13

Before realisation, you see your world like seeing the surface of the ocean whilst completely ignoring the immensity beneath.  The world is but the surface of the mind and the mind is infinite.

What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind.  All names and forms are but transitory waves in the ocean of consciousness, only awareness can be said to be, not consciousness and its transformations.  In consciousness all light appears as a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like the pen writing on paper; the ink that leaves a trace is memory.  You are that tiny point and by the movement of consciousness the world is ever re-created.  Stop moving and there will be no world.  Look within and you will find that the point of light is the reflection of the timeless awareness in the body, as the sense ‘I am’. There is only light of awareness, all else appears, including consciousness.

To the mind, that light appears as darkness.  It can be known only through its reflections.  All is seen in daylight – except daylight. When the mind is quiet it reflects reality.  When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains.  The changeless is and isn’t conscious.  The paper is not the writing, yet it carries the writing.  The ink is not the message, nor is the reader’s mind the message – but they all make the message possible.  A river is neither the banks nor the groove it runs in, yet together it is.

Like a mighty river, the real is immovable and yet in constant movement – it flows and yet is eternally there.  What flows is not the river with its bed and banks, but its water, so is the real in flow for the sake of universal harmony, playing games amidst a world of opposites.  As the sea inhabits the waves is unchanged, the gold inhabits the ring and is unchanged.

The self remains unaffected, untouched yet illumines the universe – B’Gita Ch: 13

The witness of existence is beyond ‘I am’; the ‘I am’ is always witnessed.  The state of detached awareness is the witness consciousness, the ‘mirror-mind’.  It partakes of both the real and the unreal and is therefore a bridge between the two.

The witness has no use in itself, just as a bridge has no use in itself.  We talk of it because it is there.  The bridge serves one purpose only – to cross over.  You don’t build houses on a bridge.  The ‘I am’ looks at things, the witness sees through them.  It sees them as they are – unreal and transient.  To say ‘not me, not mine’ is the task of the witness.

That which makes the ‘I am, and the witness appear yet is neither is your real being;  ‘being’ which is not being ‘this’ or ‘that’, but pure, boundless awareness.  It is like the flower and its colour.  Without flower – no colour; without colour – the flower remains unseen.  Your true nature is pure light which on contact with the flower creates colour.  When awareness is turned on itself, the feeling is of not knowing.  When it is turned outward, it inhabits consciousness, as the sea inhabits the waves, and the knowable come into being.  To say:  ‘I know myself’ is a contradiction in terms for what is ‘known’ cannot be ‘myself’.

The Void and ‘I’ are one, the un-manifested where the manifested has no place.  We talk of it only because that is my birthplace.  ‘I’ am beyond being and non-being, timeless, eternal.  ‘I’ am not to be pitied, the void is fullness – like a man saying “my work is done; there is nothing left to do”.

At the time of realisation the mind ceases producing events.  The ancient and ceaseless search stops.  I want for nothing, I expect nothing, accept nothing as my own.  There is no ‘me’ left to strive for.  Even the bare ‘I am’ has faded away.

All habitual certainties are gone.  The movement is from being sure of many things to being sure of nothing but there is nothing lost by not knowing because all knowledge is false.  Not knowing is, in itself, knowledge of the fact that all knowledge is ignorance, that ‘I do not know’ is the only true statement the mind can make.  Take the idea ‘I was born’.  You may take it to be true – it is not.  You were never born, nor shall you ever die.  It is the idea that was born and shall die, not you.  By identifying yourself with it you became mortal.  Just like in a cinema… all is light, so does consciousness become your world, vast as it appears to you.

He who looks equally on all, material or not, and experiences the unity of life, experiences his own self in all beings – B’Gita Ch.  6

When all is realised as one, fear goes. When you realise that the distinction between inner and outer is in the mind only, you are no longer afraid.  So long as you believe that realisation is not steady and comes and goes, you must go on with your meditations to disperse the false idea of not being complete.  The dawn and light of truth removes super-impositions.

When you realize yourself as less than a point in space and time, something too small to be cut and too short-lived to be killed, then and then only, all fear goes.  When you are smaller than the point of the needle, then the needle cannot pierce you – you pierce the needle!

The wise looks equally on and at one with all, sees no division and is forever free and at peace – B’Gita Ch. 5

‘I’ the void is empty of all mental formations ‘I’ am neither conscious nor unconscious, but fully aware.  ‘I am’ the witness, but in reality there is no witness, it is merely a point in awareness, everywhere, nameless and formless.    Like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew, the drop of dew has name and form but the little point of light is but a reflection of the sun.  The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself.    Beyond the mind I am, and seek the source of consciousness.    It is action not thought or the telling that brings the light.

‘I’, the body, exist in your imagination only.   Just as the sun is not affected by sunrises and sunsets, by events ‘I’ am not affected.  Because ‘I’ am not affected, I am certain to be there when needed.  You are bent on knowledge, I am not.  As ‘I’ do not have that sense of insecurity that makes you crave to know, ‘I’ have no anxiety to seek refuge in knowledge.    ‘I’ am just curious like a child is curious.  Therefore, ‘I’ am not concerned whether I shall be re-born or how long will the world last.  These are questions born of fear.

If someone were to cut off the head of the realised man, it would make no difference to him.  The body would lose its head, certain lines of communication would be cut and that is all.  Two people talk to each other on the phone and the wire is cut.  Nothing happens to the people, only they must look for some other means of communication.  The Bhagavad-Gita Says: “the sward does not cut it”.  It is literally so.

It is in the nature of awareness to survive its vehicles.  It is like fire, it burns up the fuel but not itself.  Just like a fire can outlast a mountain of fuel, so awareness survives innumerable bodies.

Freedom is a product of realisation and not the other way around.  Before asserting that it is impossible to let go of the idea that you are the body while still alive, why not investigate the very idea of the body?  Does the mind appear in the body or the body in the mind?  Surely there must be a mind to conceive the ‘I-am-the-body idea.  A body without a mind cannot be ‘my body.  ‘My body’ is invariably absent when the mind is in abeyance.  It is also absent when the mind is deeply engaged in thoughts and feelings.

