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Aldous once said, “The reason we like precious jewels so much is they remind us of planes of consciousness we’ve lived on where those are the pebbles.”
Krishna, Christ, Hanuman—all of them the same. The ocean made manifest in different forms. Different strokes for different folks. Each a form we need, if we need form.
Theravada Buddhist meditation, three components are emphasized. One is called sila, one is called samadhi, and one is called panna. Sila is the purification: nonkilling, nonstealing, nonlying, right speech, right livelihood, and so on. Samadhi is concentration and mindfulness. And panna is right understanding and right thought, or the wisdom connected with it.
The deeper panna makes it easier to let go of some of the attachments, so it makes it easier to increase the sila. And the increased sila allows the samadhi to get deeper. So we begin to see the way these three things all keep interweaving with one another. They’re a beautiful balancing act.
“The angels can fly ’cause they take themselves lightly.”
My understanding of the way a child grows is that you create the garden, you don’t grow the flower. You can merely fertilize the earth and keep it soft and moist, and then the flower grows as best it can.
You exist on many planes simultaneously at this moment. The only reason you don’t know of your other identities is because you’re so attached to this one. But this one or that one—don’t get lost; don’t stick anywhere; it’s all just more stuff. Go for broke, awake totally.
What’s bizarre is that we get to the point where somebody lays a heavy trip on us and we get caught, and then we see through our caughtness and we say, “Thank you.”
People come up and are violent or angry or write nasty letters or whatever they do to express their frustration or anger or competition, and all I can say is thanks.
Stay in the world, do your part, raise your children, earn your living, and assume your responsibility at every level. Do it all as an exercise to bring you to God, because until you are one with God, every act you perform will both liberate and entrap.
Why did it all begin? Why did we leave God in the first place? That is the question which is the ultimate question, and Buddha’s answer to that question was, “It’s none of our business.” Which is not a facetious answer. He’s saying our subject-object mind can’t know the answer to that question. It’s an answer that we can be, but we can’t know; because in order to know that, we would have to be that from which it started, but we aren’t it as long as we’re asking the question.
Because of the rampant use of opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, and prescription pain-killers, our society is running scared about all chemicals that alter consciousness.
Psychedelic chemicals such as psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, LSD–25, DMT, MDA, and other tryptamines could play a profoundly beneficial role therapeutically and spiritually in our society if we approached their use with educated discrimination instead of categorizing them as illegal, ergo “bad.”
And any time we are unsure or frightened about our situation, there’s a beautiful and very powerful mantra—“The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me”—which we can repeat to ourselves.
“Consume the universe into yourself; drink of the universe so that you may know the Father.” That’s not Jesus speaking; that’s the Christ.
The problem is that so much violence has been done by interpreting that initial statement as a statement of Jesus rather than as a statement of the Christ. Its misinterpretation has led to proselytizing, and a lack of acknowledgment of other people’s ways of meeting the Christ other than through the form of Jesus.
Don’t let paranoia rule the game about who’s doing what to whom.
It doesn’t have to be “us” against “them.” It’s we become them, and then “them” becomes us.
Really it’s like the Europeans who originally came to America and thought that if they got political and religious freedom, they would have it made. Well, they came here and they got it, and they didn’t have it made.
wisdom of Gandhi’s statement, “Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it”.
My Guru said to me, “Lincoln was a good president because he knew that Christ was president and that he was only acting president.”
acclaimed Still Here and Be Love Now.
www.ramdass.org.
STEPHEN LEVINE is one of the world’s foremost authorities on death and dying and the author of Who Dies?
