*
*"You are an unlimited Being. You always were and you always will be. You have no choice in that. Your only choice is to identify with your unlimited Beingness, or to identify with your self imposed limitations."

Lester Levenson
*

*
Who is it that knows? Even when you say you don't know, or you're confused or depressed, who is it that knows that? Follow that thread. Go back the way you came. Could this be your true identity?
*

*
"Katagiri Roshi and Suzuki Roshi did not encourage us to try and attain enlightenment; rather, they encouraged us to express enlightenment."

Les Kaye
*

*
"The point is not to get rid of thoughts and feelings, but just not to feel located inside of them."

Adyashanti
*

*
**"When there are clouds and fog everywhere, the world is dark, but that does not mean the sun has decomposed. Why is there no light? The light is never destroyed; it is just enshrouded by clouds and fog. The pure mind of all living beings is like this, merely covered up by the dark clouds of obsession with objects, arbitrary thoughts, psychological afflictions, and views and opinions. If you can just keep the mind still so that errant thought does not arise, the reality will naturally appear. This is how we know the inherent mind is originally pure.
**"The essence of nirvana is tranquil, uncontrived bliss. Realize your own mind is the true mind, and errant imagining ceases. When errant imagining ceases, you are accurately aware. By virtue of accurate awareness, dispassionately perceptive knowledge arises. By dispassionately perceptive knowledge, one finds out the nature of reality. By finding out the nature of reality, one attains nirvana. This is how we know that preserving the fundamental true mind is the basis of nirvana.
**"Once we know that the buddha-nature in all beings is as pure as the sun behind the clouds, if we just preserve the basic true mind with perfect clarity, the clouds of errant thoughts will come to an end, and the sun of insight will emerge; what is the need for so much more study of knowledge of the pains of birth and death, of all sorts of doctrines and principles, and of the affairs of past, present, and future? It is like wiping dust off a mirror; the clarity appears spontaneously when the dust is all gone.
**"Thus whatever is learned in the present unenlightened mind is worthless. If you can maintain accurate awareness clearly, what you learn in the uncontrived mind is true learning.
**"But even though I call it real learning, ultimately there is nothing learned. Why? Because both the self and nirvana are empty; there is no more two, not even one. Thus there is nothing learned; but even though phenomena are essentially empty, it is necessary to preserve the basic true mind with perfect clarity, because then delusive thoughts do not arise, and egoism and possessiveness disappear."

Hongren
*

*
"The only obstacle to your Awakening is the mere thought that you are not already Awakened."

Sri Ramana

*
"...all that we are to practice is to be still with the remembrance of the feeling 'I'. ...'being' alone is the correct sadhana; sadhana is not doing, but being."

Sri Sadhu Om
*
**
"...mostly I have a mission of not doing anything. My goal is not doing anything, ultimately. Just being. That's it."

the 12th Gyalwa Drukpa
*
*
"Freedom is not due to effort;
rather one abides timelessly in freedom."

The Pearl Garland

**
"It is the truth that liberates,
not your effort to be free."

J. Krishnamurti
*

*
**"A 'bad' feeling is not dispelled by conscious effort or 'will power'. It can be dispelled, however, by another feeling."

Maxwell Maltz
*
"And what is light, except the resolution, born of peace, of all your conflicts and mistaken thoughts into one concept...? Even that one will disappear, because the [Truth] behind it will appear instead to take its place. And now you are at peace forever, for the dream is over then."

A Course In Miracles
"*

dis-spell

*

"When the mind's as is, circumstances also are as is.
There's no real and also no unreal.
Giving no heed to existence
And holding not to nonexistence,
You're neither saint nor sage, just
An ordinary man who has settled his affairs.
Easy, so easy..."

Layman P'ang

*

*
**"If Reality did not exist, could there be any notion of existence? Free from all thoughts, Reality abides in the Heart, the Source of all thoughts. It is, therefore, called the Heart. How then is one to contemplate it? To Be It As It Is in the Heart, is Its contemplation."

Ramana Maharshi
*

*

"...listen closely the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all of this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it. At night under the moon, or in a quiet room, hush now, the secret music of the Unborn goes on and on, beyond conception, awake beyond existence. Properly speaking, awake is not really awake because the golden eternity never went to sleep: you can tell by the constant sound of Silence which cuts through this world like a magic diamond through the trick of your not realizing that your mind caused the world."