Once you realize that the body depends on the mind and the mind on consciousness, and consciousness on awareness and not the other way round, your question about waiting for self-realization till you die is answered.  It is not that you must be free from ‘I-am-the-body idea first, and then realize the self.  It is definitely the other way round – you cling to the false, because you do not know the true.  Earnestness, not perfection, is a precondition to self-realization.  Virtues and powers come with realization, not before.

Do not confuse extraordinary abilities as a feature of realisation.  Psychic tricks such as the ability to enter the minds of others require special training.

The Realised is like a dealer in wheat and carries little knowledge about breads and cakes.  Even the taste of a wheat-gruel he may not know.  But about wheat grain he knows all and well.  He knows the source of all experience, but the innumerable particular forms experience can take, he does not need to know.    From moment to moment, the little he needs to know to live his life he somehow happens to know. Virtues and powers may come with realization, not before. We are so busy cataloguing each wave that we are blind, and realise little of the sea from which they arise.

You have all you need for self-realisation, but you do not trust it.  Have courage, trust yourself, go, talk, act; give it a chance to prove itself.  With some, realization comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing.  They have changed but they do not notice it.   True awareness is immutable and the immutable does not die.  It is the changing that dies.

The immutable neither lives nor dies; it is the timeless witness of life and death.  You cannot call it dead, for it is aware.  Nor can you call it alive, for it does not change.  It is just like your sound recorder.  It records; it reproduces – all by itself.  You only listen, just as the Enlightened watches all that happens, including his talking to you.  It is not he who talks; a question arises, words appear in his mind and then in answer… he hears them said.

To lose all interest in the quest for knowledge results in omniscience. The gift of knowing what needs to be known for error free action arises from a state of choiceless awareness. Knowledge is needed for action; if you act spontaneously from unconditional awareness and without conscious thinking all just happens naturally and rightly just as it should.

Realisation is achieved by Meditation, Reason, Right action, True to teaching and worship – B’Gita Ch. 13

It is not the means to realisation, but the desire, the urge, the earnest seeking that counts.  Clarity and silence of the mind is what is necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind.

Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions.  You may think that by moving to a quieter place, it will help you on your spiritual quest.  The least you can expect is an endless succession of visitors who will make your abode into a free and open guesthouse.  Better accept your life and duties as they shape, look after your family, whatever that may be, with love and care.  Nobody else needs you.  Your dreams for greater glory will land you in trouble.

The light of wisdom will settle any doubt – B’Gita Ch. 4

In the path to realisation there can be progress only in the preparation,  Realisation is sudden.  The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return.  Be like the chick that pecks at the shell.  Speculating about life outside the shell would have been of little use to it, but pecking at the shell breaks the shell from within and liberates the chick.  Similarly, break the mind from within by investigation and exposure of its contradictions and absurdities.  The longing to break the shell comes from the unmanifested.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

The sage is indifferent to pain or pleasure, clay, stone or gold, like or dislike, praise or censure, looks equally on honour or dishonour, friends and foes. – B’Gita Ch. 14

The Sage is free from self-identification; attachment to a set of memories and habits.  To know that the known, the particular in time and space, cannot be me or mine is liberation enough.

Realisation inspires a state of wonder at the infinite reaches of being, its inexhaustible creativity and total transcendence, the absolute fearlessness born from the realization of the illusoriness and transiency of every mode of consciousness which flows from a deep and inexhaustible source.  To know the source as source and appearance as appearance, and oneself as the source only is self-realization.

The enlightened Sage is at one with the centre of being, the True Heart; unconditional and free of desire for independent self-benefit.

The sage displays the same unfathomable nature as Universal Awareness, at one with the root of birth and death; the Mysterious Pass from non-existence to existence.

Preserving the state of perfection, remaining true to the natural, universal condition, the Sage follows the example, free of acquired artificiality or false nobility.  With choiceless position the Sage seeks no glory or credit, and is naturally placed foremost by Natures will.

The Sage in tune with the true, choiceless heart, is placed unseen and unknown among common people.  Free of the false heart the Sage mirrors, accommodates and tolerates all as their own with faith and goodness to all. Reflecting all things the Sage remains untouched… as the mirror untouched reflects all.

As with the true heart, the Sage is beyond small or large, not proclaiming greatness, enters into all; embodies three great treasures – Benevolence, simplicity and daring not be ahead, above or beneath.

• Benevolence – saves and guards
• Simplicity – free of acquired allows all to develop by its own nature.
• Daring not to be ahead; standing with, not beyond – brings about greatness of all things

As the region of existence can do no harm to the non-existent, the Sage is free of death.

Not disturbed by unnatural excess as in nature, all things rise and stop where they should.  The Sage knows what enough is, preserves without loss, satisfies the need in the natural way and withdraws when done.

Following the example of one without a second, high or low being of no concern, and in honour of natural balance the Sage takes no sides. The Sage’s natural, central place benefits and nourishes all.

Just as all rivers flow to the sea, at one with natures qualities the Sage’s will is achieved without force or administration.  The Sage leaves no sign fault or trace yet all follow, none are cast away.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Although you may prefer to be in the company of the wise, abiding in your own being is also in the council of wisdom.

If you do not face suffering and release from suffering, you will not find the energy and persistence needed on the path of enlightenment.  You cannot manufacture a crisis, it must be genuine.

Act as you must, pay attention, expect nothing, follow nature’s path, judge not and by the grace of insight… wisdom be your reward.

The inner Guru takes you to the Outer Guru, as a mother takes her child to a teacher.  Trust and obey your Guru, for he is the messenger of your Real Self.

If you feel more at peace and happy, if you understand yourself with more than usual clarity and depth, it means you have met the right guide.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Knowing if we need a Guru is like knowing if we need a milestone.  Do we need one? – Yes and no.  Yes if we are uncertain, no if we know our way.  Once we are certain in ourselves, the Guru is no longer needed, except in a technical sense.  Your mind is an instrument, after all, and you can learn how to use it.  As you are taught the uses of your body, so you will know how to use your mind.

