“Here is a curious contradiction of the ordinary mind. A man wants others to think well of him, yet believes himself to be the lowest of the low. This is a perfect example of the alternating roles of the false self. It will play the part of either a good or a bad person, just as long as the actor can think about its own make-believe existence.”
~ Vernon Howard
“When we bring to another person something innately authentic and whole within us — no matter how vulnerable we may feel — we create a space of relationship that is more than simply being “in love.” This relationship becomes transformational and even sacred. It enhances our knowledge of ourselves in ways that help us to heal our old wounds because it also blesses us with greater recognition of who we really are.”
~ Richard Moss
“If there is one sentence I could say to the whole world it would be, ‘Why settle for chaos when you don’t have to?'”
~ Vernon Howard
”When we think of meditation we need to let go of the idea that enlightenment is an altered state of consciousness that we can somehow attain. Practiced meditators know that if you meditate hard enough and long enough, you will occasionally enter into altered states of consciousness. There are all sorts of them. Happiness is an altered state of consciousness. Sadness is an altered state of consciousness. Depression is an altered state of consciousness. Then, of course, there are all the mystical states of consciousness: merging with the cosmos is an altered state of consciousness; feeling your consciousness expand is an altered state of consciousness. There are many varieties of altered states of consciousness. Most people think enlightenment is some altered state of consciousness. This is a profound misunderstanding.”
~ Adyashanti
“We cannot discover, uncover or recover our true self because it’s not covered, it’s nonexistent. This is why we are determined to focus on outward, self-based pursuits like devotion, compassion, knowledge, understanding, practice, tradition, and so on; we will do anything not to turn inward. We want to create and preserve, but to awaken we must destroy.”
— Jed McKenna
“A well-running machine is quiet whereas a faulty one makes noise. Notice if there is a tendency in you to look for inner or outer noise as a sign of aliveness when it’s really just dysfunction.”
— James Wood
“It is obvious that something wiser than ordinary thinking must choose
between the beneficial and the harmful. What is it? To understand this
the author will create a new word. It combines the two familiar words of
Truth and intuition. The result is the new word Truition. Truition is
Truth in action, a power for winning right now. Anyone can reveal and
develop his hidden Truition, after which it will live thru him and for
him.
It is Truition that enables you to select only beneficial advice from
the mind-box. The rest is ignored out of existence and therefore can
never again lead you astray. Truition knows the difference between the
noble and the barbaric.”
“The self is fluid and dynamic. It’s not rigid, as in “I am X.” It’s more like, “Who am I now?” One minute serious, one minute laughing, the self is constantly changing. Let yourself be like flowing water and see what happens.”
“You know, the problem is we’re very gullible, we’re very suggestible. We come to the world as little children, we grow up and we see our parents chasing around, we see our friends, who are so active in this and that and we immediately become worshipers of activity. And never questioning what that is all about: the activity of commerce, of religion, of getting married, the activity of running around in this world, trying to find something to do with ourselves — until strangely enough we come to worship activity itself. Doing something, that seems to be the object of everyone’s life. And all these activities, where do they lead?
Well, I’ll ask you and you tell me. All this chasing around, all this running that you do – has it ever lead you to anything except more confusion, except for the need for another activity, a new man in your life, a new woman, a new place to go to, an occupation, a new hobby. And all the time way back in our mind is indeed the question, ‘What is it all about?’
Why don’t we bring the question out into the open? Why don’t we examine what’s going on inside of ourselves, as a scientist, to see what’s going on within in our minds and emotions, in an attempt to understand ourselves to see what might be beyond the heartache?”
– Vernon Howard, Positive Answers # 2 DVD # 36, talk 4
“Ever feel you can’t take it any more? Like to lift the feeling? Just ask yourself who it is who can’t take it any more. You can search for centuries and not find anyone who can’t take it any more. You will find hundreds of worried thoughts and frantic feelings, but _you are not these thoughts and feelings_. Your true self is spiritual, not mental and emotional. If you can’t take it any more, let all this reveal why you need not take it any more. Then you won’t.”
-Vernon Howard, Freedom from a Life of Hell, # 18
“‘I will give you a simple but profound method for seeing what another person is really like,’ a teacher informed his class. ‘When someone seizes upon the slightest opportunity to tell you the kind of person he is, he is telling you the kind of person he is not.’ This method ends gullibility.”
– Vernon Howard, 700 Inspiring Guides To A New Life, # 537
“The purpose of human existence is to transcend human existence. Not to do any of the ultimately engineered things that human beings get it in mind to do from the conventional egoic point of view.
