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@frenchkiki where is beautiful christy?? 🙁
"The death of the body is accompanied by less agony than the death of the ego, the separate self. The death of the self is a tearing away of everything we imagine to be solid, a crumbling of the walls we have built to hide behind. Letting go of the self-protection which is constantly bargaining with the suffering of the mind, there may arise a dizziness and a nausea, like coming out of a tiny cave into the endless vistas of the Himalayas. It means the death of everything we have learned to be, all the thoughts and projections that so enamored us in the past and created someone for us to be in the future. All is allowed to die back into the flow of life.
When all we have imagined ourselves to be is allowed to die, all is seen in its essentially empty, impermanent nature. And we experience the superficiality of the separate self we have clung to so long."
The new emerges as we uncover deeper and deeper levels of “don’t know.” Not becoming something or someone, just opening to it all, not becoming, just being.
Stephen Levine
As the American Indian sage Crazy Horse commented, “Today is a good day to die for all the things of my life are present.” In the American Indian wisdom wholeness is not seen as the duration one has lived but rather the fullness with which one enters each complete moment.
If you identify with that personality as who you are, you amplify the fear of death: the imagined loss of imagined individuality.
If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth Because these are the places where you’ll cling. You’ll focus there instead of looking beyond."
"To acknowledge the moment, to live fully in this instant, participating in one’s life moment to moment, compassionately observing what is felt, seen, heard. Not in the analytical mind of why, where, or how it relates to some self-image, some model of the universe. But with the keen light of investigation, with a new wonderment at each unfolding."
Because if you want to find the truth, you cannot allow your resistance to continually motivate you. We are constantly hiding and posturing, inventing an acceptable reality, instead of meeting with the pain and resistance which so cloud understanding. We continually elude our liberation because of an unwillingness to open to the stuff which has been locked in by years of postponing life. All the encrustations of the heart, all the mercilessness to ourselves, all our fear of letting go of who we think we are."
"And this is the condition we find ourselves in. It’s not something to judge. It’s just something to notice. Here we all are, with so many unwanted states of mind. And we pull back. Our reaction limits our openness to what comes next. Fear arises, we close. Doubt arises, we close. Anger arises, we close. Death arises, we close
To some, this encouragement to acknowledge the blockages of the heart and the confusion of the mind may seem quite negative. But actually what we are speaking about is the path of joy. The acknowledgment of the stuff which closes us allows a softening, a melting away at the edges. And the spaciousness which results illuminates that which has always been there, our original nature shining through, the joy of pure being, the stillness of the underlying reality we all share.
Indeed, the mind is always dreaming itself. So we start coming to the edge of the dream, start cultivating the compassion to let go. We relearn the ability to experience life as it unfolds, to play lightly without force or judgment. It is not a war. It is at last a kindness to ourselves, which gives rise in time, with constancy, to a spacious participation in the flow of change, beyond ideas of loss and gain, beyond ideas of life and death; opening into just this much, the vastness of what is.
We begin to open to awareness itself, threatened by nothing, withdrawing from nothing, becoming one with life. Perfectly prepared for death, knowing that nothing can separate us from our true nature and that only our forgetfulness can obscure it."
Desire is unfinished business. Whatever has its goal in the future is an incomplete transaction with life. But if thirst is seen as thirst, business becomes finished in the moment of letting go. The mirage is broken. It no longer seems like “my” desire. Something solid about which something must be done. Seeing the impersonality of desire, we are less likely to become lost in the compulsion to satisfy.
An interesting quality that can be noticed about desire, about wanting, is that what is called satisfaction only occurs in the moving from not having to having. Satisfaction is a moment of release from the pressure of wanting."
"What we usually call happiness is the ability to re-create previous pleasures. The pursuit of happiness is the attempt to satisfy old desires. The very nature of desire is a feeling of unwholeness, of being incomplete. We see that this thirst creates what could be called the “if only” mind. The yearning that says, “If only I could get my sports car, I’d be happy.” “If only I could get that job, or that date, or that money I need, then everything would be O.K.” But to the degree the mind wants that object yet unmaterialized in its world, the less it can be present for what is happening. It is drifting off in future pleasures or musing on satisfactions past. The whole world narrows to just that desire, just that sports car, that prize, that pretty face. The whole world disappears into expectation and life is missed once again, traded off for a mirage floating in the mind. We seldom make direct contact with reality, but instead live only in the flat silhouettes that it casts in the mind.
The greater the desire, the more dissatisfaction is experienced.
