When we look to where we think we are, all we see is everything there is. What we are looking for is where we’re looking from and that is everywhere.
#Hurt people hurt people.
#All separation disappears and we clearly recognise the paradox that we are all essentially the same yet expressed through difference.
#Why pile suffering on top by claiming it with pointless thoughts and stories about it?
#Pain is inevitable, suffering optional.
#Freedom from the tyranny of ego.
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Can we take responsibility for the quality of own mind instead blaming others?
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Can we see that awareness is the one and only constant in our life. It allows everything to happen, to come and go. It’s all we can rely upon. No thought, no feeling, no image, no story, no person has the omnipresent quality of unbounded, open, empty yet abundant awareness.
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Our common shrine can be the open, boundless, indivisible awareness that is always right here, right now.
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Can we recognise our memories of the past and thoughts about the future as fundamentally all the same imaginary fantasy?
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The real problems of life are literally not what we think they are. The problems lie with identification with every thought that occurs to us. We don’t have thoughts, thoughts have us. They capture and tyrannise us.
#Only confusion lies at the end of trains of thought.
#We pour all our cognitive resources into and invest heavily in our separate egos. What a waste. Let us recognise what happens when we invest in the simplicity of open, centreless awareness.
#Can we attend closely and carefully to the difference between memories and what is actually present here, now?
#If we are anything we are a spontaneous arising of ever changing aliveness.
#The universe remains indifferent to our separate identities and desires.
#Identifying as this or that is not liberation. Self identification binds us instead of freeing us. To let go of identification with anything opens us up to everything unconditionally.
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When attachment and investment are seen completely—root cause as well as the consequences that arise—then the seeing is the letting go.” Toni Packer
# The moment we notice ourselves behaving as ‘someone’ in relation to someone else or ‘others’ it is an opportunity to recognise this identification as a fabrication, a fantasy to solidify the ego.
#There seems to me to be little point in insightful realisations if they remain within the domain of ‘formal’ mediation practice sessions. Awakening reveals our essential aliveness that is present all the time, everywhere before and underneath every moment of our experience. Can we not practice persistent recognition in the midst of life?
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Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.” Anthony de Mello
#When ego’s meet there is, eventually, always conflict. When open awareness meets open awareness there is simply the allowing of spacious unity.
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Meaning and purpose are just a distracted person’s imaginary friends.” Sam Harris
#In our original non-dual nature of mind no thing can get in the way of any other thing. There is no space, no separation between anything. A sound is the hearing of it. A sensation is the feeling. Open, empty, spacious awareness unifies everything. It’s only the thinking, delusional mind that separates and breaks everything apart into me/ you, mine/ yours, us/ them, this/ that — a fantasy world of subjects and objects.
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We are not meant to be anything in particular other than simply alive as we are and only until it is time not to be. That is all.
#There is nothing confusing about pain. It is clear, pure and free and definitely not about us. It simply is.
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Can we attend to the raw actuality of experience without the accompanying psycho-dramatic narrative?
#What do we mean when we say we ‘deserve’ something?
#The realm of thought, concepts and stories is complex and confusing. Open, unimpeded awareness is clear, simple and free from interpretation. Inquiry without analysis.
#For the awakened mind nothing changes, everything stays the same but for our point of view. Instead of seeing ourselves and the world from some independent separate vantage point we recognise we are the world and and world is us. There is still pain but it is not ours to claim and own. There is joy but it is the joy of everything. Everything is included and nothing left out. We are not things but open space for everything to arise and pass away without hinderance.
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Realising there is nothing specific that we actually need except the simple acceptance of everything that arises.
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When the thinking mind tries to figure things out, confusion appears. But right here, right now is not confusing at all.” Joan Tollifson
#When the illusion of self is clearly seen through we miraculously disappear in each other’s favour.
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In the absolute there are no happy endings as there are no endings.
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True understanding is a kind of instinctive unknowing, a deep sense of fundamental emptiness expressed as everything.
#Noise is just as intrinsic to the absolute as silence. As motion is to stillness. They enable each other. In the infinite all opposites allow each other. Everything is in a process of enabling everything else. Form and formlessness.
#One fascinating, paradoxical and wonderful, yet utterly ordinary aspect of awakening is the freedom it affords one to go past, through and leave behind many of the forms of practice that enabled one to recognise that freedom in the first place.
#Wide awake in the midst of life.
#What are we doing and what is it we think we are doing?
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Unconditional expression.
#Existence purely expressed directly without preference, bias or fantasy.
#When we attend closely we find nothing more or less that the universe unfolding as us.
#Trust not knowing. Let go of certainty. Fall through doubt and land in what’s left.
#Freedom comes when we realise that although we will think, we don’t have to think. Letting go of the spurious obligation to fill open awareness with images and stories is liberating.
#Listening, sensing, awaring without expectation.
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The acquisition of happiness through pursuit is a fundamentally flawed project. We can’t make ourselves happy, we can only be happy.
#There is simultaneously both something yet nothing. No experience yet being everything.