Yes, while we live there are all kinds of conventional fulfillments and functional relations and so forth. All of that is fine and none of that has any power to prevent or qualify this ultimate realization. The force of all that is dissolved by that ultimate realization and conventions of life go on. There’s a lot of transforming of it perhaps. A lot of release of energy within it.
It becomes free because it no longer has that interior self idea that everybody is walking around with.” – Adi Da
“All this does not deny us the right to enjoy life. It does not take away authentic feelings of delight. It does just the opposite. By not depending upon fleeting pleasures, we find lasting ones. No one and no circumstance can ever take away this inner gladness.
As a matter of fact, people are much too serious. They mistakenly think that seriousness somehow indicates earnestness. Even their playtime is grim, just as if it is something they must do. Have you noticed the strange compulsion lurking beneath many so-called recreations? This playtime is heavy, not springing spontaneously from a free spirit, but from a burdensome sense of duty.
We think we are somebodies who have a duty to keep our lives on the go. What a dreadful idea. In reality, we are blithe spirits who must learn to play as such. With this special kind of purposelessness, we find real delight and lasting meaning in life. Genuine mystics are not afraid to be playful and twinkle-eyed men.”
– Vernon Howard, The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 162
“How ruthless can you be with yourself? How can you refuse the little catnaps that the devil has prepared for you? Take defending yourself. Even if the accusation is true, why are we so quick to explain, ‘Here’s why I did that.’ Why don’t you be quiet so you can see this false part of you wanting to defend yourself and give no explanation at all? You are tied to people with your own defenses.”
– Vernon Howard, A Treasury of Trueness, # 1498
“Picture a patient on his way to the doctor’s office. He dallies, distracted here and there by interesting sights, a newspaper headline. Then, as the novelty wears off, he becomes conscious of his illness and continues on to the doctor’s. For the next hour or two he swings back and forth between distraction and pain, until he finally realizes he had better get on his way to the cure.
The human quest for wholeness is like that. We are distracted by thrills, impulsive desires, false doctrines, and most of all, by our pretense that everything is just fine, when we secretly know everything is all wrong.
But at one point or another, the pain becomes unendurable and our pretenses are shattered. With a sigh of relief, we stop playing and head for the sure cure at the office of reality.”
–Vernon Howard, The Power of your Supermind, Chap. 1, p. 8
A: We do real spiritual work when seeing its necessity, and a single honest glance at our actual condition will reveal the necessity.”
–James Wood, Ten Paths to Freedom
“See the difference between declaration and situation. People at a party or down by the lakeside on Sunday afternoon, they’re shouting out as if they’re having a good time – and they have no idea of what is going on inside themselves. They have no idea that they are unaware of the existence of actually another world, another life.
Just visit the lakeside resort for a little bit, thousands of people stretched out, splashing in the water, and listen to what they shout out to each other: ‘Bring me back another strawberry soda, the band concert starts playing at two in the afternoon, let’s be there, bet you I can beat you to the edge of the park and back.’
All acting, talking, thinking, living as if what they are doing and what they are living, as if that shouting out about the band concert and the strawberry soda, as if that is the entire content of life.
It is the entire content of his life and her life. Oh yes, and that five-year old boy and that ten-year old girl, they’re hearing all those shouts from parents and friends and passing strangers. They
hear every one of those, and being young, they don’t know that limitation and confinement is being drilled into them with every shout.”
–Vernon Howard, from a talk given 3/4/1989, Vernon Howard’s Higher World – MP3 CD Volume 26, talk 644, track 15
“YOUR CHAMPION
First, read these questions:
a. Are they really my friends or does an unseen weakness in me just want to think so?
b. Is he really my protector or just another dazed derelict dis-guised as normal?
c. Do they really like me or are they polite criminals who merely cover my pain with their self-serving lies?
Use the word really like this to uncover human deceit and self-weakness. It is like being helped by a champion.”
“Ever feel you can’t take it any more? Like to lift the feeling? Just ask yourself who it is who can’t take it any more. You can search for centuries and not find anyone who can’t take it any more. You will find hundreds of worried thoughts and frantic feelings, but _you are not these thoughts and feelings_. Your true self is spiritual, not mental and emotional. If you can’t take it any more, let all this reveal why you need not take it any more. Then you won’t.”
