Thursday, February 21, 2013

"Now this is something very serious that I am suggesting.  It is easy to meet pleasure with your total being.  It does not need any effort on your part.  When you are happy, you are totally happy for that moment.  But what I am suggesting is, meeting pain, sorrow, suffering as it comes, without any reservation, without trying to escape from it.  Why should life always be pleasant?  Why shouldn't there be suffering?  Why shouldn't there be sorrow?  Why should we always run after sunshine?  Why not enjoy the shadow and the shade as much as the sunlight?   The moment I am not afraid of pain and suffering, the sting of pain melts away.  It disappears.  The sting of pain and sorrow consists of my fear of sorrow.  If I am not afraid of death, then death loses its sting.  It becomes as natural as birth.  Because I am trying to avoid pain, because I am  trying to escape from it, this fear is exploited by many people in our society.  Organized religion would not have such a tremendous hold on the human mind if the human mind were not afraid of pain.  Why should I be afraid of separation?  Why should I try to run away from loneliness?  Why should I be frightened of emptiness?  If it is within, why not face it and try to understand it?  No one can avoid pain in life.  Life is a series of challenges and responses.  No one can control the environments and atmospheres; they cannot be cast into a mold by one's likes and dislikes.  So pain and pleasure, this duality, is going to be there for as long as you are living on the mental level.  So I think it is urgently necessary to see this beauty of life - that I do not try to avoid pain when pain comes; the response of the system is there.  If there is a physical pain, I consult a doctor;  I do what is necessary.  I respond to it.  If there is a death in my family, I know that I am facing separation.  I am now lonely, left behind.  Instead of grumbling and grudging the loneliness let me receive this loneliness with open arms and let me find out what is the essence of loneliness; what is the meaning of separation; why separation is becoming painful to me.  Let me meet it.  Let me understand.
   The real beauty of life will be manifested if we do not turn away from any experience.  Then anxiety cannot touch you.  Then the thought of the morrow does not pollute the enjoyment of today.  And the rumination over the past does not spoil the happiness of today."

--Vimala Thakar, Heart to Heart
 

Tuesday, February 5, 2013


Failure to Thrive - part 3

My human life prior to enlightenment might be described thus:  I was always one, always whole, always complete but didn’t know it. With enlightenment (assent to oneness), I am enabled to say I am always one, whole, complete, but now I know it, therefore the perfection of being demonstrates itself.  Experience of a fact is its own evidence.  My individual perfection is a self-evident fact, the opposite of which is impossible to conceive. What I call imperfection is my attempt to conceive the impossible. Being, of necessity, must be perfect in order to be.  Imperfect being, being that lacks all it needs to be, cannot be.  Everything needed to being is in being; what is essential to anything is in the essence of that thing.  Being is all-inclusive.  Certain knowledge of perfection can only be my self-knowledge of my perfection.  I can only know my being; I can only do what I am.

The acknowledgment of self-oneness must precede the demonstration of self-oneness. Demonstration is a state of awareness in which there is no doubt, a state of certain knowing.  Acknowledgment is the only human access to the divinity of humanity, the state of perfection, and if acknowledgment of what I already am is not used as my starting point, any so-called demonstration is baseless.  I can call an event appearing humanly the demonstration of perfection or oneness, but if there is fear for self, doubt of self, self-guilt, etc. the baselessness of this so-called verbal demonstration will be felt within me as hollow sound only.

The fact is, “I am complete” now.  But it is my knowing of the fact, the conscious living of it, that makes it operative in my experience.  Truth needs to be tested.  It is by the testing of the truth of my oneness, allness that I am exercised by it and always some measure of proof results. Proof is not-yet demonstration, but is a necessary step to it.  Proof is a measure of demonstration; demonstration is full proof (and fool-proof).  Only what we have in the clear understanding is reliable and can be trusted.  Testing, proving and demonstrating, assenting, consenting and intending go hand in hand and this is the intuitive will or instinctive intuition that is the divinity of humanity living consciously.

The more clearly conscious I am that “I am complete,” the more spontaneous the demonstration of that fact.  In other words, when a test of truth appears (and I am ready for it always whether I recognize it or not, since it would not appear if I wasn’t ready for it),  the measure of my understanding, or conscious divinity, which lives me is signalled precisely to me by how spontaneously fear, anxiousness, doubt in myself, disappear and clear understanding stands forth.  Only understanding exists and understanding demonstrates itself.  Spontaneity and demonstration are synonymous.  I know that I know.  The mystics were close.  They say, “I will know as I am known.”  But no such knowledge exists.  I am never the known or the knower, but always the knowing which includes both, subjective and objective as one -- the knowing.  The divine fact of complete oneness lives itself as my experience, whether I am conscious of it or not. But when consciously assented to, I am the divinity of humanity and not a human wondering what to do.