Jack Kerouac
*

*
"The more we rest in silence the more we call forth love."

Pamela Wilson
*

*
"So what is the point of waiting? What exactly are you waiting for? Is somebody going to give you what you always wanted? Will a train come from Heaven bringing you goodies? But nothing that could ever happen could be as good, as precious, as who you are.
**"What stops you from being, from being present, is nothing but your hope for the future. Hoping for something to be different keeps you looking for some future fantasy. But it is a mirage; you'll never get there. The mirage stops you from seeing the obvious, the preciousness of Being. It is a great distortion, a great misunderstanding of what will fulfill you. When you follow the mirage, you are rejecting yourself."

A.H. Almaas
*

*
"The Buddhist idea system is there to help us turn our experience into a positive, expanding wakefulness, and of course, when the system itself becomes an obstacle to further expansion, we are as free to give it up as we were to take it on.
**"There is one key escape clause in Buddhist dharma that negates the mythic/ideological status of its doctrine: the teaching of emptiness. The entire intellectual system of Hinayana is denied by the Heart Sutra, the basic document of the Mahayana path: 'there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation,' says Avalokitesvara, running through the whole gamut of the skandhas, the four noble truths, the dhatus, and the eight kinds of consciousness. All the idea systems and mythic embodiments of the Vajrayana are conjured from emptiness, and returned to it at the end of the practice session. It is recognized that none of them have any objective status of 'truth' as opposed to fiction, but are evoked purely as a means to the end of experiencing Big Mind. The duality of truth and falsehood are transcended. "

Stephen T. Butterfield
*

*
"Sitting quietly, feel what sits there.
Explore this body you sit in.
Observe the scintillating field of sensation we call the body.
Notice sensation's wordless quality.
Its sense of simply being humming throughout the body.
Go within sensation to that subtle presence by which the sensation is
*known. Feel the sensation within sensation.
Settle into that sense of being, of aliveness vibrating in each cell.
Rest in being.
*
Just sit quietly and know. Let awareness sink into itself. Know what knows.
Experience directly that sense by which you imagine you exist.
Enter it wholeheartedly. Sit in the center of that hum.
Does it have a beginning? Does it have an ending?
Or is there just a sense of endless being, unborn and undying?
Don't ask the mind, which always limits itself with definitions, ask the *heart, which cannot name it but always is it.
Rest in being."

Stephen Levine
*

*
"You have the only clue you need, but you've been ignoring it. You know 'I am', and that is the clue to knowing Your Self."

Esther Veltheim
*

*
"He who loves has discovered the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality; he who hates stands in immediate candidacy for nonbeing."

Martin Luther King Jr

***
***"You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you. Your safety lies in truth, and not in lies. Love is your safety. Fear does not exist. Identify with love, and you are safe. Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self."

A Course In Miracles

Unconditional Love is seeing that all beings are equal.
Wisdom is seeing that all things are equal.
Being is equal, of One taste.


*

"So, effort is non-awareness ... So, awareness is non-effort."

J. Krishnamurti

~

Check out Don Iannone's Ab initio .
And notice, as a friend pointed out to me, that if you join the two n's to make an m, Iannone becomes 'I am one'.

*

To be truly Real, a thing has to be permanent.

Impermanent things cannot be said to be real.
All things are nothing. No-thing.
It is nowhere. Now-here.
What is It that is no-thing?
What is It that is now-here?
What is It that knows?
That Is Everything. That Is Nothing. That Is Nowhere.
That Is You. That Is Permanent. That Is You.
*

"All these are neither real nor unreal. They are the effect of delusion, mere impression arising out of some past experiences."

Yoga Vasishta

"Be master of mind, do not be mastered by mind."

Mahaparinirvana Sutra

"...who you really are is beyond concepts. It doesn't matter what name you give the unnameable or what teachings are used to describe it. No concepts, no words, can come near to the Truth because words and concepts can only be used to describe relativity, not Reality.
"Relativity signifies relationships between concepts. Reality is beyond concepts and appearances. This means that via the mind--which is limited to conceptualization--you cannot know the Truth. It means that nothing I say is the Truth. Nothing the Bible or anyone else says is the Truth.
"All we have in the various teachings are pointers towards That which is indescribable and cannot be talked about."