–Vernon Howard, Freedom from a Life of Hell, # 18
“Peace of mind, spiritual innocence, natural goodness, is the absence of all the positions you could ever think of. The absence of all the attitudes and beliefs and defenses and offenses that you ever had. Giving up your life for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven is doing just what I’ve described, which is this: Letting, allowing, both sides, the opposite positions to be wrong, to be useless. To suspect at first, and know later on, that they have no value for you, no support for you, no good for you, because they are nothing more than a mere thought.
You just try to corral, like wild horses, you just try to corral your wild thoughts, round them up in the hills and bring them back to the corral and train them, put saddles on them and try to use them. Can’t do it, can you? They’re too wild, they’re too used to going in their direction and doing what they want to do; they’re not going to submit to you.
The thought horses are always thundering somewhere, the thundering herd. They’re always suddenly changing position in front of you. You think you just about get the rope over the head of one of them, bring it back and that it will be yours. You cut the stallion out in the wilderness out there and you’re going to bring him back and you’re going to train him and he’ll serve you, and other people will admire you as you ride into town on your fancy saddle. You have never been able to catch just one of them and train it and make it your own – and you never will.
Now of course, that’s not a thought to cause you dismay, but understanding what I am talking about should cause you to rejoice because you don’t have to do it anymore. You don’t have to claim ownership, not to one, not to a dozen, not to a hundred horses out there. You can just let them go and understand their nature.”
-Vernon Howard, from a talk given 8/15/1986, Vernon Howard’s Higher World
“One thing is for sure – and everyone knows this one thing for sure. Everyone knows that something is happening to them socially, physically, mingling with other people, there are endless contacts, experiences, emotional and mental reactions. There are things that you have to do; some things that you can avoid, and inwardly the same. Something is always going on. Now that’s where the knowledge ends.
People are aware that there are happenings and events and resulting reactions and feelings. However, the cause and cure for these minute-by-minute experiences, the cause and the cure is unknown. However, there is another knowledge besides the cause and cure which they don’t know, which is that these experiences are mystifying, they are painful. There is something happening all the time and the individual feels helpless in the face of the inflowing floods of experiences, of thoughts, of moods. The individual, therefore, sees himself as a dodger.”
– Vernon Howard’s Higher World, from a talk given 11/19/1988
“Having a Teacher is a great benefit, as if the internal voice of Truth had been conveniently externalized for you as a person.”
-James Wood, Ten Paths to Freedom
“Don’t allow suffering to have its way. Most people meekly submit to mental pain because it seems to be so persistently powerful. Nonsense. Agony is nothing but a bluff and a fake and a liar. Call its bluff and it will sneak away like the cruel coward that it is. But don’t fight it, for that only increases its energy. Instead, right in the middle of the pain, practice self-release. Let go of all your usual efforts to chase away pain. Truth will do the rest.”
–Vernon Howard, 50 Ways To Get Help From God
“When a student asked about his greatest fault, his teacher told him, ‘You believe too many things which are not true.'”
– Vernon Howard, The Power of Esoterics
“It is pure delusion that you make your own intelligent decisions. All you do is to eagerly follow the dominating self-desire of the moment. Know that there is such a life as a choiceless life which has no contradiction. It comes to anyone who admits to the myth of having independent judgment and choice.”
– Vernon Howard, A Treasury of Trueness, # 1113
“Life for most people is an odd and fickle dream. There is a way to awaken. Look at it in the following way. You have an undeveloped region within. With more knowledge and application this region can be developed. You then stand in a new place of commanding comprehension. Do not lose the profound message in these few words because of their simplicity. Study and apply them.”
– Vernon Howard, 700 Inspiring Guides To A New Life
“Consider” this: Every time you dramatize reactivity, you are thinking you are the victim of someone or something or some event – every time. Reactivity is the sure sign that you have this point of view. If you react and dramatize reactivity, you are always blaming the event, blaming the other, instead of introducing the self-responsible discipline into the occasion of difficulty or stress. Always. It is always so…
This is the key to healing people of their various disorders and life-problems: the development of responsibility, not the constant finding of things to blame and, in effect, practicing shamanistic rituals to just relax your mind so that now you feel cured.
There is absolutely no one to blame. Blame is the game of evading responsibility. All your indulgence in reactivity, as if you have reasons not to grow! You have none.
Do not blame anybody ever again. Embrace the discipline of blamelessness. Never blame anything or anyone ever again. You have no right to blame anybody. It is all your personal business.
— The Incarnation of Love, Adi Da Samraj, 1993
“Let’s start off with a question. All of you can find yourself insisting quite frequently and quite vigorously that you are right about something. Do you know what I’m talking about? Yes, you do.
