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When opposition and consistency are recognized as interesting reflections of nature, their hobgoblin nature changes from monsters to little shmoos that one invites over to tea, as Ram Dass once put it.
Just as
time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once, the emptiness of space gives rise to the seeming separation of all material things.
The problem is in thinking of consciousness as a thing rather than a verb, which is closer to what it is.
while the contents may be illusory, experience itself is not.
One might say that all quality meditation comes from losing identification with the theater.
you can practice bringing awareness right up next to the contents on the stage in your mind, that is, so close a single part becomes everything and nothing at the same time.
Your identity with the theater depends on the relationship of awareness to the contents; so if you want to get out of the movie, change this relationship.
can you watch the reaction, rather than become the reaction?
The best form of confidence comes when we don’t need to be confident.
Success owes as much to failure as failure to victory.
His last words were likely the last thought each and every one us will have regardless if we die in our sleep or at the end of painful suffering... “That was fun.”
So the next time you watch drama, play with the three levels and this becomes the practice. First, become the drama as you might have in the past. Next, see the drama from a distance and notice that it is the mind at work as all patterns exist only in the act of perception. Last, see the drama as the playful nature of the cosmos.
is there any place that your awareness ends and the awareness of others begins?
Practicing being aware of the awareness in others is powerful as it removes social roles and fictional identities all created by interpretive brains.
be the awareness of your own interpretive mind and then let that awareness perceive others. Not as they appear on the surface, but as other vehicles of this single awareness.
At best, the self as a separate self is an idea of itself being separate.
survival counted on mistaking the map for the territory.
This is exactly like mental quicksand, the more you try to move, the faster you sink.
Anger is to the fight response as anxiety is to the flight response.
Fighting the ideas of your enemies in your head only pushes the acceleration button of the nervous system. The idea of fighting is never as physically exhausting as real fighting and so there is always a surplus of energy.
Anger, worry and anxiety have come into being due to a “flaw” in design, of mapping the mind onto a primitive interpretive system that increased survival value.
whoever embraces the ego will become egoless and whoever tries to become egoless will only find more ego.
If you run from something negative, it will chase you. If you experience the stillness of a monk on a mountainside and want to capture this moment forever, it will immediately escape you.
Becoming aware that effort is a thought, changes everything and ironically at the same time really changes nothing since it has always been this way.
with no illusory ideas of effort from the interpretive left-brain to improve itself, everything is accomplished.
spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.
“The non-interpretive mind is patient and kind; it does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. The non-interpretive mind bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.”
The interpretive mind, and along with it, every aspect of suffering is simply the universe pretending to be exactly what it isn’t by installing a left-brain that operates on the law of opposition.
You cannot escape being what you are, even when you are trying to be what you think you are not.
in being seduced by them, they are forever elusive.