Esther Veltheim

You are prior to concepts. Before, between, and after thoughts and words, the Truth is revealed, and you are That. And in fact, You are always That, before, between, after, and during, because before, between, after, and during are concepts, and You are prior to concepts. You Are prior to the concepts of You, Are, prior, That, to, and, and concepts.

"All suffering, from irritation at the weather to lifelong anger toward an abusive parent, is rooted in the belief that we are a separate being: I am here, the environment is there. I interact with my environment by grasping, attacking, avoiding, ignoring--keeping this, rejecting that. I suffer by losing what I want and getting what I do not want. Discomfort does not become suffering until it is personalized by this duality--until I perceive the discomfort as specific to me. From this perception follows a kind of personal wretchedness, and a conditioning history built up around grasping pleasure and avoiding pain. The belief in separateness is deeply rooted in our whole language and culture; it is so deep that Buddhists maintain we bring it with us at birth from past lives, and, indeed, is the reason we are born at all.
"Buddhist meditation aims to expose and cut the belief in separateness, in the exact moment of its creation, here and now, every instant. Doing so is the equivalent of a conscious death. As a side effect, the personal wretchedness of suffering, along with any sense of being trapped in it, is brought to an end. Ironically, however, this has long ceased to be the goal.
"Words like 'death' and 'emptiness' are provocative to the Western reader, sometimes leading to confused notions that without feelings, desires, or perceptions, a buddha must be little more than a smiling vegetable. On the contrary, a buddha is simply abiding in the condition of wakefulness. ...

...

"Willingness to die cheerfully, right now, that is, to live fully, to give in to the fluid, uncontrollable emptiness of experience, opens a way out of the prison of the separate self. Death, too, is empty."

Stephen T. Butterfield

"...if we cannot flow with the tide as it shifts, we are not in single-pointed concentration, not in samadhi.
"The word samadhi carries with it two absolutely contrary meanings: 'perfect reception' and 'perfect non-reception'. In order to 'perfectly receive' each instant as it occurs, it is necessary to 'perfectly not-receive' the previous instant and the future instant. No matter how accurately and in what detail a mirror may reflect what is before it in one instant, should it be turned to face in a new direction, the previous reflection will disappear without a trace and the mirror will faithfully reflect what is newly before it.

...

"The mind that neither ignores anything nor attaches to anything is not something that is obtained through training. It is the natural 'power' with which you entered the world. ...awaken through practice to this power that we inherently possess, to freely demonstrate it, and to bring it to life."

Soko Morinaga


"Trust the Power that knows the way."

Robert Adams

The Four Boundless Wishes

Ordinary mind: in Tibetan, thamal gye shepa, "mind without ego."

"Since the clear light of death is the same clear light that is at the basis of all mental states, the basic fear is of one's own innermost nature.
...
"The at-homeness of the fundamental innate mind of clear light when experienced by one who has overcome the initial, distorted fear and sense of annihilation suggests that this fundamental mind is, in a sense, most common, most ordinary. In fact, in Nyingma literature, it is indeed called 'ordinary mind'."

Jeffrey Hopkins

"So our first job is to undo negative thinking in order to get positive enough so that we may go in the right direction. Then, we must drop all thinking, both negative and positive thinking. When that happens, we discover that we are in the realm of knowingness, of omniscience, we have no need to think as everything is known and we are all joyous and totally free. Knowing everything, there is nothing to think about!
"Thinking is just our way of relating things to other things, connecting things together. But knowing everything, we know the unity, the oneness and there's no need to relate things by thought. Thereby, we are free, free of all concepts of separation and limitation. This leaves us free to use a mind should we want to communicate with the apparency of the world.
"The process of going within is a process of looking within and discovering that the mind is nothing but thoughts, and the thoughts are nothing but concepts of limitation. When we quiet the mind by letting go of these thoughts, we see this infinite Being that we are. This takes away the clouds covering this infinite Being and leaves us totally free."

Lester Levenson

_

If you do not seek the great way to leave the path of delusion, even if you are intelligent and talented you are not great. A hundred years is like a spark, a lifetime is like a bubble. If you only crave material gain and prominence, without considering the deterioration of your body, I ask you, even if you accumulate a mountain of gold can you buy off impermanence?

Chang Po-Tuan

_

Happy New Year!

Isn't it true that it's only a problem if you think it is?

My Father's favorite saying-- from Shakespeare, i think-- is:

A thing is neither good nor bad, but
thinking makes it so.

It's the truth
It's actual
Everything is satisfactual

Uncle Remus