How many times a day would you say something comes up with your spouse or friend or down at work in which you have to insist that your position is the right one and their position is the wrong one, right? What is this fantastic insistence that we have that we are right when another part of you overwhelmingly screams out that you are wrong.
This may have been the first time in your life, right now, when you realize what you are doing and the harmful consequences of that. What you are doing is taking a position on a hill and saying this position, this belief that I have, this way I live, this way I talk, this way I behave generally, this is the right way. No one has the right to challenge it, to question it, to correct me. Now come on, please see it deeper; please don’t think I’m using words alone.
You’re watching and you’re listening to this talk right now and I would assume you are watching and listening to it because there’s something wrong with your life. I don’t want to assume it, I know it and you know it. Now let’s go back over it once more so you don’t try to run away from the first fact that you must face.
Notice how easily you get upset when your ways are challenged, when someone tries to correct you, someone tells you you are wrong about
something, that you behaved foolishly.”
– Vernon Howard, Wake Up to a New Life
“Individual receptivity is absolutely everything. Without it, nothing changes. With it, all things are possible for you.
Contact with the truth brings out either the best or the worst in a man. When we hear a truth, it falls either on the true self or the false self. If it falls on the artificial self, it will be rejected, distorted or ignored, doing no good for the individual. But if a person has a welcoming attitude, the truth falls on his authentic self, providing understanding and relief.
Receptivity is a matter of degree. Our task is to set out the welcome mat more and more, enabling it to increasingly aid us. A little receptivity opens the way for more, for each rewarding experience shows us that the truth we once feared and rejected is the very happiness we want.
Are you capable of receiving what you really want? If you can answer that question in the affirmative, you can have everything you really want.”
– Vernon Howard, The Power of your Supermind
Excerpt from a dialogue with John de Ruiter on February 19, 2016
Q: For a long time I have felt defeated in some way by my self and wanting it to be different. I would like your help to avoid getting so triggered, and to stay in my heart.
John: Deeply surrender to using no negative phrasing within your life, inside and out.
Q: I’ve been thinking about being more positive, but that feels like pretending.
John: Not positive; just not negative. If you are positive instead of being negative, you’ll fool your self. Just simply not negative. That exposes your self.
Q: So what would that look like in my life?
John: That you won’t say anymore what you don’t like; that you won’t anymore validate the feelings of not liking something.
Q: But wouldn’t I still have those feelings?
John: And you’ll give those feelings no voice and no movement, without replacing them with the positive.
Q: What do I replace them with?
John: Being quieted. There is the difference between you and your self. You can say what you do like because that often and easily puts you into your heart. Just no longer say what you don’t like.
Q: So if I’m in the midst of feeling negative about something should I just not say anything?
John: Not even on the inside. If you say it on the inside, you’ll say it on the outside. Give it no voice and no movement. The easiest is when you give it absolutely nothing, not even a speck.
Q: In order to do that, I need to be coming from what I really am.
John: Yes, which means that any time you have a negative feeling, that’s your cue to drop deeply within into surrender. The deep surrender to being quieted within, when any negative feeling comes up, puts you into what you really are. Replace the negative with the positive and you engage your self. You make what you’re experiencing all about your self.
Q: What if I’m in a situation where someone has done something to me that isn’t right? I feel justified in feeling negative about it.
John: Be quieted within instead of being right.
Q: So I don’t have to fix anything, just me?
John: There’s nothing to fix in you.
Q: Just to change where I’m coming from.
John: Being you instead of being your self, yes. Being you is uneventful. Being your self is all about what you like and what you don’t like, but mostly what you don’t like.
Q: If there’s a situation where I think there’s something I need to resolve, I should first come from me and then resolve the situation?
John: And forego resolving things if it means leaving you.
Q: It seems inevitable that I’m going to fall a lot.
John: And when you do, let it be without a negative word or movement about it.
– Vernon Howard, Your Power of Natural Knowing, p. 84
-Vernon Howard, Pathways to Perfect Living, p. 12
“Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves. They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies. They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind’s idea of what it believes enlightenment to be. No one ever became free through such violence. Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven. But freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of “a someone who is in control” is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.”
“Do not defend yourself enough times and you will happily see there is no one to anxiously defend.”
– Vernon Howard, Cosmic Command, # 1726
“To realize something one never realized before – that is what the spiritual adventure is all about. Realization is the same as self-release, as the ending of illusion, the same as finding a totally new path. A building contractor in Chicago arrived at a magnificent realization. He realized that there is only one right rebellion on earth – rebellion against his own self-defeating unawareness.”
