Alan Watts - We are the universe

Alan Watts at his best....about the oneness of all and everything :)

Beautifully conveyed !! 

Meditate on Mooji's words..

You say, “Presence is here.”
Very beautiful. If you come to the place of unmixed presence and you are clear that all you see comes and goes, but you as the witness are not coming and going, then this is already something very beautiful.
All the bhajans, all the mantras, all the pilgrimages are to clean the consciousness
so it becomes only presence—the unassociated Being. And the perfume arising out of this recognition is peace, joy, silence and clarity. This is called the nectar, you see?
It's the ananda— joy itself. Pure joy.
Whether the mind speaks or not, it does not matter now. You are untroubled.
But some few are also saying that this delightful sense of presence, beautiful as it is, is also perceived.
Then the knower of presence is positioned where, you see?
It must be outside and beyond the presence itself.
Where are you standing to witness presence?
Slow down... keep quiet and observe.
I am not looking for a right answer.
I am looking for you.


~ Mooji

HOW AM I TO KNOW IF THERE IS ANY PROGRESS IN MY SPIRITUAL SEARCH? - Posted on behalf of Gunny

HOW AM I TO KNOW IF THERE IS ANY PROGRESS IN MY SPIRITUAL SEARCH?

One of the foreign visitors, who had been coming to Maharaj for quite some time, began quietly: 

Perhaps I am speaking from a body-mind identity but there is a question, a problem, which has been troubling me for so long that I cannot keep it bottled up any longer. I have talked about it to some of the seekers here and I know that they too have the same problem. However, now I am not speaking for them but only for myself.

The problem is: How am I to know if there is any progress in my spiritual search? Occasionally, particularly during meditation, I do have a glimpse of what I am searching for, but only a glimpse and that too only on rare occasions. How am I to know if I am progressing?


Maharaj : The problem apparently is about 'progress'. Now, who is to make the progress, and progress towards what? I have said this repeatedly and untiringly that you are the Conscious Presence, the animating consciousness which gives sentience to phenomenal objects; that you are not a phenomenal object, which is merely an appearance in the consciousness of those who perceive it. How can an 'appearance' make any 'progress' towards any objective? Now, instead of letting this basic apperception impregnate your very being, what you do is to accept it merely as an ideological thesis and ask the question. How can a conceptual appearance know whether it is making any conceptual progress towards its conceptual liberation?

Maharaj took a match box in his hand and held it up. He asked: Is this you? Of course not. Does it need time to understand this? Apperception of this fact is immediate, is it not? Why then should it take time to apperceive that you are not the phenomenal object called the body-mind?
Remember, you are the animating consciousness that gives sentience to the phenomenal objects.

Please understand, said Maharaj, that apperception is prior to the arrival of consciousness which is the basis of intellect. Apperception is not a matter of gradual practice. It can only happen by itself instantaneously — there are no stages in which deliberate progress is made. There is no 'one' to make any progress.

Perhaps, one wonders, could it be that the surest sign of 'progress' — if one cannot give up the concept — is a total lack of concern about 'progress' and an utter absence of anxiety about anything like 'liberation', a sort of' 'hollowness' in one's being, a kind of looseness, an unvolitional surrender to whatever might happen? 

- Posted on behalf of Gunny

This Weekends - Lessons Learnt

Go back to your essence being now!
No psychoanalysis here, just a pill-free freedom.
Nothing is a reading of what you are.
You are not this thing or that thing.
You are no-thing actually.
I wish to meet you, not your story.
It will be a beautiful meeting, a sweet union.
Come out of this fickle hiding place.
Don't keep hiding inside this human form and its dramas.
I know who you are.
You are a Buddha.~ Mooji


Don't avoid anything that comes!
Don't invite anything you don't need!
Attend to circumstances as best you can,
and forget about it!
~ Papaji: 

J. Krishnamurti's words on the lines of concentrating on uncovering the Truth rather than finding and following someone else's established path...

"I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. ... This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies."

J. Krishnamurti's Meditation Quotes and Sayings

• Wherever there is comparison psychologically, meditation cannot be. Where there is measurement, comparison, there cannot be meditation.
   