The struggle is never alone.  You are never alone.  There are powers and presences who serve you all the time most faithfully.  You may or may not perceive them, nevertheless they are real and active.  When you realize that all is in your mind and that you are beyond the mind, that you are truly alone, at-one; then know that all, and the power is you.

Each seeker accepts, or invents a method which suits him, applies it to himself with some earnestness and effort, obtains results according to his temperament and expectations, casts them into the mould of words, builds them into a system, establishes a tradition and begins to admit others into his ‘school of Yoga;.  It is all built on memory and ideas in the mind.

No such school is valueless, not indispensable; in each, one can progress up to the point, when all desire for progress must be abandoned to make further progress possible.  Then all schools are given up, all effort ceases; in solitude and darkness the last step is made which ends ignorance and fear forever.

The true teacher, however, will not imprison his disciple in a prescribed set of ideas, feelings and actions; on the contrary, he will show him patiently the need to be free from all ideas and set patterns of behaviour, to be vigilant and earnest and go with life wherever it takes him, not to enjoy or suffer, but to understand and learn.

Under the right teacher the disciple learns to learn, not to expect and judge, not to remember and obey.  The company of the noble does not mould, it liberates.  Beware of dependency.

Most of the so-called ‘surrenders to the Guru’ end in disappointment, if not in tragedy.  Fortunately, an earnest seeker will disentangle him or herself in time, the wiser for the experience.

There is no need to look for a Guru, or even think of one.  Make your goal your Guru.  After all, the Guru is but a means to an end, not the end itself.  He is not important; it is what you will of him that matters to you.  Now, what is your will?

The outer Guru only represents the inner, the inner accepts the outer – for a time.  The effort is that of the disciple.  The outer Guru gives the instructions, the inner sends the strength; the alert application is the disciple’s.  Without will, intelligence and energy on the part of the disciple the outer Guru is helpless.  The Inner Guru bids his chance.  Obtuseness and wrong pursuits bring about a crisis and the disciple wakes up to his own plight.  Wise is he who does not wait for a shock, which can be quite rude.

The innermost light, shining peacefully and timelessly in the heart, is the real Guru.  All others merely show the way.  The inner Guru is the only reality, all else is shadow, cast by the body-mind on the face of time.  Of course, even a shadow is related to reality, but by itself it is not real.

Life itself is the Guru, and the mind – the disciple.  The mind attends to life, it does not dictate.  Life flows naturally and effortlessly and the mind removes the obstacles to its even flow.  By itself, life is immensely creative.  A seed, in the course of time, becomes a forest.  The mind is like a forester – protecting and regulating the immense vital urge of existence.

Whoever may be the Guru, if he is pure of heart and acts in good faith, the disciple will come to no harm.  If there is no progress, no blame is there but lack of self-control.  On the other hand, if the disciple is earnest and applies himself intelligently and with zest, he is bound to meet a more qualified teacher, who will take him further.  The Guru’s role is only to instruct and encourage; the disciple is totally responsible for himself.

To know if you have the right Guru, watch yourself.  If you see yourself changing, growing, it means you have found the right Guide.  He or she may be beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, flattering or scolding; nothing matters except the one crucial fact of inward growth.  If you don’t well, he or she may be your friend, but not your Guru.

The distance from your Guru does not matter.  If your will is strong and true, it will mould your life beyond all desire.  Sow your seed and leave it to the seasons.  The sign of progress in spiritual life is the steady spread of freedom from anxiety; a sense of ease and joy; deep peace within and abundant energy without.

There are no hopeless cases.  Obstacles can be overcome.  What life cannot mend, death will end, but the Guru cannot fail.  The Guru and inner reality are really one and the same, and work toward the same goal – the redemption and salvation of the mind, and cannot fail.  Out of the very boulders that obstruct, the bridges are built.  Consciousness is not the whole of being; that you are beyond.  The Guru is at home everywhere, with inexhaustible energy and patience.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Concentrating on me, I give the power of discrimination and dispel ignorance with the light of wisdom- B’Gita – Ch. 10

Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it.

The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever-subtler levels, without losing one’s grip on the levels left behind.  Progressively expanding conscious ‘wakefulness’, effectively having sleep and distraction under control.

In a mindful state of objective consciousness, discriminating reality in the here and now, from what is not, one begins with the consciously obvious: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body; the senses, their sensations and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held.

The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the conscious identity -‘I-am-so-and-so’, beyond ‘so-I-am’, beyond  ‘I-am-the-witness-only’, beyond ‘there-is’, beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being; pure choiceless awareness.

Not by power, study, austerity or gifts, but by devotion am I seen – B’Gita – Ch. 11

At the end of your meditation all is known directly, no proofs whatsoever are required.  Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity; the eternal now.

Definitions and description have their place as useful incentives for further search, but you must go beyond them into what is indefinable and indescribable, except in negative terms… not this, not that.  After all even universality and eternity are mere concepts; the opposites of being place-and-time-bound.

Reality is not a concept, nor a manifestation of a concept.  It is nothing to do with concepts.  Concern yourself with your mind; let impurities and distortions dissolve in the light of attention.  Once you have had the taste of your own self you will find it everywhere and at all times.  Once you know it, you will never lose it; it was never lost, only hidden in ignorance.

You must give your heart and mind to brooding over the ‘I am’, what it is, how it is. Follow it to its source, its life, its meaning.  It is very much like digging a well.  You reject all that is not water, till you reach the life-giving spring.  Let the light of eternal, unchanging self be revealed as all that is not is dissolved through quiet, persistent, choiceless attention.

You will know you are moving in the right direction by your progress in intentness, in clarity and devotion to the task.

The limited only is perfectible.  The unlimited is already perfect.  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 your-self 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 love you bear for your-self.  Make love of your-self perfect, deny yourself nothing – give your-self infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond.

Changeless reality is beyond mind and its contents.  To go beyond you must let your attention turn away from all other interests.  All directions are within the mind.  You are not being asked to look in a particular direction.  Just look beyond all that happens and allow the feeling ‘I am’ as it arises.  The ‘I am’ is not a direction.  It is the negation of all direction.  Ultimately even the ‘I am’ will go, for you need not keep on asserting what is obvious.  Bringing the mind to the feeling ‘I am’ merely helps the mind to go beyond everything else.