– Vernon Howard, 700 Inspiring Guides To A New Life, # 506
“Even while in Satsang, there is a kind of warfare going on in the disciple or devotee. There is this contraction. But he is continually being drawn out of that, by the force and very condition of Satsang, into the company of Truth. The Truth draws him, even though he continues to contract. And the result of that tension is a dredging up in him of the perception of his own activity, on many, many levels. It must take place on every level.
While talking with one of you today, I used the simile of a well. When a man first comes to Satsang, he is like a dark, deep well. Way up a the top, the light comes in around the edges, but it is black, unconscious below! When the light of the Truth shines down into it, all of these weirdo, slithering things come climbing up the sides. All the hidden, slimy activity begins to be disturbed, awakened, and moved into the light. Just so, every moment in Satsang increases the necessity for responsibility in the disciple, because the force of Satsang isn’t merely a good feeling, a consolation, something smiling, happy and pleasant. It is not magic. It is a living force, the force of Truth. This force moves into the “well,” into the human function, this circuit of descending and ascending life, and brings up the chronic patterns of ordinary and unconscious life, revealing them at the level of the actual conditions of life. In the midst of this real process the subtle tendencies of life are revealed as desires, as incredible compulsions, which, even if they were known before, now seem to become worse. The intensification of everything is the activity of Satsang. And what is there to be intensified in the usual man, except this negative pattern, this contraction? So, of course, there are difficulties. Real spiritual life requires everything of a person. Spiritual life is a crisis!
One who lives in Satsang experiences many revelations of his state. Dreams become intensified. There may be spontaneous physical movements, changes in the physical body. Life may become burdensome at times, thoughts seem to become endless. The individual may become disgusted with his own game. But the whole effect of this communication of Truth over against his own tendencies is to bring about a consciousness of his own activity or contraction on every level. Where this begins to occur, all of the hidden qualities can escape into the light and be merged in the light of consciousness.”
– Adi Da, The Method of the Siddhas, Talks with Franklin Jones on the spiritual technique of the Saviors of mankind
“Satsang literally means true or right relationship. It is commonly used to refer to the practice of spending time in the company of holy or wise persons”
“Real thinking does not happen of itself. That which is often called thinking and which does happen of itself is really no more than a stream of psychical impressions. Most of so-called thinking is of this sort and much of it is sheer waste of psychical energy. It is, in fact, the kind of thinking that is the “slayer of the Real,” and must be mastered just as carefully as the more external kind of impressionism. It is not the kind of thought that deepens the roots of consciousness. True thinking calls for directed effort and often a considerable application of the will. But with practice, less and less consciously directed will is required and, in time, directed thought becomes a habit.
This kind of thought becomes established in the deeper roots of consciousness and then it, also, may become spontaneous and carry inspirational value.”
“Most of spirituality is about this extraordinarily rare thing, it’s about telling the truth – that’s what it’s about. not to be satisfied with belief, not to take something on anybody else’s word for it… but to really look and tell yourself the truth. It’s a very, very difficult thing for a human being to do. It’s not easy. When it comes to the really fundamental aspects of life, truth-telling, and doing it consistently in a very deep way, is a very challenging thing to do.”
“How dare you come into this room and think that Truth is harsh. You don’t know what you’re doing. You are harsh. When you’re nature is harsh and cruel and bitter and hard, then it sees everything else like it is.
And you’re not even at the stage where you can begin to begin to judge between truth and falsehood yet. You don’t have the intelligence enough to say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in this room.’ You judge it. You say, “I know better.’
I will ask you who is thinking those thoughts? Why do you identify with your thoughts? Why do you think you know more than Truth? It’s because, I’ll tell you why. While you’re alive here as a human being, it is either you or God.”
– Vernon Howard, Practical Exercises For Inner Harmony
“Belief is what we do when we don’t know but we’re not comfortable enough to stay there. Then we start believing. Belief is an utter and absolute lack of faith… You believe because you have no faith. If you have faith, you can sustain, you can stay in the place of not knowing. That takes great trust, great faith, great capacity, to stay completely and absolutely honest. And spiritually speaking, that’s one of the keys that unlock the whole kingdom, is the ability to sustain not-knowing, to sustain being completely and ruthlessly honest. And it’s a challenging thing to do.”
-Adyashanti, Omega talk, 6/2014
“Love is not the losing of oneself in another person. That is merely escapism. Love is the natural radiation of our own healing, in which our own wholeness includes the other person, without thought on our part. The sun shines on everyone. However, an important point must be added here. Authentic love includes an understanding of the other person, based on an understanding of oneself. Love clearly understands the weakness and pretense in others, but does not condemn them in order to feel superior. The person who truly loves is never gullible, which keeps him out of trouble with others.”
