The Torn Page

Student Question: How can I live with an open heart without taking on other's suffering?Recorded during the Abyss and Pleroma retreat, on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 2015.

Excerpt: “The Self, and by the Self we mean consciousness in its pure, original form, before it is conditioned by all of the indoctrination that we received in our childhood and in an ongoing way by all of the messages we get from society and each other . . . we are infinite beings in a state of bliss, with knowledge, with love, with power. And then we are taught a lot of misinformation that causes us to forget all of that. So within this infinite pure consciousness, little bubbles of finite belief systems form, and when such a bubble forms in which there is an identification, usually with the bodily form . . . we call that an ego. And that little finite bubble of consciousness gets cut off from the rest of consciousness and forgets about everything outside of that bubble.” Recorded on the evening of Friday, November 27, 2015.

Student Question: Why is love so painful?

Excerpt: ”Can you awaken to the dreamer of the dream who is within you at this very moment, and awaken to your own power to re-dream this world as a heaven rather than a hell? Do you have the courage? Do you have the will? Do you have the love to propel you to awaken from your own dream of life, and realize the truth that you are the dreamer? This is the real question we all face.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, July 19, 2015.

Student Question: How do you deal with the hypocrisy of the ego when you say to yourself that you want to surrender and walk the spiritual path but you don't do it? How do you deal with that situation without starting an internal war?

Excerpt: ”If and when meditation is successfully accomplished it is the result of Grace. It is given, in the same way as in the Old Testament, the manna from heaven was given every morning in the desert; they didn’t have any food in their rucksacks. And they were moving along and couldn’t plant any, and it was a desert where very little was growing, but somehow every morning the manna would appear. In our meditations it is that same faith that the manna from heaven, the Shakti, the lumination, the presence of that inner Other, of that power that is the Real Self, will shine upon us, will grant us a glimpse or a realization of the fullness of the Being that we are that is beyond anything we can think we are. And that Grace comes when there is love.” Recorded during the Lion Heart Koan retreat, on the morning of Sunday, October 25, 2015.

Excerpt: ”Awareness is all that we know. Whatever seems to occur is only an appearance in Awareness. But what is Awareness made of? Does it have a substance? Is it objective? Awareness cannot be captured by any science because every science must be an appearance in Awareness; and science is a form of knowing, but there is no form of knowing that can know Awareness. Therefore we cannot say that Awareness is made of anything; it has no substance, no essence. And since everything is an appearance in Awareness, and is simply a modification of Awareness, then we cannot say that anything is.” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, October 3, 2015.

Excerpt: ”God is the infinitely branching reality of the creativity of life itself. And we who sit under this tree of life, we are life. And we can hear the sound of life, and it is the sound of love. And if we sit watchfully like the animals on the lookout, feeling the energy of God’s love, as Nature Herself, and realizing we are one with that; we are Nature’s tuning forks who transform the bliss of this divine presence into art, into meaning, into poetry, into philosophy, into prayer – into sheer delight. This is our function as part of Nature.” Recorded during The Dao of Love retreat on the morning of Monday, February 17, 2014.

Excerpt: “Our beliefs are a defense against love. We live in the head in order to avoid the heart. And by eliminating any hiding place in the head at the level of beliefs, we force ourselves to face the reality of the Self as love - and our surrender is a surrender to love. It is the bringing to an end the fearful flight from love that is the ego’s raison d'etre. And thus we can define meditation and yoga as the practice of the purification and perfection of love. Love is what we are. Love is what God is. Whatever is real is real because it is love.” Recorded during the meditation weekend on Sunday, August 2, 2015.

Excerpt: “Why is the world something to us that arises, and that creates not only sensations, which are easily correlated to the five senses, but feelings, intuitions, and all of the subtler aspects of consciousness? Because none of that would be necessary based on simple evolutionary principles in which we could have been simply robots, or zombies . . . and how do we know that everyone else in the world is not a zombie, in other words, seemingly conscious but actually simply a computer program; programmed to respond in given ways that are adaptable but that they have no interior reality, how do we know? And how is it that there is an ‘I’ that can even ask that question? Well this Hard Question is in fact the original question that produced the field of yoga; it is nothing other than the question that Ramana insists that we ask which is ‘Who am I?’ ‘what is I-am-ness, being-ness?’” Recorded on the early morning of Friday, February 6, 2015.