When the mind has let go of its preoccupations, it becomes quiet.  If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you will find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never consciously known, and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature.  Once you pass through this experience, you will never be the same person again.  The unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision, but it is bound to return provided the effort is sustained until all the bonds are broken, delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated on the present.

As a beginner, certain formalised meditations, or prayers may be good for you.  But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation: to hold on to ‘what is, here, now, present, and with rigorous attention reveal what is not, and you will no longer be lost in the world of thoughts and distractions.

You can learn to do this by first holding on to the present, and letting thoughts flow and watching them.  Just pay attention, and the very act of observation reveals their false grip and frees the mind into the calm sea of reality. Once the mind is quiet, just hold still, here and now.  Don’t get bored with peace, be in it; go deeper into it.  When new thoughts arise, experiment anew.  Don’t go by past experience.  Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts.  With persistent patience, the state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it.

Be satisfied with watching the flow of your life; if your watchfulness is deep and steady, ever turned towards the here and now, it will gradually move upstream to the source, till suddenly it becomes the source.  Put your awareness to work, the ‘I am’ that you know you are, not your mind.  The mind is not the right instrument for this task.

Timeless awareness can be reached only by focussed attention in the here and now, breaking the bindings of consciousness; as a chick breaks its shell to be free.  Your body and your mind are both subject to time; only awareness is timeless, even in the now.  In awareness you are facing facts and awareness is fond of facts.

As the quiet mind arises, it is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once the mind is quiet.  As the sun on rising makes the world active, so self-awareness affects changes in the mind.  In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.

Understand that you are destined for enlightenment.  Co-operate with your destiny, don’t go against it, and don’t thwart it.  Allow it to fulfil itself.  All you have to do is pay attention to all that appears here and now; obstacles created by the mind.  Love of self is natures will, guide, and compulsion. It cannot fail.

The fact of dwelling on the ‘I Am’ is the key.  The very fact of observation alters the observer and the observed.  After all, what prevents insight into one’s true nature is the weakness and obtuseness of the mind and its tendency to ignore the subtle and focus the gross only.  When you follow this advice and try to keep your mind on the notion of ‘I am’ only, you become fully aware of your mind and its vagaries.

Awareness, being lucid harmony in action, dissolves dullness and quietens the restlessness of the mind and gently, but steadily changes its very substance.  This change need not be spectacular; it may be hardly noticeable; yet it is a deep and fundamental shift from darkness to light, from inadvertence to awareness.

Concentrating on acquired ideas will not help you.  Concentrating on the idea, for example of ‘a table’ is effective as an exercise in concentration, but it will not take you beyond the idea of a table. You are not interested in tables, you want to know yourself.  For this keep steadily in the focus of consciousness the only clue you have: your certainty of being.  Be with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.

As the mind becomes quiet, undisturbed, the wisdom and the power will come on their own.  You need hot hanker.  Wait in silence of the heart and mind.  It is very simple; pay attention here and now, the quiet will find you but willingness is rare.  Let go of ambition; the least desire, exposed, vulnerable, unprotected, uncertain and alone completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual.

Yes, simple, not easy.  We are so programmed for a life of acquisition, turning back the way we came – no one says it is easy.

Do not try to see how it is done.  If you knew how to do it you would not do it.  Abandon every support; hold on to the blind sense of being. This is enough. Just turn away from the pull of distractions, let things come and go.  Desires and thoughts are also things.

Since immemorial time the dust of events was covering the clear mirror of your mind, so that only memories you could see.  Brush off the dust before it has time to settle; this will lay bare the old layers until the true nature of your mind is discovered.  It is all very simple; be earnest and patient, that is all.  Dispassion, detachment, freedom from desire and fear, from all self-concern, mere awareness – free from memory and expectation – this is the state of mind through which discovery will happen.  After all, liberation is but the freedom to discover.

Silence is the main factor that makes us progress.  In peace and silence you grow.  Attend only to the sense “I am”.  No need to follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures.  Whatever happens, just go beyond and remain with the sense “I am”, it may look too simple, even crude.  Obedience is a powerful solvent of all desires and fears.  Just go beyond all that occupies the mind; do whatever work you have to complete; keep empty, keep available, and resist what comes uninvited.  In the end to reach a state of non-grasping, of joyful non attachment, of inner ease and freedom indescribable, yet wonderfully real.

None compels you to Meditate 16 hours per day, unless you feel like doing so.  It is just a way of telling you to remain with yourself.  The Guru will wait but the mind is impatient.  You do not need to do violence to yourself.

Of course there is a way that is neither violent, nor sterile yet supremely effective.  Just look at yourself as you are, see yourself as you are, accept yourself as you are and go ever deeper into what you are.  Persistent, gentle attention will be your guide.  Violence and non-violence describe your attitude to others; the self in relation to itself is neither violet nor non-violent, it is neither aware nor unaware of itself.  If it knows itself, all it does will be right; if it does not, all it does is gambling with hell, with the poorest of odds.

To know yourself as you are – before the mind, ‘I am’, is not a thought in the mind; the mind happens to me, I do not happen to the mind.  And since time and space are in the mind I am beyond time and space, eternal and omnipresent.

To the realised man, he exists everywhere and at all times.  To him it is as obvious as the freedom of movement is to you.  Imagine a tree asking a monkey: ‘Do you seriously mean that you can move from place to place?’  And the monkey saying:  ‘Yes I do’.

The world as it is, is the greatest miracle.  Of what use are small miracles when the greatest miracle of all is happening all the time?  Whatever you see, it is always your own being that you see.  Seek within, go ever deeper into yourself. There is neither violence nor non-violence in self-discovery.  The destruction of the false is not violence.  It simply dissolves in the light of truth.

To find the immutable and blissful, the mutable and painful must let go of it grip.  You are concerned with your own happiness; there is no such thing.  Happiness is never your own, it is where the ‘I’ is not.  You have only to reach out beyond yourself, and you will find it.

Do not worry about your worries – just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make being quiet into a task to be performed.  Don’t be restless about being quiet, miserable about being happy.  Just be aware that you are and remain aware – don’t say:  yes I am, what next?  There is no ‘next’ in ‘I am’.  It is a timeless state.