– Vernon Howard, Secrets for Higher Success, p. 224
“The Guru is like the sunlight in the morning. He intensifies the light of morning until you awaken. Until the light awakens a man, even the true light of consciousness, he continues to dream, he tries to survive within the dream, manipulates himself within the dream, pursues all kinds of goals, searches, none of which awaken him. All ordinary means only console a man and distract him within the dream. The Guru, the one who would awaken you, is not a person, he is not an individual within the dream. He is your very consciousness. He is the Real, the Self, he is the Light, he is the true waking state, the Heart, breaking through the force of dreaming. So it is not that you are some poor guy who needs some other poor guy to help him out. It may appear that way within the dream, but essentially it is your own nature appearing within the dream to awaken you. The Guru is your awakening, and your always already conscious state.”
– Adi Da, The Method of the Siddhas
“Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological gratification because they believe that those things will make them happy or free them from a feeling of fear or lack. Happiness may be perceived as a heightened sense of aliveness attained through physical pleasure, or a more secure and more complete sense of self attained through some form of psychological gratification. This is the search for salvation from a state of dissatisfaction or insufficiency. Invariably, any satisfaction that they obtain is short-lived, so the condition of satisfaction or fulfillment is usually projected once again onto an imaginary point away from the here and now. “When I obtain this or am free of that ― then I will be okay.” This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.
True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to “know God” ― not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.
True salvation is a state of freedom ― from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time ― that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete. You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can’t get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You “get” there by realizing that you are there already. You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God. So there is no only way to salvation: Any condition can be used, but no particular condition is needed. However, there is only one point of access: the Now.
There can be no salvation away from this moment. You are lonely and without a partner? Enter the Now from there. You are in a relationship? Enter the Now from there. There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to salvation than it is at this moment. This may be hard to grasp for a mind accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the future. Nor can anything that you ever did or that was done to you in the past prevent you from saying yes to what is and taking your attention deeply into the Now. You cannot do this in the future. You do it now or not at all.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
“Q. I know what will make me happy, but cannot attain it.
A. If you know what will make you happy, you don’t know. If you know, you will be unhappy when what you desire fails to appear or goes away. But if you don’t know what will make you happy, you are happy, because you have nothing to lose. To have no ideas whatsoever as to what will make you happy is happiness itself.”
– Vernon Howard, Pathways to Perfect Living, p. 98
James is the author of Ten Paths to Freedom: Awakening Made Simple. He teaches that awakening—the end of suffering—is possible for anyone committed to finding Truth. His talk “Awakening Compassion” will explore the meaning, purpose and practice of compassion in relationships and daily life. Talks include silent sitting and time for questions.
GM: What makes you happy?
BK: Seeing people wake up to their kinder, wiser self and then watching them live it.
GM: What is one of the best decisions you ever made?
BK: Actually, I can’t take credit for any of my decisions. I noticed one day that all my decisions were making themselves, and always at the right time. I haven’t had to make one decision since then. They are always made for me, and they come from the wisdom that is in us all. I trust that wisdom completely. That trust itself was a decision made for me as inquiry cleared my mind. No decision, no fear.
GM: What has life taught you?
BK: To question everything, to remain open-hearted and to serve the freedom of others as though it were my own. Because it is.
GM: What is your daily spiritual practice?
BK: To love without exception.
– Byron Katie, from Spiritual Leader Byron Katie Tells ORIGIN Magazine Why We Should Embrace The Quiet
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.
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
“No one can make it through this without being pointedly disloyal to the self. And all of the loyalty is gathered up and it’s all turned toward what you most deeply know in your heart.”
– John de Ruiter, Pointedly Disloyal to the Self within Experience
“The only true love affair is the one with yourself. I am married to me, and that’s what I project onto everyone. I love you with all my heart; you don’t even have to participate, so there’s no motive in “I love you.” Isn’t that fine? I can love you completely, and you have nothing to do with it. There’s nothing you can do to keep me from the intimacy that I experience with you.
The voice within is what I’m married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. When I make a commitment, it’s to my own truth, and there’s no higher or lower. “Will you have this man to be your husband?” “I will. And I may change my mind.” That’s as good as it gets. I’m married only to God—reality. That’s where my commitment is. It can’t be to a particular person. And my husband wouldn’t want it any other way.
