The Torn Page

Excerpt: ”. . . And therefore it is the transcendence of language, of thought, that is the essence of the first step in meditation, the opening up of the psyche to Pure Presence that is focused on the Source of Being, but without trying to grasp it conceptually; that is focused with devotion and with love for the ultimate mystery – that one must be very humble and careful not to believe one already knows just because you’ve read a lot of sacred texts or you’ve heard various gurus speak or you know that you’re supposed to believe that all is one or God is all that is or whatever is the current ideology, because none of that is true – because no set of words can capture the Truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 6, 2014.

Excerpt: “The two doctrines of most importance and usefulness in the East are those of Advaita and Advaya. The Advaita doctrine says that the Supreme Real cannot be understood by a mind trapped in duality – which is a mind that uses ordinary language to understand things because language defines each term in terms of an opposite term: we learn what hot means in terms of cold; we learn up in terms of down; we learn being in terms of nothingness etc. But God cannot be defined or characterized or in any way described or pointed at through language that is caught in this dualistic level of description. God is beyond both being and nothingness. . . . And so the Advaya doctrine, which is the one mostly offered in the Buddhist traditions, is that we cannot speak about God at all. And therefore what you can not speak about as Ludwig Wittgenstein came to understand himself (he’s one of the fathers of postmodern Western philosophy), what you cannot speak about, pass over in silence. And it is that silence that is at the heart of the spiritual traditions of both East and West.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 2014.

Excerpt: “In the ancient world it was recognized that there was a bifurcation of the Real between being and appearance. Anything that appears in the world therefore is not; appearance means illusion. What has being does not appear in the world. But it has flipped completely in the postmodern period in which only that which appears seems real to the postmodern ego, and anything which can’t be grabbed onto is not real. This is the complete opposite of the way that every philosophical tradition for the last five thousand years – including the Western tradition – has understood being. That which has real being does not appear as an object in the world. It is the Source, the objects are the shadow of being, the reflection. But being itself is that which sends that shadow, it is the light, but when the light hits the mirage of the physical plane and we have appearances, that is a step removed from the Source: it has no being; it is a flux. And its reality must be interpreted by the human consciousness which is given the power to discern between that which is Real and that which is illusion. It’s based on using that discernment accurately that we live a life of purity and empowerment, but when we chose the illusion over the Real, that is what is called in Christianity the ‘original sin.’” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 23, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And once that simple shift has been made then consciousness lets go of its contraction and realizes itself as infinitely vast, timeless, fearless – and completely empowered to play one’s role in the dream with heroic courage, with infinite creative potential, and with generosity and love; with all the virtues and all the siddhis that yoga speaks about, because your true nature is divine. But you’ve traded the divine powers for the ego’s anxiety. And all that needs to be done is to reclaim that original nature that is unlimited and that is fearless, and completely un-contracted.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, September 2, 2013.

Excerpt: ”We know that we are children of God, and that when all the veils of illusion have fallen away we are one with God. We know also that this world is almost gone. The old civilization is collapsing, the plagues are coming. Time is short. But God is here, and a new world is being born. It’s being born in your hearts. It’s being born in the beauty of your souls, in your love for the Creator and the Creation. It is your timeless and infinite Light that is giving birth to a new world that will form as the perfectly beautiful reflection of your Being.” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, October 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Meditation is simply Reality’s self-revelation of itself, to itself. That revelation comes in the form of awareness which is revealed as our being; our nature is simply consciousness. And that consciousness reveals itself as luminous intelligence. And that luminous intelligence reveals itself as love. And the love reveals itself as bliss. And all of this reveals itself as the timeless presence of what we are now, in this moment of what we have always been and always shall be.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, October 8, 2013.

Excerpt: ”Once upon a timelessness there was only consciousness, all alone. And because consciousness dwelt in timelessness it was lonely, it is lonely, it will always be lonely – there is no other; this is its one sanskara. And it has no form, so it can’t even look in a mirror; has no name, there’s nothing to do. It has no TV, no Internet; it’s just consciousness, in infinite, eternal, boring bliss. So what is a poor lonely Supreme Self to do? It dreams up a world! And it dreams up very interesting worlds.” Recorded during the Timeless Truth retreat, on the morning of Tuesday, September 30, 2014.

Excerpt: “One of the mantras that is popular now is actually a very young one; it’s only about 3000 years old. But before that – before this mantra ‘Sat Chit Ananda,’ which is now one of the core mantras – there was another one called ‘Satyam Gyanam Anantam,’ and this goes back many thousands of years earlier - which has a slightly different nuance - which basically says ‘I am the Truth of Being (Satyam), I am the Knowledge that is aware of that Truth.’ So it is a state of full consciousness but that knowledge is not the knowledge that is now called ‘ciencia.’ So it is toda ciencia trascendiendo, but it is still a kind of ciencia, but it is the science that is the knowledge of infinity. Anantam is infinity; it is not Ananda but Anantam. Because it is the recognition, the knowledge, that all of this that we perceive, we are. God is all that is, you are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 18, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Anyone who meditates is committing a sin because you’re starting with the presumption that you’re separate from God and have to do something to reach God – when that illusion of separation is the ignorance, the sin – the original sin – and cannot be eliminated by that illusory ego making some effort to reach God – because where are you going to reach to if you’re already That? God is not an object somewhere out there, not a being you have to call on a phone, or have some telepathic connection with. There is no process by which you can reach God because any process simply takes you away from your own center. And so the only valid form of meditation is non-meditation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 11, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Pure and total presence precedes the interpretation of what is present. And it is through an inaccurate interpretation of what is present that the soul and then the ego illusions and the belief in an external world, and an internal world for that matter, are developed which create deeper and deeper levels of maya. The maya, or the illusion, is based on the mind’s wrong interpretation of what is present. But the presence itself is Truth and is the nature of our Being. That presence includes all of reality but the presence is not divided into separate individual entities. And it is the mistaken belief that this presence is seen from the perspective of a particular entity that then creates the I-thought from which the sense of self and of otherness enters in which creates alienation and duality and a loss of wholeness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 4, 2014.