Those who keep their minds on me, eternal, indestructible, indefinable with unwavering faith and work for the welfare of all, will find me – B’Gita: Ch. 12

Keep the ‘I am’ in the focus of awareness, remember that you are, watch yourself ceaselessly and the unconscious knowing will flow into the conscious without any special effort on your part.  Desires and fears of body and mind, social conditioning and inhibitions are blocking and preventing its free interplay with the conscious.  Once free to mingle, the two become one and the one becomes all.  The person merges into the witness, the witness into awareness, awareness into pure being, yet identity is not lost, only its limitations are lost.  It is transfigured for the real Self, your eternal friend and guide.

You cannot approach it in worship.  No external activity can reach the inner self; worship and prayers remain on the surface only; to go deeper meditation is essential, the striving to go beyond the states of sleep, dream and waking.  In the beginning the attempts are irregular, then they return more often, become regular, then continuous and intense, until all the obstacles are conquered.

The word Immutable, which you are, is the bridge.  Remember it, think of it, explore it, go round it, look at it from all directions, and dive into it with earnest perseverance.  Endure all delays and disappointments till suddenly the mind turns round, away from the word, towards the reality beyond the word.  It is like trying to find a person knowing his name only.  A day comes when your enquiries bring you to him and the name becomes reality.  Words are valuable, for between the word and its meaning there is a link and if one investigates the word assiduously one crosses beyond the concept into the experience at the root of it.

As a matter of fact, repeated attempt to go beyond words is what is called meditation.  It is but a persistent attempt to cross over from the verbal to the non-verbal.  The task seems hopeless until suddenly all becomes clear and simple and so wonderfully easy.  But, as long as you are interested in your present way of living and acquisition, you will shirk from the final leap into the unknown.

You will notice yourself becoming alertly unconscious.  It is something akin to deep sleep, yet aware all the same; a sort of wakeful sleep.  The main thing is the freedom from negative emotions – desire, fear etc., the ‘enemies’ of the mind. Once the mind is free of them, the rest will come easily.  Just as cloth kept in soap water will become clean, so will the mind get purified in the stream of pure, unattached awareness.  When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface.  Do nothing about them, don’t react to them; as they have come so will they float away… by themselves.  All that matters is mindfulness, total awareness of oneself or rather of one’s mind.

As for reality, how can you talk of witnessing the real?  We can talk only of the unreal, the illusory, the transient, and the conditioned.  To go beyond we must pass through total negation of everything as having independent existence.  All things depend on consciousness and consciousness depends on the witness.

How can there be knowledge of the conditioned without the unconditioned?  There must be a source from which all this flows, a foundation on which all stands.  Self-realisation flows from the knowledge of one’s conditioning, and the awareness that the infinite variety of conditions depends on our infinite ability to be conditioned, giving rise to variety.  To the conditioned mind the unconditioned appears as the totality as well as the absence of everything.  Neither can be directly experienced, but this does not make it non-existent.

To help you to become true, the words ‘What I see as me, is not I’  contains all you need for liberation.  Ponder over it, go into it deeply, go to the root of it; it will operate. The power is in the word, not in the person.

A person comes into being as a shadow appears when light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure self-awareness is obstructed by the ‘I am-the-body’, idea.  And as the shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land, so does the persona appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find and lose according to the pattern of destiny.

When the body is no more, the person disappears completely without return, only the witness remains and the great Unknown.  The witness is that which says ‘I know’.  The person says ‘I do’.  Now, to say ‘I know’ is not untrue – it is merely limited.  But to say ‘I do’ is altogether false, because there is nobody who does; all happens by itself, including the idea of being a doer.

Often people come with their body, brain and minds so mishandled, perverted and weak, that the state of formless, choiceless attention is beyond them.  In such cases, some simpler token of earnestness is appropriate.  The repetition of a mantra or gazing at a picture will prepare their body and mind for a deeper and more direct search.  After all, it is earnestness that is indispensable, the crucial factor.  Our minds must be filled to the brim with earnestness, which is but love in action.  For nothing can be done without love.

Before you can accept the universal, you must accept yourself, which is even more frightening.  The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight.  One needs all the courage to go further.  Look at the being you believe you are and remember – you are not what you see.  ‘This I am not – what am I?’ is the movement of self-enquiry.  There are no other means to liberation, all means delay.

Information is not enough.  You may know the theory, but without the actual experience of yourself as the impersonal and unqualified centre of being, love and bliss, mere verbal knowledge is sterile.  Try to be, only to be.  The all-important word is ‘try’.  Allot enough time daily for sitting quietly and trying, just trying, to go beyond the personality, its addictions and obsessions.

Don’t ask how, it cannot be explained.  You just keep on trying until you succeed.  If you persevere, there can be no failure.  What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now.

Just see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits.  This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of release and freedom.  After all, you are what you are every moment of your life, but you are never conscious of it, except, maybe, at the point of wakening from sleep.

All you need is to be aware of being, not as a verbal statement, but as an ever-present fact.  The awareness that you are will open your eyes to what you are.  It is all very simple.  First of all, establish constant contact with your-self; be with yourself all the time.  Into self-awareness all blessings flow.  Begin as a centre of observation, deliberate cognisance, and grow into a centre of love in action.  ‘I am’ is a tiny seed, which will grow into a mighty tree- quite naturally, without a trace of effort.

This ‘natural’ yoga is disconcertingly simple – the mind, which is all-becoming, must recognise and penetrate its own being, not as being this or that, here or there, then or now, but just timeless being.  To delve into the sense of ‘I’ – so real and vital – in order to reach its source is the core of this Yoga.  Not being continuous, the sense of ‘I’ must have a source from which it flows and to which it returns.

This timeless source of conscious being is what Nisargadatta Maharaj calls the self-nature, self-being, ‘swarupa’.