I also notice that I possess nothing. Stephen slips the wedding ring onto my finger and whispers, “Try to keep it for one month.” It’s his little joke. He’s had the experience of giving me a gift, an expensive one, that was gone the next day, because someone admired it and I knew it was theirs. He realizes that what the ring symbolizes is mine forever and that the ring itself can never belong to me, that I simply wear it until it’s gone. Two years ago, I gave it to a dear, unmarried man whom we both love, but he gave it right back. So here it is, still on my left ring finger, five years later: an unexpected miracle, in Stephen’s view. How can I possess anything? Things come to me only when I need them and only for as long as I need them, and the way I know I need them is that I have them.
There’s a lot to be said for monogamy. It’s the ultimate symbol for One, because it keeps your mind focused on one primary person. You just have to undo everything around him, every story about him that rises up in your mind. Monogamy is a sacred thing, because the mind can be very still in that position. One person will give you the experience that a million people could give you. There’s only one mind. Your partner will bring up every concept ever known to humanity, in every combination, so that you can come to know yourself. If you can just learn to love the one you’re with, you have met self-love.”
“I believe that in the past at one time or another I have compared the usual marriage to the relationship of Siamese twins. I have called it the “cult of pairs.” Instead of being a free relationship between awakened beings, the usual marriage is a dependency relationship between unawakened beings neurotically dependent on one another’s survival. The subject and the object are dependently linked.
The subject-object condition in general is a state of mutual bondage. Both the object and subject are bound and bind one another and, curiously enough, they depend on their state of bondage for their existence.
We try to work out our freedom in the domain of relations yet what we do never becomes freedom, because we never transcend the self-contraction and object bondage. The more we seek to achieve a sense of release in the plane of relationships, the more we bind ourselves. Our relationships are like traps that bind more tightly the more the quarry strives to escape.
The subject-object orientation of conditional existence is like such a trap. It is conceived as a form of bondage from the beginning, but the more you try to liberate yourself in the context of this body, the more bound you become, until you understand the binding principle of the subject-object condition, which pervades both the subject and the object and which—when understood, permits perfect transcendence and Freedom.”
“Meditation practice is a structure that we place around this conscious relationship, around who we are. We’re dipping into that relationship and allowing an awareness that doesn’t judge, and this is what liberates us.
Who you are as a person is a vessel — a form that we use to find out who we are in a way that’s not mentally graspable.
It’s as if to say, “Make of thyself a prayer.”
– James Wood, Meditation is What I Am
“I want to talk about practice, different kinds of practices. We already talked about meditation a little bit. It’s probably good to have maybe three or four practices in your pocket, so to speak, that you can use.
Prayer, for example, is really a form of meditation. All spiritual practice is a form of meditation practice. I mention at the beginning of Chapter Seven in Ten Paths that meditation and meditation practice are not the same thing and that in colloquial speech it’s okay to blur it a little bit. But it is an important distinction.
The truth is really I am meditation. Who I am is that conscious relationship with what is, and that’s true, in essence, for everyone. Practice is dipping into that and being that, touching into that in a way that reminds us who we are.”
– James Wood, Meditation is What I Am
“It is good to meet here now, as human beings here on earth to explore a very interesting question and that interesting question is, ‘What on earth am I doing here on earth?’ Have you ever asked yourself that or have we been caught up in the excitement of life, with all the moneymaking and the human contacts and the machinery of life? Have we been so overwhelmed by that that we’ve forgotten something tremendously important?
Again, the question, ‘What am I doing here on this earth as an individual human being’ and hopefully it will occur to us after awhile, that just maybe our purpose here on this globe isn’t to come into it and just be frightened, just be bewildered, just be walking in a fog through all our days. Maybe a question mark will appear in our mind and we’ll say to ourselves, ‘Is it possible that there is something higher here in this world than this mad chasing around that I do and everyone else does?'”
– Vernon Howard, Vernon Howard’s Positive Answers
“Ego is an addiction to thinking that creates a false sense of self, an attachment to self, a relentless I can’t let go of self. I will not. It’s painful and I can’t stop and I won’t. I know what I’m doing. I can handle it.
And you can’t.”
– James Wood, Gratitude
“In the simple willingness to see yourself, in the simple truthfulness of sincerity, the truth starts to reveal ourselves to ourselves. It’s not necessarily a technique-oriented endeavor, here. The technique is sincerity. We really need to want the Truth. We need to want the truth even more than we want to experience the truth. And this sincerity isn’t something that we can impose, it’s inherent within Reality itself. There is a radical sincerity in self-honesty and simplicity.”
