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.
NaturesDestiny 