Only those devoted to the self can surmount the manifested illusion- B’Gita – Ch. 7

This dwelling on the sense ‘I am’ is the simple, easy and natural Yoga.  There is no secrecy in it and no dependence; no preparation is required and no initiation.  Whoever is puzzled by his very existence as a conscious being and earnestly wants to find his own source, can grasp the ever present sense of ‘I am’ and dwell on it assiduously and patiently, till the clouds obscuring the mind dissolve and the heart of being is seen in all its glory.

The body is a material thing and needs time to change.  The mind is but a set of mental habits of ways of thinking and feeling, and to change they must be brought to the surface and examined.  This also takes time. Just resolve and persevere, the rest will take care of itself.  Don’t bully yourself, do what you feel like doing.  Violence will make you hard and rigid.  Do not fight with what you take yourself to be as obstacles on the way.  Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, and enquire.  Let anything happen – good or bad.  But don’t let yourself be submerged by what happens.

Change happens instantly, it is the preparation that is gradual.  You need the conviction and courage to let go.  Complete conviction generates both desire and courage.  Understanding through meditation leads to faith necessary for patient persistence. In meditation you consider the teaching received, in all its aspects and repeatedly until out of clarity confidence is born and, with confidence, action.  Conviction and action are inseparable.  If action does not follow conviction, examine your convictions; don’t accuse yourself of lack of courage.  Self-deprecation will take you nowhere.  Without clarity and emotional assent of what use is will?

There are many who have practised Yoga for years and years without any apparent result.  Some are just addicted to trances, with their consciousness in abeyance.  Without full consciousness, what progress can there be?

Both the person and the witness are both modes of consciousness.  In one you desire and fear, in the other you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events.  You let them come and go.

Consciousness does not shine by itself.  It shines by a light beyond it, the light of pure awareness.  Having seen the dreamlike quality of consciousness, look for the light in which it appears, which gives it being.  There is the content of consciousness as well as the awareness in and beyond it.

When you do not take yourself to be the body, then the family life of the body, however intense and interesting is seen only as a play on the screen of the mind, with the light of awareness as the only reality.

Objects of consciousness do not last.  Momentary reality is secondary; it depends on the timeless.  There is no continuity in objects of consciousness.  Continuity implies identity in the past, present and future.  No such identity is possible for the very means of identification fluctuates and changes.  Continuity, permanency, these are illusions created by memory, mere mental projections of a fixed pattern where no such pattern can be.  Abandon all ideas of temporary or permanent, body or mind, man or woman; what remains?  What is the state of your mind when all separation is given up?  This is not talking of giving up distinctions, for without them there is no manifestation.

We complain that our inner peace is not steady.  Peace after all is a condition of the mind.  Beyond the mind is silence.  There is nothing to be said about it.  When the mind is engaged in serving the body, happiness is lost.  To regain it, it seeks pleasure.  The urge to be happy is right, but the means of securing it are misleading, unreliable and destructive of true happiness.

Pleasure is not wrong in itself.  The right state and use of the body and the mind is intensely pleasant.  It is the search for pleasure that is wrong.  Do not try to make yourself happy; rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy.  Find out why you are unhappy. Because you are not happy you seek happiness in pleasure; pleasure brings in pain and therefore you call it worldly; you then long for some other pleasure without pain which you call divine.  In reality, pleasure is but a respite from pain.  Happiness is both worldly and unworldly, within and beyond all that happens.  Make no distinction, don’t separate the inseparable and do not alienate yourself from life.

Acting as a saint or rehearsing saintliness is perfectly all right, provided no merit is claimed.  As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.

You must put in true worth before you can expect something real.  You are what you think about. Look at the content of your mind.  Are you not, most of the time, busy with your own little person and its daily needs?  The value of regular meditation is that it takes you away from the humdrum of daily routine and reminds you that you are not what you believe yourself to be.  But even remembering is not enough – action must follow conviction.  Don’t be like the rich man who has made a detailed will, but refuses to die.

Not with mortal eyes but inner sight am I to be seen – B’Gita – Ch. 11

The mind is like a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself for a moment with some particular ripple and call it: ‘my thought’.

Non attachment is superior to meditation B’Gita: Ch. 12

All you are conscious of is your mind; awareness is both in and beyond consciousness, just as the sea is both in and beyond the rise and fall of the waves, untouched, of no concern, attached to none

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

A mantra provides a gentle focus of attention, grounded in the present; a faint idea of mental repetition without necessity for clear pronunciation.

Repeating a word ceaselessly, any word and particularly ancient words of power can work wonders. It is not so much what word but the urge, the hidden motive that matters.  Be here now, in the presence of the mantra.

No idea of control is required, allowing all ideas and thoughts to come and go as they will.  They are neither good nor bad.  When seen that the mantra is lost to thought, gently come back to the mantra.

Our concern is with the mantra, and if other thoughts are there along with it we do not mind them, and we don’t try to remove them.  Just innocently favour the mantra as we innocently favour the spaces between people as we walk in a crowded street.

The mantra is, as with all means of present-centred attention, visual, tactile or auditory, simply part of one’s sustained will to be present and at one with now.

Whatever you do for the sake of finding your own real self will surely bring you to it. No need of faith, which is but the expectations of results. Whatever you do for the sake of truth will surely bring you to truth.

Be earnest and honest. The shape it takes hardly matters. Action is not really needed, just longing, undiluted by thought and action, pure concentrated longing, will take you speedily to your goal. It is the true motive that matters, not the manner.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Waiting for realisation is futile.  Neither you nor any help can speed your growth to realisation.  It will just happen. To depend on time to solve your problems is self-delusion.  The future, left to its self merely repeats the past.  Change can only happen now, never in the future.  With crystal clarity, see the need of change.  This is all.

You can have reality right now, provided you are really fed up with everything, including your meditations.  When you demand nothing, want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected!

To realise non-dependence is the end of Yoga.  All that happens, happens in and to the mind, not to the source of the ‘I am’, the Self.  Once you realize that all happens by itself, (call it destiny or supreme will or mere accident), you remain as witness only, understanding and enjoying, but not perturbed.

To realise that you are one with, and yet beyond the world brings freedom from all desire and fear.  Neither planning nor reasoning is needed, it is found unexpectedly, without the least effort.  Thoughts become self-fulfilling; things just fall in place smoothly and rightly.  The main change is in the mind; it becomes motionless and silent, responding quickly, but not perpetuating the response.

