Month: March 2014

Eckart Tolle:

“What is conventionally called “love” is an ego strategy to avoid surrender. You are looking to someone to give you that which can only come to you in the state of surrender… Only surrender can give you what you were looking for in the object of your love”.

Kim Eng:

“What is it like to be in relationship with an enlightened being?

As long as I have the idea in my head “I have a relationship” or “I am in a relationship,” no matter with whom, I suffer. This I have learnt.

With the concept of “relationship” come expectations, memories of past relationships, and further personally and culturally conditioned mental concepts of what a “relationship” should be like. Then I would try to make reality conform to these concepts. And it never does. And again I suffer. The fact of the matter is: there are no relationships. There is only the present moment, and in the moment there is only relating.

How we relate, or rather how well we love, depends on how empty we are of ideas, concepts, expectations.”

 

– Eckhart Tolle and Kim Eng, Relationships – True Love and the Transcendence of Duality

“You want nothing to do with Realization. You seem to want everything to do with bondage, because you fear the implications of Realization, of Truth, of Reality, not merely the implications of death. You fear the loss of egoity and the egoic position, even though it is precisely the condition in which death is guaranteed. And it is what in fact is going to die, and there are no two ways about it. It’s not only going to die a little bit, it’s going to die in every fraction – gross, subtle and causal. All of it will go.

There can be transformations of conditional state in the meantime, but ultimately, all of it goes. Just as in physical death, the gross part goes, there would still be inevitable processes of a subtle and causal nature producing more modes of transformation and so forth. In the midst of which will be the same bewilderment, the same self-contraction, the same defensiveness, the same protection of ignorance and of egoity itself, the same failure to identify the suffering as such, for real, and to identify it as your own activity. And the same fundamental unwillingness, obstinancy, the conviction, somehow or other arrived at, and it somehow seems logical, that it is not desirable to realize Reality, Truth, Real God. Not desirable, because it requires loss of self.

So you are not afraid of death, merely. You are afraid of God. Not in any positive sense. You are afraid to surrender because surrender is the relinquishment of the very thing you are defending. So, even fear of death is dishonest. It’s a kind of misplacement of the reality of what fear is about.”

 

 

“Most people come to spirituality because they don’t like sad stories. They want to exchange their sad story for a happy one – but no story? That’s a whole new ballgame.”

– James Wood, Ten Paths to Freedom

“Ignorance consists of not knowing that ignorance can be temporary. An ignorant human being, ignorant about what life is all about, loves that position because when you’re ignorant of truth and reality, you can weave your own dream world according to your own desires, your own neurosis, your own madness. An ignorant person is quite free to construct the kind of a world that he wants and the worst part of that is, he does not know that the world that he wants is the world that is going to wreck him.

The human mind is terribly deceitful, to put it mildly, and unless you start off with that fact, you are indeed going to create your world. And I’ll tell you what it will be like. As if I need to tell you because you already live in it. That’s a world of frantic self-convincing, a world of burning, brooding and hostility and it is a world of shakiness.”

– Vernon Howard’s Higher World, from a talk given 2/28/1986

Whenever you love someone you feel totally helpless. That is the agony of love: one cannot feel what one can do. You want to do everything, you want to give the whole universe to the lover or the beloved, but what can you do? If you think that you can do this or that you are still not in a love relationship. Love is very helpless, absolutely helpless, and that helplessness is the beauty because in that helplessness you are surrendered.

Love someone and you will feel helpless; hate someone and you can do something. Love someone and you are absolutely helpless because what can you do? Whatsoever you can do seems insignificant and meaningless; it is never enough. Nothing can be done, and when one feels that nothing can be done, one feels that one is helpless. When one wants to do everything and feels nothing can be done, the mind stops. In this helplessness surrender happens. You are empty. That is why love becomes a deep meditation.

– Osho, The Book of Secrets, Talk #13

John: It’s more than just a comparison; it’s also the energy. It’s like having surface happiness about something. That’s not going to hurt you but when you’re in surface happiness that sets you up for when something makes you unhappy. Then, you’re going to give that all of your energy. So you need to let go of the negative emotion and you can be in the positive, but the positive will dig out the negative.

Q1: So what do you do with the positive?

John: Just be in it. The negative emotion is bad for you. The positive emotion is not bad for you, but it’s also not really good. To integrate your self puts you into being responsible within what feeling is. So you’re able to move based on something that you have clarity in and that then turns into emotion. But it’s not an emotion that governs you.

– John de Ruiter, Integrating Your Self Within Likes and Dislikes