Meditation

Meditation means awareness. Whatsoever you do with awareness is meditation. Action is not the question, but the quality that you bring to your action. Walking can be a meditation if you walk alertly. Sitting can be a meditation if you sit alertly. Listening to the birds can be a meditation if you listen with awareness. Just listening to the inner noise of your mind can be a meditation if you remain alert and watchful. The whole point is: one should not move in sleep. Then whatsoever you do is meditation.

Compassion

There's no joy like this!

For me, the purpose (or meaning, if you like) of life is to shift one's centre of gravity from who I thought I was to Who I AM. `Seeing' is important only as a means to this End - which is to be the Absolute Mystery, to know oneself as Absolutely Incomprehensible. There's no joy like this! - Douglas Harding

Underneath the layers of conditioning...

Once all of our conditioning is stripped away,
the true self is as clear as the brilliant sun.
Underneath the layers and layers of conditioning
accumulated over the course of a lifetime is a Buddha
whose light shines throughout the whole universe.
Inside the ego shell of conditioning,
a glimmer of that light is actually
what brings us to practice to begin with.
It is the bodhicitta, the bodhi mind,
the mind that says it does't make sense
that there should be all this pain and suffering,
or that it should be so difficult to just be ourselves
the way a tree can just be a tree or a dog can just be a dog.
We humans seem to have a complicated time
with just simply being human. We fight with each other,
kill each other; we bang heads all the time,
even with the ones we love.

Inner Stillness

When you lose touch with inner stillness,
you lose touch with yourself.
When you lose touch with yourself,
you lose yourself in the world.
Your innermost sense of self,
of who you are, is inseparable from stillness.
This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

The ego

The ego is human;
egolessness is divine.
The ego is hell;
egolessness is paradise.

Mind Divides

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim
or a Christian or a European, or anything else,
you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent?
Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.
When you separate yourself by belief,
by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.
So a man who is trying to understand violence
does not belong to any country, to any religion,
to any political party or partial system;
he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. ( J. Krishnamurti )

Is God Real?

Is God Real? Since the question came up,
let's briefly go into it.
When it comes to spiritual realities,
the fact that when you are
in a meditative state of oneness,
a G-spot might light up
(or whatever brain correlate is being tracked),
says absolutely nothing about
the ontological status of the referent in that state.
Any G-spot activity in the brain
is the correlate of a meditative state, not its content.
When I look at an apple, an area in my brain
associated with its perception lights up,
but we do not therefore assume that
the apple exists only in the brain.
So why sould we assume that
God exists only in the brain because the same thing happens? ( Ken Wilber )

Thought & consciousness

Thinking and consciousness
are not synonymous.
Thinking is only a small
aspect of consciousness.
Thought cannot exist
without consciousness,
but consciousness does not need thought.

You Are The Sky

You are the sky.
The clouds are what happens,
what comes and goes.

A metaphor for practising with thoughts
which is sometimes used which describes
the process of practicing with them as follows:

Thoughts are like clouds moving across the sky.
You are the sky and the thoughts are just a movement,
like clouds. Don’t move attention towards them or away from them.

But there is something very important
that is being left out.
The metaphor implies a “watcher” of the clouds
and unless this “watcher” is also released,
we have not begun to practise with
the mechanisms of self-image that give rise to patterns of contraction.

We need to attend to thoughts like the sky attends to clouds,
not like someone sitting on the ground looking up at the clouds.

Awareness is non-dual

Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality. Awareness is non-dual, and mind is dual.So just watch. I don't teach you any solutions. I teach you the solution:
Just get back a little and watch.Create a distance between you and your mind. ~ Osho

Freedom

When each thought absorbs your attention completely,
it means you identify with the voice in your head.
Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self.
This is the ego, a mind-made "me."
That mentally constructed self
feels incomplete and precarious.
That’s why fearing and wanting are
its predominant emotions and motivating forces.
When you recognize that there is a voice
in your head that pretends to be you
and never stops speaking,
you are awakening out of
your unconscious identification
with the stream of thinking.
When you notice that voice,
you realize that who you are
is not the voice — the thinker — but
the one who is aware of it.
Knowing yourself as the awareness
behind the voice is freedom.

Beyond The Mind

All the things that truly matter
— beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace —
arise from beyond the mind.

Waking up

If you wake up one morning
realising that you do not know anything,
then you are awake.
If you still think you know something,
then you are still asleep.
If you are still trying to know,
you are still trying to control.
If you are still trying to control,
then you still think something can ‘go wrong’.
If you still think something can go wrong,
then you are not in touch with the source.
If you are not in touch with the source,
then you live in fear.
You are living in the fear that you have created,
and that you are trying to get away from. ~ ( Paul Lowe )

To be Ordinary

Drop the idea of being Extraordinary!
It’s keeping you mediocre.
To be Ordinary is the most
extraordinary thing in the world.
The Ordinary person has light in his eyes…
he has become extraordinary,
but he has no idea of it.

What is Awareness?

Ask yourself - 'What is awareness?'

"Become conscious of your consciousness. And in that very becoming, in that very silence - when you are only conscious of your consciousness and not of any other content - no thought, no desire, no dream - you are just conscious of your being conscious, the mirror is reflecting itself and nothing else... in that moment, something immensly miraculous happens. You become aware of the divine, you become aware of the essential core of your being." Osho

Ken Wilber

Human beings are born and begin their evolution
through the great spiral of consciousness,
moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational
to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps
into genuinely transpersonal domains.
But for every person that moves into
integral or higher, dozens are born
into the archaic.

Being & Becoming

All the Buddhas of all the ages,
have been telling you a very simple fact:
Be -- don't try to become.
Within these two words, be and becoming,
your whole life is contained.
Being is enlightenment,
becoming is ignorance.