Spontaneity becomes a way of life, the real becomes natural and the natural becomes real.  And above all, infinite affection, love; dark and quiet, radiating in all directions, embracing all, making all interesting and beautiful, significant and auspicious.

You will need no proof that you know yourself correctly.  The experience is unique and unmistakable.  It will dawn on you suddenly, when the obstacles are removed to some extent.  It is like a frayed rope snapping.  Yours is to work at the strands; the break is bound to happen.  It can be delayed, but not prevented.

The centre of your being will emerge into consciousness.  The three states – sleeping, dreaming and waking are all in consciousness, the manifested; what you call unconsciousness will also be manifested – in time; beyond consciousness altogether lies universal awareness and the unmanifested.  And beyond all, and pervading all, is the heart of being which beats steadily – manifested-unmanifested; manifested-unmanifested

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Not easy but simple – pay attention! – B’Gita – Ch. 5

It is enough just to be attentive.  Having never left the house you are asking for the way home.  Collecting right ideas will take you nowhere.  Just cease imagining.

Don’t try to understand.  Enough if you do not misunderstand.  Don’t rely on your mind for liberation.  It is the mind that brought you into bondage.  Go beyond it altogether.  This integral seeing-feeling can work miracles.  It is like casting a bronze image; metal alone, or fire alone will not do, nor will the mould be of any use; you have to melt down the metal in the heat of the fire and cast it in the mould.

By choiceless attention in the now, all sin is dissolved in wisdom – B’Gita – Ch. 5

By being with yourself, the ‘I am’; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of attentive consciousness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind.  Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

Your destiny is here and now, eternally at one – B’Gita – Ch. 4

Just give attention until a current of mutual understand is established.  As a matter of fact, all realization is only sharing.  Allow for a wider consciousness and share in it.  Unwillingness to enter and to share is the only hindrance.  Understand one thing well, and you have arrived.

What prevents you from knowing is not the lack of opportunity but the lack of will to focus in your mind what you want to understand.  If you could but keep in mind what you do not know it would reveal to you its secrets.  But if you are shallow and impatient, not earnest enough to look and wait you are like a child crying for the moon.

Your body and mind exist as you, just as long as you believe so.  Cease to think that they are yours and attachment will just dissolve.  By all means let your body and mind function, but do not let them limit you.  If you notice imperfections just keep on noticing.  Your very giving attention to them will set your heart and mind and body right.

All illness begins in the mind.  Take cognisance of the whole of it, not only the outer symptoms. Take care of the mind first, its roots run deep.  By tracing ideas deep into their roots, all wrong ideas and emotions, at their root, will be eliminated.  With the removal of causes the effect is bound to depart.

Man sees himself become what he believes himself to be.  Abandon all ideas about yourself and you will find yourself to be the pure witness, beyond all that can happen to the body or the mind.

It is easy to forget the high topics of mind and spirit when you return home to everyday life.  It is your childishness you are returning to.  You are not fully grown up; there are levels left undeveloped because unattended.  Just give full attention to what in you is there to develop, altogether childish and you will ripen.  It is the maturity of heart and mind that is essential.  It comes effortlessly when the main obstacle is removed – inattention, unawareness.  In awareness you grow.

Do not despair if you find it difficult.  Just take time to be satisfied with watching the flow of your life; if your watchfulness is deep and steady, ever turned towards the source, it will gradually move upstream till suddenly it becomes the source.

Put your awareness to work, not your mind.  The mind is not the right instrument for this task.  The timeless can be reached only in the timeless.  Your body and your mind are both subject to time; only awareness is timeless, even in the now.  In awareness you are facing facts and reality is fond of facts.

You want to treat your ignorance as if it is a disease, without having seen the patient! Before you ask about ignorance, why don’t you enquire first, who is ignorant? When you say you are ignorant, you do not know that you have imposed the concept of ignorance over the actual state of your thoughts and feelings.  Examine them as they occur, give them your full attention and you will find that there is nothing like ignorance, only inattention.  Give attention to what worries you – that is all.  After all, worry is mental pain and pain is invariably a call for attention.  The moment you give attention, the call for it ceases and the question of ignorance dissolves.

Instead of waiting for an answer to your question, find out who is asking the question and what makes him ask it.  You will soon find that it is the mind, goaded by fear of pain that asks the question.  And in fear there is memory and anticipation, past and future.  Attention brings you back to the present, the now, and the presence in the now is the state ever at hand, but rarely noticed.

Just give attention and wonder.  Wonder is the dawn of wisdom.  To be steadily and consistently wondering brings light of understanding.  You may ask how it is done.  At least you are asking!  Good enough, for a start.  Go on pondering, wondering; being anxious to find a way.  Be conscious of yourself; watch your mind; give it your full attention.  Don’t look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing.

Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change; there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behaviour.  You need not aim.

So far your life was dark and restless.  Attention, alertness, awareness, clarity, liveliness, vitality are all manifestations of integrity, oneness with your true nature, infinite peace.  It is in the nature of peace, the central normality to reconcile duality, and rebuild the personality in accordance with the true nature of the self.  Attentive, choiceless-awareness, bliss, is the faithful servant of the self, ever attentive and obedient.

There is no possession as precious as anchored in the present, here and now, where no calamity can disturb – B’Gita – Ch. 6

Do not undervalue attention, it means interest and also love.  To know, to do, to discover or to create you must give your heart to it – which means attention.  All the blessings flow from it.

Being attentive, self-remembering will bring you to realisation because they are two aspects of the same state.  Self-remembrance is in the mind; self-realisation is beyond the mind.  The image in the mirror is of the face beyond the mirror.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

It may seem too simple to be true, but don’t be misled by the simplicity of the advice.  Very few are those who have the courage to trust the innocent and the simple.

To know that your limitations are of your own mind; that your life, its boundaries is of your own making is the dawn of wisdom.  To want nothing of it, to be ready to let go entirely is earnestness.

Do not let the suffering make you dull, unable to see its enormity.  Your first task is to see the sorrow in you and around you; your next is to long intensely for liberation.  The very intensity of longing will guide you; you need no other guide.