Desire can be very subtle. It does not have to be the obvious self-satisfaction of the sports car or first prize. It can be the subtle desire for our children to be well. It can be the desire for a healthy body. It can even be the desire for clarity. It doesn’t matter what the object of desire is, it is the closing of awareness around that object which causes us to lose our spaciousness, the loss of ease in our life. It is not the object of desire that matters, it is desire itself that closes the mind, that creates pain. The desire for sex or the desire for happiness causes the same contraction in the mind. It doesn’t matter whether the object of desire is gold or peace. Ironically, the happiness that is sought is lost when the natural mind condenses around the form of some momentary shadow. We lose our happiness by grasping at it.
And the mango is in your hand and there is a moment of peace. For a split second there is no desire in the mind and the body feels very light. Peace is experienced not because of the object in our hand but because for a moment desire does not obstruct the joy and quietude of our underlying nature. What we call satisfaction is the momentary experience of the vastness which lies beneath All of a sudden the clouds part and the sun shines through. The painfulness of desire does not exist. The mind for a moment experiences its wholeness. In that moment of nonwanting, the mind becomes like a clear pool no longer ruffled by the prevailing winds and we can see through the still water to what lies beneath. We experience a moment’s participation in the joyousness that arises as we approach our true nature.
Desire arises, fear arises, dissatisfaction arises. Our sense of wholeness is lost in the attempt to protect the object of desire from the flow of change.
Desire is a product of latent tendencies in the mind. Old imprints left from previous experience. A memory of the pleasant which the mind attempts to re-create. A pulling away from remembrances of dissatisfaction. Memory creates desire as well as fear, a yearning for things to be other than they are. Every thought or feeling or perception that arises in the mind passes through this filter of unconscious preferences and tendencies. The mind is in a constant roller-coaster state of reaching out for and pushing away its contents. In restless agitation, mind seeks the peace that it knows only in the momentary satisfaction of the absence of desire. We notice in that moment that we have somehow groped our way by a kind of braille method into a spacious feeling of peace. The desire for satisfaction is perhaps motivated by an innate momentum toward the truth which some call “a homesickness for God.” A desire to participate in the One. The difficulty with our desires is just that they are too small. They are the desires of me and mine. They do not include the universe. They are a desire for what we want, not for who we are."
"We begin to make an art of life, to walk, as the American Indian said, in “a sacred manner,” to develop a reverence for life which does not seek self-satisfaction, but simply is as it is, edgeless and unending, containing everything, lacking nothing. It is in recognition of the pain caused by our thirst for the little satisfactions of little desires that we are led to the great satisfaction of the great desire: freedom from the mind’s incessant wandering and thirst."
"Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian teacher and saint, spoke of making use of the Great Desire to burn out lesser desires. He speaks of using the desire for the truth, a motivation for coming into wholeness, in the same way that in India the tender of the burning grounds uses his great staff to stir the fire on which the corpse is cremated. One uses the Great Desire for liberation to stir up the fire that conflagrates the little desires that draw one into a mind of bondage. One watches the bones of desire disintegrate in the flames of awareness, consciously stirring the remnants with the great stick. The stirring up of the embers allows the fire to consume all the tissue, muscle, and ligaments that bind together the body of desire. And eventually as the bones and flesh and organs of our holding, of our seeming solidity, are dissolved in the great blaze of purification, the stick that we use to stir the fire, the desire for freedom itself, is thrown into the blaze as well. So that nothing remains to obstruct the reception of the truth."
"Any solidity, any closing of mind, will keep us from experiencing the space within which our life momentarily exists. When desire does not shape the mind and limit it to thought, consciousness becomes translucent. Entering into the spaciousness of the original mind, we become the vastness itself. Inseparable from all else, at one with all that is."
"We see the world through our idea of who we think we are. Our model of the universe is based on our model of ourselves. When we look at the world, all we see is our mind. When we look at a tree, a face, a building, a painting—all act as mirrors for who we think we are. Seldom do we experience an object directly. Instead we experience our preferences, our fears, our hopes, our doubts, our preconceptions. We experience our ideas of how things are. All is created in our image and likeness. Little is allowed independent existence."
"As Krishnamurti continues to point out, “The observed is the observer.” What is perceived is a function of the models we have The mold into which we pour molten reality. The newness of each moment is compressed to fit our idea of ourselves.