–Adyashanti, The End of Your World
“I think there’s a big misconception about what “ego” means. The traditional psychological term “ego” really means self, the basic sense of self. But the way I use it, ego and self aren’t the same thing, exactly. Ego is an attachment to self. It’s an identification.
Identification with self is the issue. That’s what ego is: it’s a tendency to say, “I am my thoughts” or “I know who I am.” After awakening, there’s still a sense of self, but it’s surrendered into unknowing. But there’s a sense of it hanging around. It’s allowed.”
– James Wood, Gratitude
“Truth is a very high standard. It’s not a plaything. To tell what’s true within ourselves isn’t to tell what we think, it’s not to tell our opinion, it’s not to dump the garbage can of our mind onto someone else – this is what I think about you, this is what I feel about you, this is my judgment about you – none of that’s true. That’s illusion. That’s distortion. That’s one’s own garbage. It’s one’s own problem. It’s one’s projection.
What is Truth? Truth isn’t to unload our opinions onto someone. That’s not truth. Truth isn’t to tell our beliefs about things. That’s not truth. Those are ways that we actually hide from truth. Truth is much more intimate than that. Whenever we tell the truth it has much more of the sense of a confession – I don’t mean a confession of something bad or wrong – but I mean, the sense, where we come completely out of hiding.
Truth is a simple thing. To speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectedness. And to do that, with any consistency, we have to not only have met every place in ourself that is afraid of doing that, we have to see – what is the belief structure I have that tells me I can’t do that? Because those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality. But just to know that’s not enough – you have to actually see it, really perceive, exactly what one believes… what are the exact belief structures that cause you to go into duality?, that cause you to go into conflict and hiding?”
– Adyashanti, The End of Your World
“Can a man honestly see that he is in psychological prison? That is the question. We cannot escape from self-imprisonment unless we observe it as a fact. Does he get upset when things go wrong? That is one cell of psychological prison. Does he harbor secret resentments and antagonisms? That is another. Is he bound by mechanical habits which he can neither break nor endure? Does he suffer at the hands of daily incidents? Is he afraid of himself? All this is what is meant by psychological jail.”
– Vernon Howard, The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 226
“Human beings are caged inside their own anxious thoughts. And because anxiety is not understood, the individual with the tension
and nervousness becomes bad, and does and says and feels bad things.
But you can’t get away with being bad. Underline that, please – you can’t get away with being bad. Your nerves won’t forgive your
wrongness.
I am telling you now, therefore; to stop trying to find yourself in the world of your mind. Give up trying to find yourself inside your
intellect; you’re not there. When you give up, God gives down. You remember that, and you remind yourself where you have to give up, what you have to give up. And if you can think about it, that’s what you have to give up.”
– Vernon Howard, from a talk given 11/27/1987, Vernon Howard’s Higher World
“The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone reminds, and that is the Self.”
“All other knowledge are only petty and trivial knowledge; the experience of silence alone is the real and perfect knowledge.”
“I am everywhere. Bring me myself. In a conscious or awakened condition, forms are like little presents, little containers. And it’s fun to open them, there’s just nothing in there but who we are, and it’s everything.
It’s like it’s saying Come to me. I will dissolve you. I will take you into Me and surrender self into Unknowingness, into this Mystery of who we are, together.
So there can’t be any enemies. The illusion of others persists because self persists. They arise simultaneously. And when people come to do this work and are willing to sit and trust, it’s powerful.
Do you ever look around and realize the world is just people rushing around thinking they know what’s going on and no one does? No one. Our greatest scientists, our greatest philosophers — no one agrees on anything. I love that. I love it.
I want to meet you. I want to meet my friends. I want to say “Hey, what is this? I don’t know.” Deeper. “What is it? What is it? Who are we together? What is this?”
“Silence” is about as close as I can get.
So I’m grateful for all of it. I think gratitude is a good practice.”
– James Wood, Gratitude
“The fact is that the mind is only a bundle of thoughts. How can you extinguish it by the thought of doing so or by a desire? Your thoughts and desires are part and parcel of the mind. The mind is simply fattened by new thoughts rising up. Therefore it is foolish to attempt to kill the mind by means of the mind. The only way of doing it is to find its source and hold on to it. The mind will then fade away of its own accord.”
“To ask the mind to kill the mind is like making the thief the policeman. He will go with you and pretend to catch the thief, but nothing will be gained. So you must turn inward and see from where the mind rises and then it will cease to exist.”
– Ramana Maharshi
Svaha 