It is no matter that the mind may seem weak and vacillating.  In a way, that is the most hopeful case.  There is an alternative to Sadhana – Meditative exercises – which is trust. You are the fullness of perfection here and now and that nothing can deprive you of your heritage, of what you are.

You do not know what you are and therefore you imagine your-self to be what you are not.  Hence desires and fears and overwhelming despair, and meaningless activity in order to escape.  Just trust and live by trust.  You will not be misled.

You are the Supreme Reality beyond the world and its creator, beyond consciousness and its witness, beyond all assertions and denials.  Remember it, think of it, and act on it.  Abandon all sense of separation, see yourself in all and act accordingly.  With action, bliss will come and with bliss, conviction.  After all, you doubt yourself because you are in sorrow.

Happiness, natural, spontaneous and lasting cannot be imagined.  Either it is there, or it is not.  Once you begin to experience the peace, love and happiness which need no outer causes, all your doubts will dissolve.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

All problems are imaginary.  What problems can there be which the mind did not create?  Life and death do not create problems; pains and pleasures come and go, experienced and forgotten.  While we choose to live, problems in life are a natural part of life – to be, to exist with a name and form is painful but can be most enjoyable.

Our very nature is to love so even the painful is lovable. It is memory and anticipation (the false heart) that creates problems of attainment or avoidance, coloured by like and dislike.  Truth and love (the True Heart) are man’s real nature and mind and heart are the means of its expression.  Mind and heart cannot work in darkness.  They need the light of pure awareness to function rightly.

It is the instinct to explore and the love of the unknown that brings us into existence, however painful that might be.  The will to be the particular makes you into a person with all its conceived, personal past and future. Out of love for corporate existence one is born and once born, one gets involved in destiny.

Look at some great man, what a wonderful man he was!  And yet how troubled was his life and limited its fruits.  How utterly dependent is the personality of man and how indifferent is its world.  And yet we desire it and protect it for its very insignificance.  Being and becoming is inevitable; but our home is beyond, inspiring an unending search until found.

All effort at control springs from the mind, and will merely subject us to the dictates of memory – a good servant, bad master.  It effectively prevents discovery. It is selfishness due to a self-identification with the body that is the main problem, and the cause of all the other problems.  And selfishness cannot be removed by effort, only by clear insight into its causes and effects.

As a river flows naturally to the sea, ‘Going with the flow’ is our natural state.  Effort is a sign of conflict between incompatible desires, and should be seen as they are, then only do they dissolve.  What remains is that which cannot change.  The great peace, the deep silence, the hidden beauty of reality remains.  While it cannot be conveyed through words, it is waiting for you to experience for yourself.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Do not confuse desire and attachment with Love, desire is selective, Love is not.  Natural, universal love is unconditional, it contains the passion for sharing.  It washes away the idea of duality, you and the external world out of your mind.  Only the pure radiance of love remains, beyond giving and receiving.

In love there are no strangers.  When the duality of me and mine, of independent self-interest is no longer, all desires for personal pleasure and fear of pain cease.  One is no longer concerned with independent happiness, for there is none.  Beyond singular happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy from the ecstasy of being at one with, and giving from the perennial source.

Do not pretend that you love others as yourself.  Unless you have realized them as one with yourself you cannot love them.  There is no duality in love – the lover and the beloved – there is not one even, how can there be two?  Love is the refusal to separate, to make distinctions.  Before you can think of unity you must first create duality.  When you truly love, you do not say: ‘I love you’.  Where there is mentation, there is duality.

Don’t pretend to be what you are not; don’t refuse to be what you are.  Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause.  Without self-realisation, no virtue is genuine.

When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of your-self, you know that every living being and the entire universe is included in your affection; but when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid.  Self-interest with conditions arise with the inevitable fear of loss.  Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation; a vicious circle.  Only true knowledge, at one with the true heart, can break it.

When you know beyond doubt that the same life flows through, and is, all that is and you are that life, love and service flows naturally and spontaneously.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

A man who claims to know what is good for others is dangerous.  When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. Whatever you do for your own sake and ideas accumulates and becomes explosive; one day it goes off and plays havoc with you and your world.  It is not doing good that comes first, but ceasing to hurt, not adding to suffering.  Pleasing others is no help.

You merely talk of helping others, but have you ever helped, really helped a single man?  Have you ever put one soul beyond the need of further help?  Can you give a man character, based on full realization of his duties and opportunities at least, if not on full realisation of his true being?  When you do not know what is good for yourself, how can you know what is good for others? Repeated help is no help at all.  Do not talk of helping another, unless you can put him beyond the need of help.

You are responsible only for what you can change.  What you can change is only your attitude.  There lies your responsibility.  If you can change yourself you will find that no other change is needed.  To change the picture you merely change the film, you do not attack the cinema screen!  It is not that you are indifferent; all the sufferings of mankind do not prevent you from enjoying your next meal.  The witness is not indifferent.  He is the fullness of understanding and compassion.  Only as the witness you can help another.

When you see sorrow and suffering, just be with it, lay bare its roots – helping to understand is real help. For yourself you need nothing.  You are pure giving, beginning-less, endless, and inexhaustible… Do not rush into activity.

Neither learning nor action can really help.  What you can do is limited.  The self-alone is unlimited.  Give limitlessly – of your-self.  All else you can give in small measures only.  You alone are immeasurable.  To help is your very nature. Daily life is a life of action.  Whether you like it or not, you must function.  Even when you eat and drink you help your body.

ram <contact and further information>

June 2015

Do not be confused by the assertion of science that observes the world in purely objective terms separate from the mind.

The difference between science and religion is purely verbal.  What is, is.  It is neither subjective nor objective.  Matter and mind are not separate; they are aspects of one energy.  Look at the mind as a function of matter and you have science; look at matter as the product of the mind and you have religion.

Religions show their true face in action, in silent action.  To know what a man believes, watch how he acts.  For most of the people service of their bodies and their minds is their religion.  They may have religious ideas, but they do not act on them.  They play with them, they are often very fond of them, but they will not act on them.

ram <contact and further information>