Our models freeze-dry the flow of experience into a “manageable” reality. They are our idea of the truth, not the truth itself. The truth is what is. It is this moment, without the least trace of the last or any expectation of the next. Our models are a prison. They are the limit to which we can accept the molten flow of change. They act as filters that accept what we believe and reject what seems otherwise. We don’t so much receive reality, as we perceive it. We pre-receive it. It is precast in concrete. Usually all that we see are memory and expectation"
"Models create such expectation by preconceiving, like any philosophy or idea, a sort of tunnel vision of the mystery. Because we seldom touch the heart of what is happening. We experience only our idea, our dream of what is real.
Models can cause suffering. Holding to them, we miss the truth. We create a world of desire and fear.
"We have become so identified with our doing, with our model of who we are, that we become incredibly insecure at the time of death. We no longer know who we are, because we have always traded off our true being for some stance in the world, for some position of authority. We have traded grace for the mask of someone doing something in a world of arbitrary values.
The self-cruelty of our holding to models can be seen in the eyes of those on their deathbed unable to continue manifesting the roles they have spent their whole life polishing and developing, guilty and confused at the condition they find themselves in, wondering what is real and who they really are.
Their resistance is hell. The resistance is so painful, the pushing away of the present so isolating and fearful, that a feeling of helplessness arises. The more they resist, the more they contract, and the less space they have in which to live their life and die their death. The more painful it gets, the more restless they become."
"Holding to models creates this hell. The difficulty of opening to the truth of the moment that denies the opportunity for a direct participation in this mysterious unfolding, beyond the mind’s calcified preconceptions and fanciful ideas. It is the resistance to life that causes such suffering at death."
"The confusion and suffering arise from our attachments to how it used to be and how we thought it always would be. For these people, dying is hell. It is a tearing away of all that seemed so real and substantial.
But dying doesn’t have to be hell. It can be a remarkable opportunity for spiritual awakening. I have been with many people who have experienced this falling away of energy, this same wearing away of the body, this same inability to be the individual they thought they were, who, instead of tightening into even greater suffering, began to let go of the root of their contraction. As their self-image began to melt, I saw them begin to have a little more space in which to experience themselves."
When this occurs there is an opening to a whole new participation in life as an investigation, because somehow, though you can’t maintain who you thought you were, there is a sense that who you really are is still there."
"somehow their spirit and their participation in the moment are getting stronger and stronger.
Finally, these things they used to present themselves to be in the world are seen as bars in a cage. They see they have lived their whole life in a prison made of models and ideas of how things are, should be, must be, will be, instead of allowing themselves the vastness of what is. They are no longer kept captive by their models of the world. They see that everything they are is present in each moment. There is nothing absent in their predicament, nothing that blocks them from their liberation. They see how identifying awareness with the fantasies of the future and dreams of the past has kept them imprisoned their whole life, rather than allowing them a full participation in their being as it presents itself moment to moment."
"They often begin by investigating the psychological elements, the contents of the mind. And, to a certain degree, that seems useful. Examining states of mind makes them more aware of the blockages to clarity, though it doesn’t necessarily remove them. But, instead of working through each psychological knot, trying to finish business with themselves as a personality, they begin to diminish the identification with these knots. Starting to let go of themselves as a psychological entity, as a personality, as something or someone separate, they begin to recognize that they are the space within which all these mind states occur. And, as they penetrate more deeply into their being, their priorities change. They start to relate to the mind, instead of from it, which allows a whole new dimension of participation in being, in life itself.
They come to the edge of the mind. They see that they are none of the objects of thought or mood. They begin to relate to the light by which all this mind-stuff is seen. They come to recognize that they are awareness itself, beyond any model of solidity or expectation. They no longer confuse the light of awareness for the objects which reflect the light. In the silent “I am” of the mind, consciousness itself is revealed. And they no longer mistake themselves for the objects of awareness, but instead recognize themselves as the vast space of awareness itself.
They have touched the deathless."
Each time we remember, each time we encourage ourselves to penetrate past our attachments, we start to relate to the mind and feel a greater expanse of being. We start to see that what we called “our experience,” what we called “me”—“our” seeing, “our” hearing, “our” tasting, “our” smelling, “our” thinking—is actually just bubbles floating through vast spaciousness, changing from instant to instant. And that we are none of these. These experiences are like an old movie, playing to an empty house. It’s all happening by itself. Thoughts are thinking themselves. And any kind of control introduces force, and force closes the heart and creates suffering.
When I am with people whose greatest priority is the truth and work to let go of all that blocks their understanding,"
"It is a considerable insight for beings who have lived so much of their life, as we all have, in ideas and models of a universe of “shoulds” and “musts” that doesn’t exist. I see them touch the real. I see them become part of what is.
