on compassion within an illusion

Understanding that your reality is an illusion, that your life is a story, and that none of it is true, does not mean that compassion is a part of the meaningless dream as well.

In fact it means that compassion is more central than ever, because Truth is one with Love.

Suffering is not real. Hatred is not real. Violence is not real.

Pain is real.

In ‘Emptiness Dancing,’ Adyashanti speaks to Meister Eckhart’s sense of the above:

If you are in a state of rapture meditating and your neighbor is hungry and needs a bowl of soup, it would be much more pleasing to God to give your neighbor the soup than to stay in the rapture.

Someone once said that God is a verb. In other words, there is no subject and object in Truth. There is only Spirit in motion, with attachment to no end.

In attachment comes suffering again, comes separation, comes the belief of ends justifying the means.

This in fact was the Gita-based genius of Gandhi: desireless Action: "means are after all everything."

Compassion for compassion’s sake.


~Peace to All and One,
Son Rivers

Adyashanti on Ramana the Flame

Ramana Maharshi's gift to the world was not that he realized the Self. Many people have had a deep realization of the Self. Ramana's real gift was that he embodied that realization so thoroughly. It is one thing to realize the Self; it is something else altogether to embody that realization to the extent that there is no gap between inner revelation and its outer expression. Many have glimpsed the realization of Oneness; few consistently express that realization through their humanness. It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

Adyashanti from 'Selling Water By the River' in Inner Directions Journal, Fall/Winter 1999

Some Notes from Radio Adyashanti

decision-making

from being to doing

from being rather than thought
more intuitive
and not awakened to the intuitive yet
from silence, the divine

stop trying to figure it out
let go of figuring it out, to solve, to know on the level of mind
and awaken deep intuitive intelligence

get out of the driver’s seat

willingness to be still and know

be still first
then know

be still

let go of solving in mind to allow consciousness to go deeper
consciousness will move out of the mind into being
into an intuitive wisdom
heart wisdom
the wholeness of wisdom

bubbling from the unknown, the silence

relinquish control
you really don’t have control anyways
still you struggle for control
and blind yourself of the intuitive wisdom

enlightened action
action coming from the unknown
only can happen when you let go

to be still and know

mind relaxes into something it doesn’t understand
because mind isn’t the only intelligence

but sometimes you have to allow yourself to not know

Reality Dancing

The other day I was thinking of the potentiality of Pure Awareness, and the spiritual practices that allow one to tap into it, when I suddenly realized that particular thought was completely backwards.

I cannot emphasize enough the word, realized.

It was as if the thought of ‘me thinking’ was turned around, seen through, disappeared, terminated with extreme prejudice, and the realization of the Self was here and now.

Now this wasn’t the first time such realization has happened, but when it happens as it did suddenly and unexpectedly from the perspective of the Dream, it brings a rush of understanding.

And I understood in truth, there is nothing I, in the Dream, can really do.

Adyashanti describes the Dream’s experience of Emptiness in two ways. The first is the emptiness of emptiness, a cool emptiness. But the second is a deeper experience of Emptiness as if your being is dancing.

I felt as if my being was being danced, and everything was vividly alive.

But this happened while driving, so thought reappeared relatively quickly, so as to avoid any appearance of an accident.

But that realization was no accident; it was intent itself. And it really didn’t happen the other day; it’s happening now.

I Go, You Go, We All Go for Ego

Adyashanti says that spirituality is a surrender game. Certainly eradicating the ego and all its resultant suffering is. There are two chief ways of doing so.

The first involves some worship of a higher power, so that your self is humbled to a greater cause or being. The ego is ultimately sacrificed on that altar.

The second involves an intellectual quest, an investigation really, into the nature of the self. In so doing, the ego is discovered to be an illusion.

In both ways, the ego is surrendered. In the former, it is killed. In the latter, it never existed.

Still, they are radically different in their worldview. In worship, there is a Creation. In self inquiry, there is, at most, a dream. Beyond that, Nothingness.

Call me Ishmael. Call me Quantum Spirit.

After Awakening, Then What

Miguel Ruiz calls it the Dream of the Second Attention. You write your new story with love.

Eckhart Tolle calls it Awakened Doing. Consciousness flows through you and into this world in three modalities: Acceptance, Enjoyment, Enthusiasm.

Adyashanti speaks of a New Way of Being, resting in awareness, experiencing the ordinary as extraordinary, more like love than anything else, for no reason or purpose, knowing the story isn’t true.

Robert Adams says that the universe is a manifestation of your mind. And in that realization you become Self, which includes everything you need. The trees do not lack for leaves.

Jesus simply said to consider the lilies of the field. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today is enough for today.

Buddha held up a golden lotus flower silently before his listeners.

So I’m blogging.