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This results in a total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every “other” as well as with the Source.
This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion.
We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness.
“A new heaven” is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and “a new earth” is its reflection in the physical realm.
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came.
When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life.
That disentanglement is what this book is about.
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you.
In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, c...
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Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in its depth?
The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves.
They are ultimately no more than thoughts held together precariously by the fact that they are all invested with a sense of self.
Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless.
For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.
“That is the joy of Being,” I said. “You can only feel it when you get out of your head. Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious.
How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long?
Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.
If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesn’t mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity.
The ego’s sense of self-worth is in most cases bound up with the worth you have in the eyes of others.
if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there.
Concealed within it remains a deep-seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of “not enough.” “I don’t have enough yet,” by which the ego really means, “I am not enough yet.”
No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.
Some egos know what they want and pursue their aim with grim and ruthless determination—Genghis Khan,
The energy behind their wanting, however, creates an opposing energy of equal intensity that in the end leads to their downfall.
Most egos have conflicting wants.
Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting.
The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego.
Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded.
No matter what you have or get, you won’t be happy. You will always be looking for something else that promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete sense of self complete and fill that sense of lack you feel within.
In some traditional cultures, the worst fate a woman can have is to be unwed or barren, and for a man to lack sexual potency and not be able to produce children. Life’s fulfillment is perceived to be fulfillment of one’s gender identity.
For many people, their sense of self-worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength, good looks, fitness, and external appearance.
At the root of this condition lies identification with the mind.
If the sufferer could look at her body without the interfering judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they are instead of believing in them—or better still, if she could feel her body from within—this would initiate her healing.
from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body, which after all is no more than a physical form that shares the destiny of all forms—impermanence and ultimately decay.
Equating the physical sense-perceived body that is destined to grow old, wither, and die with “I” always leads to suffering sooner or later.
If you don’t equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, or the body becomes incapacitated, this will not affect your sense of worth or identity in any way.
You then unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most important part of who you perceive yourself to be.
Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go.
the good news is that it is also the one that you can most easily go beyond.
by shifting your attention from the external form of your body and from thoughts about your body—beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too thin—to the feeling of aliveness inside it.
What I call the “inner body” isn’t really the body anymore but life energy, the bridge between form and formlessness.
When you are in touch with the inner body, you are not identified with your body anymore, nor are you identified with your mind. This is to say, you are no longer identified with form but moving away from form-identification toward formlessness, which we may also call Being.
it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego.
It also strengthens the immune system and the body’s abil...
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What you may be aware of as a voice in your head that never stops speaking is the stream of incessant and compulsive thinking.
Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of self. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of “I Am,” which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form.
Descartes,
“I think, therefore I am.”