• The mind can only be silent when it understands the nature of its own movement, as thought and feeling. And to understanding that, there can be no condemnation in observing thought and feeling.
   
• When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy - if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face of your wife or child.
   
• To concentrate is not to meditate, even though that is what most of you do, calling it meditation. And if concentration is not meditation, then what is? Surely, meditation is to understand every thought that comes into being, and not to dwell upon one particular thought; it is to invite all thoughts so that you understand the whole process of thinking.
   
• Meditation is the understanding of the whole structure of the 'me', the self, the ego, and whether it is possible to be totally free of the self, not seek some super-self. The super-self is still the self. So meditation is something which is not a cultivated, determined, activity.
   
• Meditation is spontaneous and therefore it requires spontaneity and not a regimented mind. Spontaneity comes into being when there is awareness, awareness in which there is no condemnation, no judgment and no identification. If you go deeper and deeper and let it flow freely it becomes meditation, in which the thinker is the thought and there is no division between the thinker and the thought.
   
• Meditation is not following a system, it is not repetition, a constant imitation; meditation is something that demands an astonishingly alert mind, great sensitivity in which there is no sense of bringing something about through demand, no illusion. So one has to be free of all demands, therefore of all experience, because the moment you demand, you will experience; and that experience obviously will be according to your conditioning.
   
• If while sitting quietly without any motive, or walking quietly by yourself or with somebody, you watch the trees, the birds, the rivers and the sunshine on the leaves, in that very watching you are also watching yourself. You are not striving, not making tremendous efforts to achieve something. Those who are committed to a certain kind of meditation find it very hard to throw that off because the mind is already conditioned; they have practised this thing for several years and there they are stuck.
   
• When the mind is relaxed, no longer making an effort, when it is quiet for just a few seconds, then the problem reveals itself and it is solved. That happens when the mind is still, in the interval between two thoughts, between two responses. In that state of mind understanding comes, but it requires extraordinary watchfulness of every movement of thought. When the mind is aware of its own activity, its own process, then there is quietness.
   
• Meditation is not something that you practise for an hour or ten minutes and the rest of the day do your mischief. Meditation is the whole of life and that is the beauty of meditation, it is not something set aside, it covers and enters into all our activities and to all our thoughts and feelings. So it is not something that you practise or give attention to once a day or three times a day or ten times a day and the rest of the day live a life that is shoddy, neurotic, mischievous, violent.
   
• Meditation is a process of understanding. Understanding is not a result and it is not something you gain. It is a process of self-discovery. That means meditation is an awareness of your whole process of living. Meditation is a process of understanding, the process of your whole being, not only a part of it, and that means that you have to be aware of everything that you are doing. it is not concentration. You take a picture and you focus your attention on that.

• One has to be choicelessly attentive, fully aware; and this state of choiceless attention is meditation.
   
• Meditation is to be aware of the activities of the mind - the mind as the mediator, how the mind divides itself as the mediator and the meditation, how the mind divides itself as the thinker and the thought, the thinker dominating thought, controlling thought, shaping thought.
   
• The first thing to realise in meditation is that there is no authority, that the mind must be completely free to examine, to observe, to learn. And so there is no following, no accepting, no obedience.
   
• All this process of knowing oneself is the beginning of meditation - not putting the mind to sleep, not having visions or transcendental experiences through some footling word - but to uncover the conditioned and the state of mind which is ourselves in its relationship to society, in its relationship to another. To discover oneself and penetrate deep - all that is meditation.
   
• When you are aware, you see the whole process of your thinking and action; but it can happen only when there is no condemnation. When I condemn something, I do not understand it, and it is one way of avoiding any kind of understanding.
   
• Awareness is observation without choice, condemnation, or justification. Awareness is silent observation from which there arises understanding without the experiencer and the experienced. In this awareness, which is passive, the problem or the cause is given an opportunity to unfold itself and so give its full significance. In awareness there is no end in view to be gained, and there is no becoming, the 'me' and the 'mine' not being given the continuity.
   
• When there is the state of innocency, it is also the state of meditation. You cannot come to that state of innocency as long as you are ambitious, as long as your mind is petty, as long as you are caught in the psychological structure of society and are nothing but an embodied technique - which is what most of us are.
   
• Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is seeing - watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion - attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day. And at night, when the whole organism is at rest, the meditative mind has no dreams for it has been awake all day. It is only the indolent who have dreams; only the half-asleep who need the intimation of their own states. But as the mind watches, listens to the movement of life, the outer and the inner, to such a mind comes a silence that is not put together by thought.
   
• All this is implied in meditation - to be aware, to be conscious of your environment, to be aware how you talk, how you walk, how you eat, what you eat; to be aware how you speak to another, how you treat another, as you are sitting there, to be aware of your neighbour, the colour of the coat, the way he looks. Without criticism just be aware. That gives you great sensitivity, empathy, so that your body is subtle, sensitive, aware of everything that is going on around you. To be aware without any choice, see where you are, looking at the speaker, looking all around you without a single choice, just look - to be aware.
   
• Observing is meditation, it is not that in order to observe you must meditate. To observe is one of the most, difficult things. To observe a tree, for example, is very difficult, and that is because you have ideas, images, about that tree, and these ideas - botanical knowledge - prevent you from looking at that tree.
   
• The mind is always chattering, always pursuing one thought or another, one set of sensory responses after another set of responses. In order to stop that chattering you try to learn concentration, forcing the mind to stop chattering and so the conflict begins again. This is what you are doing; chattering, chattering, talking endlessly about nothing. Now, if you want to observe something, a tree, a flower, the lines of the mountains, you have to look, you have to be quiet. But you are not interested in the mountains, or the beauty of the hills and the valleys and the waters; you want to get somewhere, achieve something, spiritually

Hypothesis

The past couple of days have been truly exciting as they have challenged the way each of us defined our self – real and spiritual. There is a need for these observations to be documented and questioned and refined.  From discussions over the last few days, following are the key observations:

·         Universe in its base form is made up of energy (waves) and matter. Energy is created when matter interacts; matter can only interact an some energy is applied to it. It is futile to answer which gave rose to the other, as it is a chicken and egg problem.

·         By utilizing energy, matter can and has evolved into various forms and shapes. Living organisms are only one form of the matter. For matter to gain mass it requires energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred from one form to the other. Energy in the universe does seem to be a zero-sum game, which seems to be at a natural equilibrium level.

·         Matter can communicate with other matter by way of waves – audible, visual, electrical or even electro-magnetically. This form of communication can be accessed by all matter, either by creating waves or responding to them. When waves (energy) hits matter it either absorbs or responds to waves. If matter absorbs energy then it inherently is transferring the form of that energy (wave) from one form to the other much like the way how a dam converts kinetic energy into electricity. But the key observation is energy cannot be destroyed and does affect all matter that it comes in contact with.  

·         What is reality for humans? Reality is how perceive energy(waves) interacting with other matter through the 5 senses that humans most use. Inherent in this definition is that our reality is totally governed by how matter/energy interaction is perceived by our senses. Thus our reality is truly defined by our senses. If we choose to close or deactivate all our 5 physical senses, what is reality then?

·         Cells (base form of life) have been scientifically proven to communicate with one another through visual signals which result from electromagnetic pulses. Human body too generates electromagnetic pulses and this forms the basis of how our central nervous system works and how we “feel”. The same way earth has its own electromagnetic signature. Each celestial body in the universe has its own electromagnetic signature.

·         A human body has trillions of cells, each with their electromagnetic pulse (vibrations) generating/reaction capability. Depends on the vibrations generated by the cell it is captured by our nervous system and transports the message to the brain which directs our body to take action to address the matter. Following is our hypothesis: Like cells in our body play a particular function in our body, (basically to convert energy from one form to the other), we humans play a similar role on the earth. We too can communicate with earth and everything around us like our cells do in our very own bodies. And earth probable is a part of a bigger body and so on and so forth. This relationship has been captured in various spiritual texts as “everything is one” and the “oneness” concept. We all part of the same and communicate thru our vibrations with the whole. Our vibrations are our 6^th sense, which we can experience thru focus  which can be achieved through meditation

·         I haven’t experienced the oneness but through reasoning and observing we can easily see that concept is at work all around us and within us.