Those beings who live with such insight are the most openhearted and clear-minded people I know. They say, “I don’t have to be anything special to investigate the truth, to find real freedom. I don’t have to worry about being anyone or anything. I don’t have to worry about anything, because I’m not that, either.” As they approach death, they discover life."
"If I might share a composite of what I hear many say, it goes something like this: “This is strange to say, but I’ve never been so happy in my life, because I’ve never had so little resistance, or self-doubt. I don’t really know who I am but it doesn’t matter, because nothing I think of myself as being seems to hold it for long anyway. Somehow I am always something else, and I don’t know what that is. But it certainly is the most fulfilling exploration I have ever undertaken, because I am not going into it with a lot of knowing. I am going into it not knowing. My knowing has always blocked my understanding, filled me up, confused me. But now I am vulnerable to the truth, because I have nothing to lose. I had to lose it all to see that little of it was worth having in the first place. Somehow there is more to me than I ever imagined.”
These people have let go of their limiting models and the archaic insistence of their conditioning and opened into the fresh, fearless present.
They touch the underlying deathlessness of pure awareness—that which neither comes nor goes, but simply is as it is.
These are the people who I see die in wholeness, without struggle, just evaporating out of their body. They die into their true nature. Their death is like the rain falling gently back into the ocean.
The variance between heaven and hell is the fluctuation of the mind between thinking itself fortunate or unfortunate. We weigh each perception against what we desire. An example is the story of the well-to-do insurance broker who lives with his family in a big house, in a “nice neighborhood.” His two children are on the honor roll and he thinks of himself as very fortunate. But the company he works for goes bankrupt and he loses his job and has to sell his house, and considers himself very unfortunate.
However, having to give up his house he thinks, “I might as well do what I’ve always wanted to.” And with the equity from his home, buys a small farm in the country, from which he derives great peace of mind. And once again, he thinks of himself as fortunate.
Then, some weeks later his son, plowing the field, is thrown from the tractor and badly injured. Once again he feels unfortunate. However, the quick action of doctors and the proximity of the hospital saves his son’s life and, once again, he considers himself fortunate.
But as it turns out, his son’s leg is so badly injured that it must be amputated. And again he is certain life is indeed unfortunate.
As it turns out, his son heals rapidly and the insurance covers all of the hospital expenses and, once again, the fellow is considering himself quite fortunate.
After the operation, the boy returns to school on crutches, and can no longer maintain his position on the basketball team or play any sport at all, which the father considers to be most unfortunate.
However, as the boy’s sensitivity grows from his new one-legged relationship to the world, he begins to visit the hospital where he had the operation and to spend time with other young people who have had similar operations and mentions to his father that, at last, he has found his life’s work. Once again his father thinks of it all as fortunate indeed The story could go on forever. And usually does.
Life is not in itself hellish or heavenly. These are the mind’s conditions. Its openness or closedness to events.
As it is the nature of the hand to be soft and open and pliant, able to support whatever is placed within it, so the natural mind is a spacious awareness that clings nowhere. But the conditioned mind due to the millions or billions of moments of grasping we have imagined necessary to maintain some false security in the world has lost much of its original openness.'
"Cramped by its holding, its return to the natural state is slow and occasionally discomforting. Because we so fear pain, we prefer to remain contracted rather than allow the release of ancient tension."
Most of the moments of satisfaction in our life are clung to, making a temporary heaven into an increasing hell. We fear that we will lose our short-lived paradise and crouch in the dark corner, denying the inevitable. Grasping at heaven creates a life of hell. We keep involving ourselves in old patterns, thinking that somehow they will bear fruit in a way they never have before."
"When desire is great and there is no satisfaction, we think ourselves in hell. Hell is our inability to play lightly with the hungry ghost of past fears and temporary satisfactions, the inability to surrender. It is when we find ourselves backing into a corner to elude the unpleasant and try to pull back yet farther from the fire of our unsatisfied longing that we establish residence in hell. And there we are with nowhere to turn, “no exit,” trapped by our longing, unwilling to let go. Our heart constricted by fear and doubt. And it is then, when the suffering gets great enough, when we simply can’t resist any longer, that we begin to open to our predicament. When the heart sighs and begins to surrender its suffering, hell dissolves before our eyes. It is as Thomas Merton said: “True prayer and love are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” It is in letting go of hell that we surpass heaven, entering the light beyond the mind.
For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence."
"The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.