Acknowledgment is one aspect of assent to the fact.  Recognition is another.  Nearly synonymous, these two terms have the meaning of “ownership”, as well as giving place to the prior rights of something.  Before enlightenment, I do not consciously own my allness, but live as if I am owned by an unknown alien force.  The work of enlightenment is effortless, unwilled, spontaneous living of one’s self as one’s all, self-responsibly, self-authentically, self-accountably lived as the one self that one is.  My heart’s deepest desire is to be myself living consciously the true nature of my living whole.

What has been said so far can be illustrated by a common example.  Suppose I have suffered the loss of all of my property and money.  Here is the test of truth.  What do I do?  Do I immediately start running my thinking around my thinking, thinking of all the things I should do to recover my fortune? No.  Thinking about thinking tightens itself all up.  If human steps to my recovery are necessary, they will appear spontaneously as I live myself consciously, divinely.  But if I jump in and immediately begin strategizing, the human steps appearing out of my divinity cannot appear.  Again, this is backwards reasoning and it inhibits my awareness.  Backwards reasoning is like putting the brakes on.  It seems to slow everything down.

Instead I acknowledge the fact, the absolute fact, no matter what the appearances: “I am complete.”  I am one, whole, all-inclusive total self-being.  My perfection is guaranteed, since nothing can exist that does not perfectly exist.  Paradoxically, when I realize that my wholeness is intact without regard to the looks of my money or property, I then find my money and property quickly restoring themselves and sometimes in quite “unorthodox” ways.  Supply is not money and things, it is the substance of my being which I am.  So the test of truth is not how do I get more money.  The test is a self-demand to be the self-supply of my every need.  The need is always for more conscious self-discovery of allness now.

In all of our experiences, troubles and pleasures, we never let go of the absolute fact: “I am one, whole, complete.”  I may momentarily forget it, but since it is the fact, and every dynamic fact is operative whether I am conscious of it or not, very soon I am conscious of it again.  It is as if I am endowed with a divine memory that makes me remember the fact and I find that even in the densest, blackest self-forgetfulness, something occurs that jogs my memory.  The something is the dynamic fact.  I am whole, one, all, complete.

Speaking to the attendees of the 1965 New York seminar, metaphysical scientist Margaret Laird said:

What is there to be afraid of?  I see fear as my own unself-conscious living, because when I am living the I that is Mind consciously there is no fear and there can be no fear in that conscious living. Fear indicates I must be living in the realm of unself-conscious living, denying myself, denying my own self respect, self-love, self-worth. If I am not conscious of my oneness which is allness, then of course, I am going to be insecure, afraid.  It is only as I am living my all, right here, subjectively as my one Mind that I can lose all fear of what anyone, anything or any circumstance can do to me.

Events are going on in Mind before they appear to my conscious mind.  There is not anything that is not going on right now. I believe absolutely in this existential NOW.  The events which appear are going on right now and there are some who have the gift of of seeing these events and can conceptualize them before they happen.  All the steps necessary to identifying the fact of perfection are present now because the fact is present now.

This impersonal seeing, we call insight, is Love, Principle, the discernment of spiritual facts and always the discernment is that no need is present at anytime, in anyway.  With  insight or awareness functioning consciously for one’s outsight there is no such thing as human need, since the divinity of humanity is ever-present supplying the needs of humanity to see its divinity and that that’s all that is going on.

Now in Science, in this discernment, awareness or insightful living of myself, I have a way of consciously and deliberately awakening to the fact.  Because it is the basic fact of all my facticity: all my being, knowing, doing, I learn soon that when a fact known and consciously assented to demonstrates itself through a trial, what is being demonstrated through the trial is the irrepressible law of oneness.  Since the fact of me is being me and this fact is my divinity living humanly as me, I learn with every lesson it creates how to relax into the presence of my present being and let it do its own thing.  Paradoxically, when I relax, I awaken; but when I tense up, staying tense, then I don’t.  My access to my omnipotent divinity is not through will-power, but is insight-power.

With this for my point of view, in very practical terms, the labels “sick and poor” can be understood as me habitually saying “no” to my life and naturally failing to thrive.  The labels “healthy and wealthy,” which label me as my own thriving one/all, apply to the degree in which I have learned to always say “yes!” to my life.  Consciously saying yes to all of my life is, in a very real way, my awakening from the dead (unconsciousness), my resurrection and my ascendance is my assent to what is always going on as the whole me - the conscious infinitude of the One/All -- here and now that I already am.