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Use every situation you have with other people as a vehicle to work on yourself. See where you get stuck, where you push, where
you grab, where you judge, where you do all the other stuff. Use your life experiences as your curriculum.
But what actually happens is that many relationships reinforce our separateness because of our misperception of ourselves as separate beings, and because of our desire systems, which are based on separateness or ego. Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.
The problem with interpersonal love is that you are dependent on the other person to reflect love back to you. That’s part of the illusion of separateness. The reality is that love is a state of being that comes from within.
If someone is a problem for you, it’s you who needs to change.
The power other people have to shake you out of your equanimity and love and consciousness has to do with your own attachments and the clinging of your mind.
The only game in town is the game of being, which includes both highs and lows. Every time you push something away, it remains there. The pile under the rug gets very big. Your lows turn out to be more interesting than your highs because they are showing you where you’re not, where you have work to do.
When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that
frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.
If you want to be free more than you want to be right, you have to let go of righteousness, of being right.
If you stay in the soul, you will stay in love. It’s not a concept or a belief. When you have faith, there’s no fear—only love. True “faith” arises when you know that you are the soul, and that the soul is love.
Goethe had this beautiful thought: “The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and
who, though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
The zeal for independence and individuality has alienated us not only from our deeper being, from family and community, but also from nature.
If our old people feel empty of purpose, perhaps it is because our culture’s vision for the end of life is lacking too.
Use the new uncertainty and negative feelings about aging as a wake-up call. Have compassion for yourself and allow yourself to open to the changes, and all the rest will follow.
Now we are getting more into the heart of the matter: can you find a place to stand in relation to change where you are not frightened by it? Can you live in the presence of change, even enjoy the changes—work with the changes, become an elder, do all the things that involve changing—and at the same moment cultivate equanimity, clarity, loving awareness, compassion, and joy? Balancing those qualities is really what the deep spiritual work is about.
you see the Beloved when you look at another being, then everyone you see is a soul, as well as a mirror for your own soul.
Making believe you are done with something you are not truly finished with will slow you down on your journey to God. Equally,
trying to hold onto something you are done with will slow your journey.
You took this birth because you have work to do that involves suffering and the kinds of situations you find yourself in. This is your curriculum for this birth.
When we are resting in our souls, death is just closing a chapter in a book.
Each of us has our own work to do, our own unique karmic predicament. But what’s most important is where you are doing it from—that is, your point of view. Are you doing it from your ego, your role, your personality—or from a place in you that doesn’t change—your spiritual heart, your soul?
Are you stuck in time or not? Time is a river that flows from birth to death, a lifetime. If you are in time, you will suffer and you will die. If you change your identification from that which dies to your soul, then you move into that realm of awareness that is beyond time, though it includes time. Then you are a soul who is part of the One. And souls don’t die.
The journey of consciousness is about arriving at a balance in life where you are open to the mystery of it all. You can’t be open when you’re loaded down with a lot of conceptual stuff.
When the great South Indian saint Ramana Maharshi was dying of cancer, his doctors wanted to treat him, but he refused, saying, “This body is all used up.” His devotees, who loved him dearly, cried, “Bhagawan [Blessed One], don’t leave us, don’t leave us.” He replied, “Don’t be silly, where can I go?”
Curing a disease of the body is not always an option, but healing from the soul level is always possible.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready.
Whatever you need to do to get ready to die, you should have done it a minute ago. Do it now and get ready. Every moment is the moment you die. Every breath is the first and last. A conscious being holds on nowhere.
When you and another person enter into love together, you enter into a unitive moment that transcends death. Recognize that you feel enriched by everybody you have loved, instead of deprived by the loss of their form. You’ll realize they continue to live in your heart. Everybody you have ever loved is part of the fabric of your being. And that is where grief gets transformed into a living, loving space, a spiritual transcendence of the pain.
The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain—to just be with it all. I’ve been growing into that wonderful
Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world. When you bear what you think you cannot bear, who you think you are dies. You become compassion. You don’t have compassion—you are compassion. True compassion goes beyond empathy to being with the experience of another. You become an instrument of compassion.
May all beings be free from danger. May all beings be free from mental suffering. May all beings be free from physical suffering. May all beings know peace. OM
Hate, fear, lust, greed, jealousy—all that comes from the ego. Only love comes from the soul.
How did the rose ever open its heart And give to this world all of its beauty? It felt the encouragement of light against its being, Otherwise we all remain too frightened.
A soul takes a human birth in order to have a series of experiences through which it will awaken out of its illusion of separateness.
Time is a box formed by thoughts of the past and future.
May the Blessings of God Rest upon you. May His Peace Abide with you May His Presence Illuminate your heart Now and forever more.
There is a poignancy in our predicament of being stuck with one foot in the world and one foot in the spirit. When you get too holy or too high, the world pulls you back down. You have to dance with that kind of tension all the time. You keep bringing your worldly nature and your spiritual self closer and closer into alignment. The good news is that awakening is built into the system. It just takes its own time.
our karma and our awakening are unfolding perfectly.