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Our quality of being determines our quality of doing." Thich Nhat Hanh
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It’s what’s real. Shift your focus from thought forms, physical objects, and mental stories to what’s aware of those things, and you’ll see.” Dr Amy Johnson
#One could write a million words, make a million pictures and still get no nearer to the raw actuality of this moment.
#Icy wind, flecks of stinging rain, deserted beach, mind open.
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We become what we give our attention to.
#Let the nettle sting be. Who are we to claim it as ours?
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Reality is not a symbol, we live in the midst of it.” John Aske
# When we say we can’t take anymore what we’re really saying is we don’t want anymore.
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Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” Anthony de Mello
#Don’t wait to be taught. Let your own intuition and insights guide you.
#Words and images have meaning in contrast to reality which simply is meaning.
#The real benefits of contemplative inquiry appear when we let go of acquiring any.
#It’s the holding on that hurts, not the letting go.
#Beware spiritual materialism. The subtle, seductive tendency to turn the formless, not only into form, but to elevate and separate that form above and from other forms.
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It is what we do when we don’t know, don’t understand what we are doing.
#We deceive ourselves by thinking it can’t be this obvious, this simple, this effortless. It is our thoughts, not our raw awareness, that create confusion, complexity and fantasies of difficulty and expectation. The delusion that this can’t be it when in reality, it always is.
#The eternal unfolding of the infinite everything includes the arising of the futile attempts to describe it. A ruler trying to measure itself.
#Can we be still and attend to this open awareness without describing or narrating?
#We don’t experience things in the present. We are experience and presence simultaneously without separation.
#When we truly and honestly inquire into the present moment with open awareness, without concepts or definitions, we paradoxically find the inseparability of emptiness and abundance inextricably interwoven, undeniably present yet undefinable.
#Notice how we don’t experience time in the same way as we experience bodily sensations. When we really look for the experience of time, there’s nothing to be found in the same way as we come up empty handed when really look for the self we think is so central to our experience.
#“True freedom is the end of separation, this moment of life without ���I’. The presence revealed through the absence of yourself. What remains is this immaculate totality of appearances knowing itself from within just as it is. The obvious truth of every present moment.” Sam Harris
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Life lives us without effort. We need do nothing to be fully alive. We can’t stop it, we can’t make more of it. The present unfolding of everything as this moment is always vivid and undeniable yet impossible to grasp, contain or define.
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Can we take responsibility for the truth we find when we let go of wanting things to be other than they are?
#You’re never going to win the argument you have with the universe.
#When our minds are open and not constricted by the blinkers of small ego, we realise there is wisdom to be found everywhere from everything.
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Falling into opennessa dissolution of the psychological knot of ego—is the doorway to freedom.” Amoda Maa
#If, sometimes, we must hold, hold lightly with gentle tenderness, full in the knowledge that that is what we are doing.
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��Whatever state of mind you find yourself in, rather than focussing on the content or the description of it and all the mental/ emotional associations you may have about it, just let yourself feel the sheer presence of the experience you’re describing, the energy and vitality of it. Let yourself swim in the open-ended indefinable aliveness that it is. Just ride the waves of that energy. The miraculous, impossible to fully describe energy of life that is always present, appearing as all the myriad phenomena we encounter.” John Astin
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Presence without shape or dimension.
#That which is undoubtedly here yet utterly inconceivable.
#Despite all the billions of words, images and stories created over the centuries not one is ‘it’.
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What seekers are seeking is not ‘out there’ beyond but right here, right now before everything, even prior to the seeker and the sought.
#Everything changes while nothing changes.
#Nothing is fixed or stable including us and our fantastical flights of fancy about identity and self.
#There is no mistaking the raw actuality of this moment, right here, right now. Everything else is fantasy.
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If we attend closely and carefully enough we can observe how we take refuge and hide and imprison ourselves in emotions, however painful or unpleasant they may be.
#All forms reveal emptiness and emptiness reveals all forms. Not two, not oneness, just difference unseparated.
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As ever, beginning again.
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Attend to the present moment carefully and closely enough and find everything that happens appears in awareness out of nowhere and then either changes into something else or disappears into nowhere again.
#Seeing through the self and all phenomena as ephemeral and transient allows for everything to simply unfold as it will free from expectation and judgement.
#The present moment will never let you down. Everything else will.
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The fear of death is the same as any other story we believe to be true. Just a story we have made up to escape the raw actuality of the unknown, that which we cannot control, that which simply is and will be in spite of our desire for it to be otherwise.
#This, this that is undeniable, self evident and simply here is ungraspable and without form or boundary.
#All art is the attempt to express the inexpressible.
#All memories pale in comparison to the vibrant, visceral actuality of this moment of vivid aliveness.
#Thinking - the original virtual reality.
#We attribute fixed meanings to the ever changing phenomenal world. No wonder all meanings fail in the end and leave us bereft. Wisdom reveals that meaning is not a requirement but a choice and one we are perfectly capable of living without.
#Pleasure or pain. Relaxation or anxiety. There is nothing confusing about the present moment until we start thinking about it.
#Awareness is not
beyond doubt or question because it is already present
before either arise.
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